Correlation between high-resolution ultrasound and surgical/pathology findings in patients with suspected appendicitis: preliminary report.

The Authors describe the miniinvasive approach in pediatric patients affected by appendiciti

Trattamento endoscopico del reflusso vescico-ureterale primario

il trattamento endoscopico \ue8 efficac

Vesico-ureteral reflux: endoscopic treatment

trattamnento endoscopico \ue8 efficac

Indicazioni e limiti dello stent ureterale in et\ue0 pediatrica: nostra esperienza

lo stent ureterale puo essere utilizzato nelle urop\ue8atie malformativ

Simulating super earth atmospheres in the laboratory

Several space missions, such as JWST, TESS and the very recently proposed ARIEL, or ground-based experiments, as SPHERE and GPI, have been proposed to measure the atmospheric transmission, reflection and emission spectra of extrasolar planets. The planet atmosphere characteristics and possible biosignatures will be inferred by studying planetary spectra in order to identify the emission/absorption lines/bands from atmospheric molecules such as water (H2O), carbon monoxide (CO), methane (CH4), ammonia (NH3), etc. In particular, it is important to know in detail the optical characteristics of gases in the typical physical conditions of the planetary atmospheres and how these characteristics could be affected by radiation driven photochemical and biochemical reaction. The main aim of the project 'Atmosphere in a Test Tube' is to provide insights on exoplanet atmosphere modification due to biological intervention. This can be achieved simulating planetary atmosphere at different pressure and temperature conditions under the effects of radiation sources, used as proxies of different bands of the stellar emission. We are tackling the characterization of extrasolar planet atmospheres by mean of innovative laboratory experiments described in this paper. The experiments are intended to reproduce the conditions on warm earths and super earths hosted by low-mass M dwarfs primaries with the aim to understand if a cyanobacteria population hosted on a Earth-like planet orbiting an M0 star is able to maintain its photosynthetic activity and produce traceable signatures

Secondary omental torsion in children: a report of two cases and review of the literature.

The Authors describe a case of omental torsion in pediatric ag

A tunable integrated system to simulate colder stellar radiation

In the last years, a lot of extrasolar planets have been discovered in any direction of the Galaxy. More interesting, some of them have been found in the habitable zone of their host stars. A large diversity of spectral type, from early types (A) to colder ones (M), is covered by the planetary system host stars. A lot of efforts are done in order to find habitable planets around M stars and indeed some habitable super earths were found. In this framework, a€Atmosphere in a Test Tubea€, a project started at Astronomical observatory of Padua, simulates planetary environmental condition in order to understand how and how much the behavior of photosynthetic bacteria in different planetary/star scenarios can modify the planet atmosphere. The particular case of an habitable planet orbiting a M dwarf star is under study for the time being. The irradiation of an M star, due to its lower surface temperature is very different in quality and quantity by the irradiation of a star like our Sun. We would like to describe the study of feasibility of a new kind of tunable led stellarlight simulator capable to recreate the radiation spectrum of M type stars (but with the potential to be expanded even to F, G, K star spectra types) incident on the planet. The radiation source is a multiple LED matrix cooled by means of air fan technology. In order to endow it with modularity this device will be composed by a mosaic of circuit boards arranged in a pie-chart shape, on the surface of which will be welded the LEDs. This concept is a smart way in order to replace blown out pieces instead of changing the entire platform as well as implement the device with new modules suitable to reproduce other type of stars. The device can be driven by a PC to raise or lower the intensity of both each LED and the lamp, in order to simulate as close as possible a portion of the star spectrum. The wavelength intervals overlap the limits of photosynthetic pigment absorption range (280-850 nm), while the range of the radiation source will be between 365 nm and 940 nm. The reason why we chose a higher outer limit is that M stars have the emission peak at about 1000 nm and we want to study the effects of low-light radiation on bacterial vitality. The innovative concept behind this radiative source is the use of the LED components to simulate the main stellar absorption lines and to make this a dynamic-light. Last but not least the use of LED is crucial to keep the device compact and handy. This device could help us to better understand the link between radiation and NIR-photosynthesis and could find applications in the field of photobioreactors as a test bench for the choice of the wavelength to be used in order to maximize the production rate. Other fields of application are the microscopy light sources field and the yeasts growth sector

Discovering candidates for gene network expansion by variable subsetting and ranking aggregation

We present a method that produces a list of genes that are candidates for Network Expansion by Subsetting and Ranking Aggregation (NESRA) and its application to gene regulatory networks. Our group has recently developed gene@home [3], a BOINC project [1] that permits to search for candidate genes for the expansion of a gene regulatory network using gene expression data. The project adopts intensive variable-subsetting strategies enabled by the computational power provided by the volunteers who join the project by means of the BOINC client, and exploits the PC algorithm for discovering putative causal relationships within each subset of variables. The PC algorithm, whose name derives from the initials of its authors [7] and PC* [2] are algorithms that discover causal relationships among variables. In particular, PC is based on the systematic testing for conditional independence of variables given subsets of other variables, comprehensively presented and evaluated by Kalish and colleagues [4] who proposed it also for gene network reconstruction [5]. NESRA is an algorithm which runs as a postprocessor of the gene@home project that has: 1) a procedure that systematically subsets the variables, runs the PC and ranks the genes; the subsetting is iterated several times and a ranked list of candidates is produced by counting the number of times a relationship is found; 2) several ranking steps are executed with different values of the dimension of the subsets and with different number of iterations producing several ranked lists; 3) the ranked lists are aggregated by using a state-of-the-art ranking aggregator. Here we show that a single ranking step is enough to outperform PC and PC*, but with some dependency on the parameters. Moreover, we show that the output ranking aggregation method is better that the average performance of the single ranking steps. Evaluations are done by means of the gene@home project on Arabidopsis thaliana including a comparison against ARACNE [6] (Table 1). Method k=5 k=10 k=20 k=55 NESRA 0.90 0.80 0.60 0.42 ARACNE 0.2 0.3 0.35 0.45 Table 1: A. thaliana, Expansion of the Flower Organ Specification Gene Regulatory Network. NESRA and ARACNE (default parameters) precision for different values k of the length of the gene lis