Who is afraid of school choice?

This study uses survey data to investigate attitudes among Swiss voters to different models offering more freedom of choice in the educational system. The findings indicate clear opposition to the use of taxpayer money to fund private schools, while free choice between public schools seems to appeal to a majority. The analyses show that the approval-opposition heterogeneity is mainly based on an explicable, rational calculation of personal utility. Approval rates are much higher among groups or individuals who see a personal advantage in more school choice, such as parents of school-age children, urban/metropolitan area residents and those on a low income. In contrast, residents of small to medium-sized centers of population, high-income groups, and individuals with a teaching qualification oppose more school choice. The analyses also indicate differences between the country's language regions, attributable to intercultural differences in what people consider the state's role to be

Who is Afraid of School Choice?

This study uses survey data to investigate attitudes among Swiss voters to different models offering more freedom of choice in the educational system. The findings indicate clear opposition to the use of taxpayer money to fund private schools, while free choice between public schools seems to appeal to a majority. The analyses show that the approval-opposition heterogeneity is mainly based on an explicable, rational calculation of personal utility. Approval rates are much higher among groups or individuals who see a personal advantage in more school choice, such as parents of school-age children, urban/metropolitan area residents and those on a low income. In contrast, residents of small to medium-sized centers of population, high-income groups, and individuals with a teaching qualification oppose more school choice. The analyses also indicate differences between the country’s language regions, attributable to intercultural differences in what people consider the state’s role to be.school choice, survey, private schools, education vouchers

Robustness of radiomic features in magnetic resonance imaging for patients with glioblastoma: Multi-center study

Background and purpose Radiomics offers great potential in improving diagnosis and treatment for patients with glioblastoma multiforme. However, in order to implement radiomics in clinical routine, the features used for prognostic modelling need to be stable. This comprises significant challenge in multi-center studies. The aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of different image normalization methods on MRI features robustness in multi-center study. Methods Radiomics stability was checked on magnetic resonance images of eleven patients. The images were acquired in two different hospitals using contrast-enhanced T1 sequences. The images were normalized using one of five investigated approaches including grey-level discretization, histogram matching and z-score. Then, radiomic features were extracted and features stability was evaluated using intra-class correlation coefficients. In the second part of the study, improvement in the prognostic performance of features was tested on 60 patients derived from publicly available dataset. Results Depending on the normalization scheme, the percentage of stable features varied from 3.4% to 8%. The histogram matching based on the tumor region showed the highest amount of the stable features (113/1404); while normalization using fixed bin size resulted in 48 stable features. The histogram matching also led to better prognostic value (median c-index increase of 0.065) comparing to non-normalized images. Conclusions MRI normalization plays an important role in radiomics. Appropriate normalization helps to select robust features, which can be used for prognostic modelling in multicenter studies. In our study, histogram matching based on tumor region improved both stability of radiomic features and their prognostic value

Corrigendum to "Robustness of radiomic features in magnetic resonance imaging for patients with glioblastoma: Multi-center study" [Phys. Imaging Radiat. Oncol. 22 (2022) 131-136]

Background and purpose Radiomics offers great potential in improving diagnosis and treatment for patients with glioblastoma multiforme. However, in order to implement radiomics in clinical routine, the features used for prognostic modelling need to be stable. This comprises significant challenge in multi-center studies. The aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of different image normalization methods on MRI features robustness in multi-center study. Methods Radiomics stability was checked on magnetic resonance images of eleven patients. The images were acquired in two different hospitals using contrast-enhanced T1 sequences. The images were normalized using one of five investigated approaches including grey-level discretization, histogram matching and z-score. Then, radiomic features were extracted and features stability was evaluated using intra-class correlation coefficients. In the second part of the study, improvement in the prognostic performance of features was tested on 60 patients derived from publicly available dataset. Results Depending on the normalization scheme, the percentage of stable features varied from 3.4% to 8%. The histogram matching based on the tumor region showed the highest amount of the stable features (113/1404); while normalization using fixed bin size resulted in 48 stable features. The histogram matching also led to better prognostic value (median c-index increase of 0.065) comparing to non-normalized images. Conclusions MRI normalization plays an important role in radiomics. Appropriate normalization helps to select robust features, which can be used for prognostic modelling in multicenter studies. In our study, histogram matching based on tumor region improved both stability of radiomic features and their prognostic value

New Translational Trends in Personalized Medicine: Autologous Peripheral Blood Stem Cells and Plasma for COVID-19 Patient

The COVID-19 pandemic, caused by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), still remains a severe threat. At the time of writing this paper, the second infectious wave has caused more than 280,000 deaths all over the world. Italy was one of the first countries involved, with more than 200,000 people reported as infected and 30,000 deaths. There are no specific treatments for COVID-19 and the vaccine still remains somehow inconclusive. The world health community is trying to define and share therapeutic protocols in early and advanced clinical stages. However, numbers remain critical with a serious disease rate of 14%, ending with sepsis, acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), multiple organ failure (MOF) and vascular and thromboembolic findings. The mortality rate was estimated within 2–3%, and more than double that for individuals over 65 years old; almost one patient in three dies in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). Efforts for effective solutions are underway with multiple lines of investigations, and health authorities have reported success treating infected patients with donated plasma from survivors of the illness, the proposed benefit being protective antibodies formed by the survivors. Plasma transfusion, blood and stemcells, either autologous or allograft transplantation, are not novel therapies, and in this short paper,we propose therapeutic autologous plasma and peripheral blood stem cells as a possible treatmentfor fulminant COVID-19 infection

Probiotics in Health and Immunity: A First Step toward Understanding the Importance of Microbiota System in Translational Medicine

There are mounting evidences showing the relation of chronic inflammatory and autoimmune diseases with the uncontrolled intensification of gut dysbiosis. This position asserts that an elevated presence of pathogens and bacterial, fungal, and viral components is directly involved in inflammatory metabolic diseases with a strong alteration of autoimmune components such as in inflammatory bowel syndrome (IBS), ulcerative colitis, and Crohn’s disease. Furthermore, the increase of unbalanced enteric microbiota is also connected to other types of conditions of metabolic origin such as diabetes mellitus, atherosclerosis, and osteo-degenerative conditions. As a matter of fact, evidence confirmed that gut damages histologically inspected revealed a situation with high expression of pro-inflammatory cytotumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α), and IL1β, IL-2, IL-4, IL-6, and IL-17 together with high level of mucin-2. This chapter focuses on diverse topics related to microbiota dysfunction and systemic health condition and regenerative capacity and the therapeutic role of probiotics in gut health and disease emphasizing the potential beneficial role of probiotics in idiopathic inflammatory metabolic diseases. In brief, outcomes demonstrate that an intimate relationship between microbiota, metabolism, tissue/cellular damages, and regeneration is standing. Within this scenario, the gut certainly plays a big part of the regenerative mechanisms in translational medicine

Highly porous free-standing rGO/SnO2 pseudocapacitive cathodes for high-rate and long-cycling Al-ion batteries

Establishing energy storage systems beyond conventional lithium ion batteries requires the development of novel types of electrode materials. Such materials should be capable of accommodating ion species other than Li+, and ideally, these ion species should be of multivalent nature, such as Al3+. Along this line, we introduce a highly porous aerogel cathode composed of reduced graphene oxide, which is loaded with nanostructured SnO2. This binder-free hybrid not only exhibits an outstanding mechanical performance, but also unites the pseudocapacity of the reduced graphene oxide and the electrochemical storage capacity of the SnO2 nanoplatelets. Moreover, the combination of both materials gives rise to additional intercalation sites at their interface, further contributing to the total capacity of up to 16 mAh cm-3 at a charging rate of 2 C. The high porosity (99.9%) of the hybrid and the synergy of its components yield a cathode material for high-rate (up to 20 C) aluminum ion batteries, which exhibit an excellent cycling stability over 10,000 tested cycles. The electrode design proposed here has a great potential to meet future energy and power density demands for advanced energy storage devices

Dental-derived stem cells and biowaste biomaterials: What’s next in bone regenerative medicine applications

The human teeth and oral cavity harbor various populations of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), so called dental-derived stem cells (D-dSCs) with self-renewing and multilineage differentiation capabilities. D-dSCs properties involves a strong paracrine component resulting from the high levels of bioactive molecules they secrete in response to the local microenvironment. Altogether, this viewpoint develops a general picture of current innovative strategies to employ D-dSCs combined with biomaterials and bioactive factors for regenerative medicine purposes, and offers information regarding the available scientific data and possible applications

Metodo e kit diagnostico per l'individuazione multipla di virus della famiglia Coronaviridae: SARS-CoV-2, SARS-CoV, HCoV e MERS-CoV.

L’invenzione riguarda un kit diagnostico per la rilevazione multipla di 4 virus della famiglia Coronaviridae: HCoV, SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV ed il ceppo virale SARS-CoV-2 che ha causato una pandemia della malattia nota come COVID-19. Il kit prevede una metodicha "One-Step" di amplificazione quantitativa genica dopo retrotrascrizione del genoma virale (rRT-PCR). L'invenzione contiene un doppio controllo per evitare potenziali falsi negativi utilizzando il virus della diarrea epidemica del suino, (Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Virus - PEDV -CoV) e la Ribonucleasi P (RNase P-RP)