Calcitonin estimation in patients with nodular goiter and its significance for early detection of MTC: european comments to the guidelines of the American Thyroid Association

One of the most discussed and controversial issue in the management of thyroid nodules is the need to perform a routine measurement of serum Calcitonin (Ct) in all cases. The American Thyroid Association guidelines do not recommend in favor or against this procedure since they retain that there are not enough evidences that it can determine an advantage to the health outcomes of these patients. This is not the view of many European experts who met in Lisbon in 2009 at the European Thyroid Association-Cancer Research Network meeting to discuss all the still open controversial issues on the management of medullary thyroid cancer patients.This paper is focused on the routine measurement of serum Ct in all patients with thyroid nodule(s): the evidences, the rational and the benefits of this procedure are deeply analysed following the discussion that was done in Lisbon. The conclusions reached at that time are reported in detail

RET/PTC Translocations and Clinico-Pathological Features in Human Papillary Thyroid Carcinoma

Thyroid carcinoma is the most frequent endocrine cancer accounting for 5–10% of thyroid nodules. Papillary histotype (PTC) is the most prevalent form accounting for 80% of all thyroid carcinoma. Although much is known about its epidemiology, pathogenesis, clinical, and biological behavior, the only documented risk factor for PTC is the ionizing radiation exposure. Rearrangements of the Rearranged during Transfection (RET) proto-oncogene are found in PTC and have been shown to play a pathogenic role. The first RET rearrangement, named RET/PTC, was discovered in 1987. This rearrangement constitutively activates the transcription of the RET tyrosine-kinase domain in follicular cell, thus triggering the signaling along the MAPK pathway and an uncontrolled proliferation. Up to now, 13 different types of RET/PTC rearrangements have been reported but the two most common are RET/PTC1 and RET/PTC3. Ionizing radiations are responsible for the generation of RET/PTC rearrangements, as supported by in vitro studies and by the evidence that RET/PTC, and particularly RET/PTC3, are highly prevalent in radiation induced PTC. However, many thyroid tumors without any history of radiation exposure harbor similar RET rearrangements. The overall prevalence of RET/PTC rearrangements varies from 20 to 70% of PTCs and they are more frequent in childhood than in adulthood thyroid cancer. Controversial data have been reported on the relationship between RET/PTC rearrangements and the PTC prognosis. RET/PTC3 is usually associated with a more aggressive phenotype and in particular with a greater tumor size, the solid variant, and a more advanced stage at diagnosis which are all poor prognostic factors. In contrast, RET/PTC1 rearrangement does not correlate with any clinical–pathological characteristics of PTC. Moreover, the RET protein and mRNA expression level did not show any correlation with the outcome of patients with PTC and no correlation between RET/PTC rearrangements and the expression level of the thyroid differentiation genes was observed. Recently, a diagnostic role of RET/PTC rearrangements has been proposed. It can be searched for in the mRNA extracted from cytological sample especially in case with indeterminate cytology. However, both the fact that it can be present in a not negligible percentage of benign cases and the technical challenge in extracting mRNA from cytological material makes this procedure not applicable at routine level, at least for the moment

Smart Cities and standards – The approach of the Horizon2020-project ESPRESSO

A Smart City integrates physical, digital and human systems to deliver a sustainable, prosperous and inclusive future for its citizens. Many of these innovative solutions will be based on sophisticated information and communication technologies. However, technological complexity, as well as the complexity of the various sectoral services involved within a Smart City, require a system approach to standardisation. Such an approach must promote the greatest possible reuse of existing open standards to accelerate the Smart City deployment. In an effort to leverage the promise of a system approach, the Horizon 2020-project ESPRESSO (systEmic standardisation apPRoach to Empower Smart citieS and cOmmunities) will focus on the development of a conceptual Smart City Information Framework based on open standards. A further goal of ESPRESSO will be to envisage the impact of those technologies for urban planning and also in societal terms. The partner cities will be engaged to analyse how their services can be streamlined and improved through large-scale use of standards. This will be done by analysing the downstream changes from the new scenarios enabled by large-scale interoperability and what this could bring for a future Smart City. Based on a detailed requirements-engineering campaign executed in close cooperation with cities, standardisation organizations, administrative bodies, and private industry, the project will identify open standards matching the elicited requirements and will establish a baseline for interoperability between the various sectoral data sources and the Smart City enterprise application platform. In a comprehensive set of coordination, support and networking activities, the project will engage a very large number of stakeholders, such as Smart Cities (both existing and those with aspirations), European Standardisation Organizations (ESOs), National Standardisation Bodies (NSBs), Standards Development Organizations (SDOs), public administrations, industries, SMEs, and other institutions. ESPRESSO’s approach emphasises cost reduction and will foster an open market for many actors, avoiding lock-in to proprietary solutions

Impact of Iris Size and Eyelids Coupling on the Estimation of the Gaze Direction of a Robotic Talking Head by Human Viewers

International audiencePrimates - and in particular humans-are very sensitive to the eye direction of congeners. Estimation of gaze of others is one of the basic skills for estimating goals, intentions and desires of social agents, whether they are humans or avatars. When building robots, one should not only supply them with gaze trackers but also check for the readability of their own gaze by human partners. We conducted experiments that demonstrate the strong impact of the iris size and the position of the eyelids of an iCub humanoid robot on gaze reading performance by human observers. We comment on the importance of assessing the robot's ability of displaying its intentions via clearly legible and readable gestures

CRISALIDE – Concept of Corporative Information System for Governance and Management of Digital City

Corporative Information Systems (CIS) is a tool for decision making support for rather big business companies. Such systems were introduced approximately twenty years ago and have shown good results forbusinesses optimization since. The present-day demand is to move cities to a digital era. Considering this demand, let us take a look at a digital city governance and management from CIS ideology point of view. CIS approach based on proposed methodology provides means for development and support of decision making process for different levels of governance and management. Governance and management should notbe centralized, it should be distributed with weak feedback links. In this paper, we present our experience in this field based on "Aqueduct" systems (product of SPIIRAS– HTR&DO Ltd.) implementation for different subject domains and ideas for digital city localization

Boucles de perception-action et interaction face-à-face

International audienceCet article explore un champ de recherches en plein essor : la communication face-à-face. Les performances et la robustesse des composants technologiques nécessaires à la mise en oeuvre de systèmes d'interaction face-à-face entre l'homme et un agent conversationnel - technologies vocales, vision par ordinateur, synthèse d'images, compréhension et génération de dialogues, etc. - sont maintenant matures. Nous esquissons ici un programme de recherche centré sur la modélisation des diverses boucles de perception-action impliquées dans la gestion de l'interaction et sur le paramétrage dynamique de ces boucles par les divers niveaux de compréhension de la scène dans laquelle humains, robots et agents conversationnels animés seront inévitablement plongés

The audiovisual structure of onomatopoeias: An intrusion of real-world physics in lexical creation

Sound-symbolic word classes are found in different cultures and languages worldwide. These words are continuously produced to code complex information about events. Here we explore the capacity of creative language to transport complex multisensory information in a controlled experiment, where our participants improvised onomatopoeias from noisy moving objects in audio, visual and audiovisual formats. We found that consonants communicate movement types (slide, hit or ring) mainly through the manner of articulation in the vocal tract. Vowels communicate shapes in visual stimuli (spiky or rounded) and sound frequencies in auditory stimuli through the configuration of the lips and tongue. A machine learning model was trained to classify movement types and used to validate generalizations of our results across formats. We implemented the classifier with a list of cross-linguistic onomatopoeias simple actions were correctly classified, while different aspects were selected to build onomatopoeias of complex actions. These results show how the different aspects of complex sensory information are coded and how they interact in the creation of novel onomatopoeias.Fil: Taitz, Alan. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires; ArgentinaFil: Assaneo, María Florencia. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires; ArgentinaFil: Elisei, Natalia Gabriela. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Medicina; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Tripodi, Monica Noemi. Universidad de Buenos Aires; ArgentinaFil: Cohen, Laurent. Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique; Francia. Universite Pierre et Marie Curie; Francia. Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale; FranciaFil: Sitt, Jacobo Diego. Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique; Francia. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale; Francia. Universite Pierre et Marie Curie; FranciaFil: Trevisan, Marcos Alberto. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires; Argentin