Co-constructing a new framework for evaluating social innovation in marginalized rural areas

The EU funded H2020 project \u2018Social Innovation in Marginalised Rural Areas\u2019 (SIMRA; www.simra-h2020.eu) has the overall objective of advancing the state-of-the-art in social innovation. This paper outlines the process for co- developing an evaluation framework with stakeholders, drawn from across Europe and the Mediterranean area, in the fields of agriculture, forestry and rural development. Preliminary results show the importance of integrating process and outcome-oriented evaluations, and implementing participatory approaches in evaluation practice. They also raise critical issues related to the comparability of primary data in diverse regional contexts and highlight the need for mixed methods approaches in evaluation

Diagnostic accuracy of a new fluoroenzyme immunoassay for the detection of TSH receptor autoantibodies in Graves' disease

Purpose: Thyrotropin receptor (TSHR) autoantibodies (TRAbs) are a hallmark of Graves’ disease (GD). The aim of this study was to evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of a new third generation automatic fluorescence enzyme immunoassay for TRAb measurement in GD, in comparison with two current IMAs. Methods: Sera of 439 subjects (57 patients with untreated GD, 34 with treated GD, 15 with GD and Graves’ orbitopathy, 52 with multinodular non-toxic goiter, 86 with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, 20 with toxic adenoma or toxic multinodular goiter, 55 with non-thyroid autoimmune diseases and 120 normal controls) were tested for TRAbs with the ELiA™ anti-TSH-R assay (ThermoFischer Scientific, Uppsala, Sweden), the TRAK™ RIA, Brahms (Thermo Scientific, Hennigsdorf, Germany) and the Immulite™ TSI assay (Siemens Healthcare, Llanberis, UK). Results: Sensitivity and specificity of the ELiA™ anti-TSH-R assay, TRAK™ RIA and Immulite™ TSI assay were 94.7% and 99.6, 100 and 98.2%, 100 and 98.2%, respectively. Spearman’s coefficient and Passing-Bablok regression showed a satisfactory correlation between EliA™ and TRAK™ [rho: 0.925; 95% CI: 0.883-0-953. Intercept: − 0.875 (95% CI: − 2.411 to 0.194); slope: 1.086 (95% CI: 0.941 to 1.248)], and between ELiA™ and TSI™ [rho: 0.947; 95% CI: 0.912 0.969. intercept: 1.085 (95% CI: 0.665 to 2.116); slope 1.315 (95% CI:1.116 to 1.700)]. Conclusions: The diagnostic performance of ELiA™-TSH-R assay is comparable to that of some current TRAb assays. It may be adopted into clinical practice for the differential diagnosis of hyperthyroidism, to screen for transient hyperthyroidism, and to monitor disease activity and treatment effects. © 2018, The Author(s)

Neural crest migration is driven by a few trailblazer cells with a unique molecular signature narrowly confined to the invasive front

Neural crest (NC) cell migration is crucial to the formation of peripheral tissues during vertebrate development. However, how NC cells respond to different microenvironments to maintain persistence of direction and cohesion in multicellular streams remains unclear. To address this, we profiled eight subregions of a typical cranial NC cell migratory stream. Hierarchical clustering showed significant differences in the expression profiles of the lead three subregions compared with newly emerged cells. Multiplexed imaging of mRNA expression using fluorescent hybridization chain reaction (HCR) quantitatively confirmed the expression profiles of lead cells. Computational modeling predicted that a small fraction of lead cells that detect directional information is optimal for successful stream migration. Single-cell profiling then revealed a unique molecular signature that is consistent and stable over time in a subset of lead cells within the most advanced portion of the migratory front, which we term trailblazers. Model simulations that forced a lead cell behavior in the trailing subpopulation predicted cell bunching near the migratory domain entrance. Misexpression of the trailblazer molecular signature by perturbation of two upstream transcription factors agreed with the in silico prediction and showed alterations to NC cell migration distance and stream shape. These data are the first to characterize the molecular diversity within an NC cell migratory stream and offer insights into how molecular patterns are transduced into cell behaviors

High Sensitivity AC Field Measurement Using Rhombic Inducer

The principle behind the ac field measurement (ACFM) technique has been explained in [1]. In this technique, a thin-skin eddy current is induced in the metal under test. The current is perturbed by defects in the metal surface and the result is reflected in the magnetic field above the surface. A probe is used to detect perturbations in this field

Multiple dimensions and roles of Non-Wood Forest Products within bioeconomy: examples from Northern and Southern perspectives

Non-wood forest products (NWFPs) make an important contribution to livelihoods, diets, and recreation for people across the world. Particularly in developing countries, NWFPs are essential for subsistence as nutritionally relevant foods, source of medicines, energy, and construction materials. Moreover, their commercialization also provides earnings for cash-constrained households. NWFPs are important items also in western societies, where they can be found as key ingredients in a surprising number of food and medicinal products. Moreover, many still directly collect NWFPs for self-consumption, for leisure, and for trade. This paper presents results on the roles played by NWFPs in developing and developed countries. On the one hand it provides insights from research conducted in select forest and non-forest communities in two African countries (Uganda and Zambia), demonstrating their role in providing important nutrients year-round, as well as their potential to form the basis of sustainable, economically viable and nutrition-sensitive value chains. On the other, it presents the results of a survey conducted on a large panel of European households (17,000 respondents), revealing that about 90% of these consume NWFPs at least once per year and a surprisingly high share, almost 25%, harvest NWFPs. Moreover, data from two European case-studies illustrate how NWFPs harvesting can originate recreational opportunities and earnings in rural areas. While research results in the different contexts are not directly comparable due to different methods and scale of application, they provide useful insights on the versatile role of NWFPs under different conditions, development stages and aspects of the bioeconomy

Delivering reform in English healthcare: an ideational perspective

A variety of perspectives has been put forward to understand reform across healthcare systems. Recently, some have called for these perspectives to give greater recognition to the role of ideational processes. The purpose of this article is to present an ideational approach to understanding the delivery of healthcare reform. It draws on a case of English healthcare reform – the Next Stage Review led by Lord Darzi – to show how the delivery of its reform proposals was associated with four ideational frames. These frames built on the idea of “progress” in responding to existing problems; the idea of “prevailing policy” in forming part of a bricolage of ideas within institutional contexts; the idea of “prescription” as top-down structural change at odds with local contexts; and the idea of “professional disputes” in challenging the notion of clinical engagement across professional groups. The article discusses the implications of these ideas in furthering our understanding of policy change, conflict and continuity across healthcare settings

Investigating white matter fibre density and morphology using fixel-based analysis

Voxel-based analysis of diffusion MRI data is increasingly popular. However, most white matter voxels contain contributions from multiple fibre populations (often referred to as crossing fibres), and therefore voxel-averaged quantitative measures (e.g. fractional anisotropy) are not fibre-specific and have poor interpretability. Using higher-order diffusion models, parameters related to fibre density can be extracted for individual fibre populations within each voxel (‘fixels’), and recent advances in statistics enable the multi-subject analysis of such data. However, investigating within-voxel microscopic fibre density alone does not account for macroscopic differences in the white matter morphology (e.g. the calibre of a fibre bundle). In this work, we introduce a novel method to investigate the latter, which we call fixel-based morphometry (FBM). To obtain a more complete measure related to the total number of white matter axons, information from both within-voxel microscopic fibre density and macroscopic morphology must be combined. We therefore present the FBM method as an integral piece within a comprehensive fixel-based analysis framework to investigate measures of fibre density, fibre-bundle morphology (cross-section), and a combined measure of fibre density and cross-section. We performed simulations to demonstrate the proposed measures using various transformations of a numerical fibre bundle phantom. Finally, we provide an example of such an analysis by comparing a clinical patient group to a healthy control group, which demonstrates that all three measures provide distinct and complementary information. By capturing information from both sources, the combined fibre density and cross-section measure is likely to be more sensitive to certain pathologies and more directly interpretable

Time-lapsing biodiversity: an open source method for measuring diversity changes by remote sensing

Understanding biodiversity changes in time is crucial to promptly provide management practices against diversity loss. This is overall true when considering global scales, since human-induced global change is expected to make significant changes on the Earth's biota. Biodiversity management and planning is mainly based on field observations related to community diversity, considering different taxa. However, such methods are time and cost demanding and do not allow in most cases to get temporal replicates. In this view, remote sensing can provide a wide data coverage in a short period of time. Recently, the use of Rao's Q diversity as a measure of spectral diversity has been proposed in order to explicitly take into account differences in a neighbourhood considering abundance and relative distance among pixels. The aim of this paper was to extend such a measure over the temporal dimension and to present an innovative approach to calculate remotely sensed temporal diversity. We demonstrated that temporal beta-diversity (spectral turnover) can be calculated pixel-wise in terms of both slope and coefficient of variation and further plotted over the whole matrix / image. From an ecological and operational point of view, for prioritisation practices in biodiversity protection, temporal variability could be beneficial in order to plan more efficient conservation practices starting from spectral diversity hotspots in space and time. In this paper, we delivered a highly reproducible approach to calculate spatio-temporal diversity in a robust and straightforward manner. Since it is based on open source code, we expect that our method will be further used by several researchers and landscape managers

Revertant Fibers in the mdx Murine Model of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy: An Age- and Muscle-Related reappraisal

Muscles in Duchenne dystrophy patients are characterized by the absence of dystrophin, yet transverse sections show a small percentage of fibers (termed “revertant fibers”) positive for dystrophin expression. This phenomenon, whose biological bases have not been fully elucidated, is present also in the murine and canine models of DMD and can confound the evaluation of therapeutic approaches. We analyzed 11 different muscles in a cohort of 40 mdx mice, the most commonly model used in pre-clinical studies, belonging to four age groups; such number of animals allowed us to perform solid ANOVA statistical analysis. We assessed the average number of dystrophin-positive fibers, both absolute and normalized for muscle size, and the correlation between their formation and the ageing process. Our results indicate that various muscles develop different numbers of revertant fibers, with different time trends; besides, they suggest that the biological mechanism(s) behind dystrophin re-expression might not be limited to the early development phases but could actually continue during adulthood. Importantly, such finding was seen also in cardiac muscle, a fact that does not fit into the current hypothesis of the clonal origin of “revertant” myonuclei from satellite cells. This work represents the largest, statistically significant analysis of revertant fibers in mdx mice so far, which can now be used as a reference point for improving the evaluation of therapeutic approaches for DMD. At the same time, it provides new clues about the formation of revertant fibers/cardiomyocytes in dystrophic skeletal and cardiac muscle