Improvement of Surface Accuracy and Shop Floor Feed Rate Smoothing Through Open CNC Monitoring System and Cutting Simulation

AbstractIn the milling process of complex workpiece shapes the feed rate normally becomes instable due to the high degree of surface curvature that requires high acceleration and deceleration of the interpolated axes. This condition impacts on process time and on the surface accuracy regarding the manufactured part form and texture. The challenge to simulate the real machine and control behavior requires accurate models with a set of experiments to tune and dimension the model to the respective machine tool. The aim is to improve the HSC milling process of complex surfaces before removing any material. In this paper experiments show that the surface form accuracy and texture can be optimized through an automatic feed rate smoothing of the finishing operation directly on the machine tool. The axis positions and spindle speeds monitored through the open CNC are used as input for a geometric cutting simulation, thus enabling to predict and optimize the surface quality

Therapeutical Options in ROS1—Rearranged Advanced Non Small Cell Lung Cancer

ROS proto-oncogene 1 (ROS1) rearrangements occur in 0.9–2.6% of patients with non small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), conferring sensitivity to treatment with specific tyrosine-kinase inhibitors (TKI). Crizotinib, a first-generation TKI, was the first target-therapy approved for the first-line treatment of ROS1-positive NSCLC. Recently, entrectinib, a multitarget inhibitor with an anti-ROS1 activity 40 times more potent than crizotinib and better activity on the central nervous system (CNS), received approval for treatment-naive patients. After a median time-to-progression of 5.5–20 months, resistance mechanisms can occur, leading to tumor progression. Therefore, newer generation TKI with greater potency and brain penetration have been developed and are currently under investigation. This review summarizes the current knowledge on clinicopathological characteristics of ROS1-positive NSCLC and its therapeutic options

Critical assessment of protein intrinsic disorder prediction (CAID) - Results of round 2

Protein intrinsic disorder (ID) is a complex and context-dependent phenomenon that covers a continuum between fully disordered states and folded states with long dynamic regions. The lack of a ground truth that fits all ID flavors and the potential for order-to-disorder transitions depending on specific conditions makes ID prediction challenging. The CAID2 challenge aimed to evaluate the performance of different prediction methods across different benchmarks, leveraging the annotation provided by the DisProt database, which stores the coordinates of ID regions when there is experimental evidence in the literature. The CAID2 challenge demonstrated varying performance of different prediction methods across different benchmarks, highlighting the need for continued development of more versatile and efficient prediction software. Depending on the application, researchers may need to balance performance with execution time when selecting a predictor. Methods based on AlphaFold2 seem to be good ID predictors but they are better at detecting absence of order rather than ID regions as defined in DisProt. The CAID2 predictors can be freely used through the CAID Prediction Portal, and CAID has been integrated into OpenEBench, which will become the official platform for running future CAID challenges

CAID prediction portal: A comprehensive service for predicting intrinsic disorder and binding regions in proteins

Intrinsic disorder (ID) in proteins is well-established in structural biology, with increasing evidence for its involvement in essential biological processes. As measuring dynamic ID behavior experimentally on a large scale remains difficult, scores of published ID predictors have tried to fill this gap. Unfortunately, their heterogeneity makes it difficult to compare performance, confounding biologists wanting to make an informed choice. To address this issue, the Critical Assessment of protein Intrinsic Disorder (CAID) benchmarks predictors for ID and binding regions as a community blind-test in a standardized computing environment. Here we present the CAID Prediction Portal, a web server executing all CAID methods on user-defined sequences. The server generates standardized output and facilitates comparison between methods, producing a consensus prediction highlighting high-confidence ID regions. The website contains extensive documentation explaining the meaning of different CAID statistics and providing a brief description of all methods. Predictor output is visualized in an interactive feature viewer and made available for download in a single table, with the option to recover previous sessions via a private dashboard. The CAID Prediction Portal is a valuable resource for researchers interested in studying ID in proteins. The server is available at the URL: https://caid.idpcentral.org

Effect of Fiber Information on Consumer's Expectation and Liking of Wheat Bran Enriched Pasta

The need to promote a diet rich in wholegrain has been recognized as an important task in nutrition education. Despite this, the intake of fiber in Western countries is below the recommended 25 g per day. The aim of the study was to evaluate the impact of wheat bran addition on the sensory quality of durum wheat spaghetti and to evaluate the effect of fiber information on consumer's acceptability and expectation. Information about fiber content had a positive impact on consumer's expected product quality but only for bran addition equal or higher than 20%. Consumers completely assimilated their liking in the direction of expectations for spaghetti with 20 and 25% of bran addition. Assimilation was incomplete for the 30% added sample indicating that the health benefit of eating fiber did not compensate the decrease in liking. The effect of information varied according to consumers' frequency consumption of bran-enriched pasta. Non-users showed a negative disconfirmation starting with a 20% bran addition, whereas for low-and high-users disconfirmation occurred at a higher bran addition. A complete assimilation effect was seen only for non-users, indicating that fiber information had an impact only for those consumers who actually do not consume wholegrain pasta

Balanced Propofol Sedation in Patients Undergoing EUS-FNA: A Pilot Study to Assess Feasibility and Safety

Introduction and aims. Balanced propofol sedation (BPS) administered by gastroenterologists has gained popularity in endoscopic procedures. Few studies exist about the safety of this approach during endosonography with fine needle aspiration (EUS-FNA). We assessed the safety of BPS in EUS-FNA. Materials and methods. 112 consecutive patients, referred to our unit to perform EUS-FNA, from February 2008 to December 2009, were sedated with BPS. A second gastroenterologist administered the drugs and monitorized the patient. Results. All the 112 patients (62 males, mean age 58.35) completed the examination. The mean dose of midazolam and propofol was, respectively, of 2.1 mg (range 1–4 mg) and 350 mg (range 180–400). All patients received oxygen with a mean flux of 4 liter/minute (range 2–6 liters/minute). The mean recovery time after procedure was 25 minutes (range 18–45 minutes). No major complications related to sedation were registered during all procedures. The oxygen saturation of all patients never reduced to less than 85%. Blood systolic pressure during and after the procedure never reduced to less than 100 mmHg. Conclusions. In our experience BPS administered by non-anaesthesiologists provided safe and successful sedation in patients undergoing EUS-FNA

Pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of combination chemotherapy with paclitaxel and epirubicin in breast cancer patients

AIMS: To investigate the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of epirubicin and paclitaxel in combination, as well as the effects of paclitaxel and its vehicle Cremophor EL on epirubicin metabolism. METHODS: Twenty-seven female patients with metastatic breast cancer received epirubicin 90 mg m-2 i.v. followed 15 min or 30 h later by a 3 h i.v. infusion of paclitaxel 175, 200 and 225 mg m-2. Plasma concentrations of paclitaxel, epirubicin and epirubicinol were measured and the relationship between neutropenia and drug pharmacokinetics was evaluated using a sigmoid maximum effect (Emax) model. Finally, the influence of paclitaxel and Cremophor EL on epirubicin metabolism by whole blood was examined. RESULTS: An increase in epirubicinol plasma concentrations occurred after the start of the paclitaxel infusion, resulting in a significant increase in the area under the plasma concentration-time curve (AUC) of epirubicinol (+0.5 micromol l-1 h [95% CI for the difference: 0.29, 0.71],+0.66 micromol l-1 h [95% CI for the difference: 0.47, 0.85] and +0.82 micromol l-1 h [95% CI for the difference: 0.53, 1.11] at paclitaxel doses of 175, 200 and 225 mg m-2, respectively), compared with epirubicin followed by paclitaxel 30 h later (0.61+/-0.1 micromol l-1 h). A significant increase in epirubicin AUC (+0.74 micromol l-1 h [95% CI for the difference: 0.14, 1.34] and +1.09 micromol l-1 h [95% CI for the difference: 0.44, 1.74]) and decrease in drug clearance (CLTB) (-25.35 l h-1 m-2[95% CI for the difference: -50.18, -0.52] and -35.9 l h-1 m-2[95% CI for the difference -63,4,-8,36]) occurred in combination with paclitaxel 200 and 225 mg m-2 with respect to the AUC (3.16+/-0.6 micromol l-1 h) and CLTB (74.4+/-28.4 l h-1 m-2) of epirubicin followed by paclitaxel 30 h later. An Emax relationship was observed between neutropaenia and the time over which paclitaxel plasma concentrations were equal to or greater than 0.1 micromol l-1 (tC0.1). The tC0.1 value predicted to yield a 50% decrease in neutrophil count was 7.7 h. Finally, Cremophor EL markedly inhibited the metabolism of epirubicin to epirubicinol in whole blood. CONCLUSIONS: Paclitaxel/Cremophor EL affects the disposition of epirubicinol and epirubicin. Furthermore, the slope factor of the Emax relationship between neutropenia and tC0.1 of paclitaxel suggests that the drugs might also interact at the pharmacodynamic level

The Use of Artificial Intelligence Approaches for Performance Improvement of Low-Cost Integrated Navigation Systems

In this paper, the authors investigate the possibility of applying artificial intelligence algorithms to the outputs of a low-cost Kalman filter-based navigation solution in order to achieve performance similar to that of high-end MEMS inertial sensors. To further improve the results of the prototype and simultaneously lighten filter requirements, different AI models are compared in this paper to determine their performance in terms of complexity and accuracy. By overcoming some known limitations (e.g., sensitivity on the dimension of input data from inertial sensors) and starting from Kalman filter applications (whose raw noise parameter estimates were obtained from a simple analysis of sensor specifications), such a solution presents an intermediate behavior compared to the current state of the art. It allows the exploitation of the power of AI models. Different Neural Network models have been taken into account and compared in terms of measurement accuracy and a number of model parameters; in particular, Dense, 1-Dimension Convolutional, and Long Short Term Memory Neural networks. As can be excepted, the higher the NN complexity, the higher the measurement accuracy; the models’ performance has been assessed by means of the root-mean-square error (RMSE) between the target and predicted values of all the navigation parameters

The role of dose-dense (DD) adjuvant chemotherapy (CT) in HER2-positive (HER2+) early breast cancer (BC) patients (pts) before and after the introduction of trastuzumab (T): Exploratory analysis of the GIM2 trial

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