Vagal stimulation in heart failure

Vagal nerve stimulation (VNS) has a strong pathophysiological rationale as a potentially beneficial treatment for heart failure with reduced ejection fraction. Despite several promising preclinical studies and pilot clinical studies, the two large, controlled trials—NECTAR-HF and INOVATE-HF—failed to demonstrate the expected benefit. It is likely that clinical application of VNS in phase III studies was performed before a sufficient degree of understanding of the complex pathophysiology of autonomic electrical modulation had been achieved, therefore leading to an underestimation of its potential benefit. More knowledge on the complex dose–response issue of VNS (i.e., pulse amplitude, frequency, duration and duty cycle) has been gathered since these trials and a new randomized study is currently underway with an adaptive design and a refined approach in an attempt to deliver the proper dose to a more selected group of patients

I LIMITI ALL' ACCESSO

La presente tesi si propone di affrontare l’ istituto del diritto di accesso agli atti e documenti amministrativi, soprattutto con riferimento alle limitazioni poste in materia: il diritto in esame infatti, pone non pochi problemi di coordinamento in relazione a determinati ambiti quali la tutela della riservatezza e della segretezza, oltre che i limiti espressamente previsti dall’ art 24 della L. 241/1990, dai regolamenti e dai decreti. L’ istituto verrà comunque analizzato sotto tutti i diversi aspetti che lo compongono, a partire dall’ evoluzione legislativa fino ad arrivare alle forme di tutela: in particolare verranno dapprima prese in considerazione le tematiche riguardanti la natura giuridica, i soggetti attivi e passivi, i cosiddetti controinteressati, l’ oggetto, l’ esercizio, le autorità di riferimento ed il coordinamento con le altre fonti legislative. Si affronteranno poi le situazioni inerenti i limiti in materia con attento riguardo agli ambiti della riservatezza e della segretezza, soprattutto si cercherà di spiegare il difficile bilanciamento degli interessi in gioco che porta necessariamente ad una valutazione caso per caso, fornendo anche l’ analisi delle ratio di talune sentenze. Infine si passeranno ad esaminare le forme di tutela approntate all’ istituto, prendendo in esame sia le forme non giurisdizionali che quelle giurisdizionali anche in sede comunitaria e con particolare attenzione rivolta al rito speciale delineato dall’ art 116 del c.p.c. così come modificato dalla L. 69/2009

Interview to Stefano Boeri, Stefano Boeri Architetti

Il contributo, realizzato sulla base di una conversazione condotta con l'architetto Stefano Boeri, tratta la questione delle stazioni ferroviarie abbandonate e la loro riabilitazione all'interno del tessuto urbano esistente, delle nuove esigenze della città di Milano in termini di spazio pubblico, sistemi verdi, infrastrutture leggere e mobilità sostenibile. L'intervista raccoglie la visione dell'architetto Boeri attraverso l'analisi e la prefigurazione di nuovi scenari metropolitani.The contribution, made on the basis of a conversation with the architect Stefano Boeri, deals with the question of abandoned railway stations and their rehabilitation within the existing urban landscape, of the new needs of the city of Milan in terms of public space, greenery, light infrastructure and sustainable mobility. The interview collects the vision of architect Boeri through the analysis and prefiguration of new metropolitan scenarios

Assigning UPDRS Scores in the Leg Agility Task of Parkinsonians: Can It Be Done through BSN-based Kinematic Variables?

In this paper, by characterizing the Leg Agility (LA) task, which contributes to the evaluation of the degree of severity of the Parkinson's Disease (PD), through kinematic variables (including the angular amplitude and speed of thighs' motion), we investigate the link between these variables and Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) scores. Our investigation relies on the use of a few body-worn wireless inertial nodes and represents a first step in the design of a portable system, amenable to be integrated in Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios, for automatic detection of the degree of severity (in terms of UPDRS score) of PD. The experimental investigation is carried out considering 24 PD patients.Comment: 10 page

Connectivity alterations underlying the breakdown of pseudoneglect: New insights from healthy and pathological aging

A right-hemisphere dominance for visuospatial attention has been invoked as the most prominent neural feature of pseudoneglect (i.e., the leftward visuospatial bias exhibited in neurologically healthy individuals) but the neurophysiological underpinnings of such advantage are still controversial. Previous studies investigating visuospatial bias in multiple-objects visual enumeration reported that pseudoneglect is maintained in healthy elderly and amnesic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), but not in Alzheimer's disease (AD). In this study, we aimed at investigating the neurophysiological correlates sustaining the rearrangements of the visuospatial bias along the progression from normal to pathological aging. To this aim, we recorded EEG activity during an enumeration task and analyzed intra-hemispheric fronto-parietal and inter-hemispheric effective connectivity adopting indexes from graph theory in patients with mild AD, patients with aMCI, and healthy elderly controls (HC). Results revealed that HC showed the leftward bias and stronger fronto-parietal effective connectivity in the right as compared to the left hemisphere. A breakdown of pseudoneglect in patients with AD was associated with both the loss of the fronto-parietal asymmetry and the reduction of inter-hemispheric parietal interactions. In aMCI, initial alterations of the attentional bias were associated with a reduction of parietal inter-hemispheric communication, but not with modulations of the right fronto-parietal connectivity advantage, which remained intact. These data provide support to the involvement of fronto-parietal and inter-parietal pathways in the leftward spatial bias, extending these notions to the complex neurophysiological alterations characterizing pathological aging

Real-world data mining meets clinical practice: Research challenges and perspective

As Big Data Analysis meets healthcare applications, domain-specific challenges and opportunities materialize in all aspects of data science. Advanced statistical methods and Artificial Intelligence (AI) on Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are used both for knowledge discovery purposes and clinical decision support. Such techniques enable the emerging Predictive, Preventative, Personalized, and Participatory Medicine (P4M) paradigm. Working with the Infectious Disease Clinic of the University Hospital of Modena, Italy, we have developed a range of Data-Driven (DD) approaches to solve critical clinical applications using statistics, Machine Learning (ML) and Big Data Analytics on real-world EHRs. Here, we describe our perspective on the challenges we encountered. Some are connected to medical data and their sparse, scarce, and unbalanced nature. Others are bound to the application environment, as medical AI tools can affect people's health and life. For each of these problems, we report some available techniques to tackle them, present examples drawn from our experience, and propose which approaches, in our opinion, could lead to successful real-world, end-to-end implementations. DESY report number: DESY-22-153

PEDALAR NA COPA 2014 E NAS OLIMPÍADAS 2016 NO BRASIL?

Esse texto é uma aproximação dos projetos da Copa do Mundo da FIFA 2014 e dos Jogos Olimpícos de 2016 que serão sediados no Brasil. A intenção do trabalho é descrever o que está previsto nos projetos desses dois megaeventos em relação à Mobilidade Urbana, assim como analisar essas propostas a partir da perspectiva da promoção e consolidação da bicicleta como meio de transporte no país. Para isso são apresentados: o Projeto Bicicleta Brasil: Avanços e Desafios, que é uma proposta nacional de política pública do uso da bicicleta como opção modal; Os projetos de Mobilidade Urbana das cidades-sedes da Copa de 2014; oprojeto de Mobilidade Urbana do Rio de Janeiro para as Olimpíadas de 2016. Por fim, articulam-se os três projetos apresentados com enfase nas possibilidades educacionais e de formação cultural, concluindo-se que a bicicleta como meio de transporte é praticamente desconsiderada em todas as dimensões como alternativa modal nos projetos desses megaeventos sediados no Brasil

Charge localization in Co-doped ceria with oxygen vacancies

In this paper we report density functional theory (DFT) calculations on bulk cerium oxide (ceria) doped with magnetic impurities of cobalt atoms in the presence of oxygen vacancies. Using the framework of the DFT+U approach to take into account the effects of electronic correlations in the Ce 4f states, we evaluate the relative stability of different configurations of vacancies. We show that, within the approximations considered, the vacancies tend to locate close to the Co impurities. In addition, we address the issue of the charge localization that takes place due to de-oxygenation processes, finding that the excess electrons reside at Ce atoms which are next-nearest neighbors of the vacancy sites.Fil: Murgida, Gustavo Ezequiel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Física; Argentina. Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica. Centro Atómico Constituyentes; ArgentinaFil: Vildosola, Veronica Laura. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica. Centro Atómico Constituyentes; ArgentinaFil: Ferrari, Valeria Paola. Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica. Gerencia del Área de Investigaciones y Aplicaciones no Nucleares. Gerencia de Física (Centro Atómico Constituyentes); Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Llois, Ana Maria. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Física; Argentina. Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica. Centro Atómico Constituyentes; Argentin