Imaging of tumor specific antigens and microenvironment

The events that drive tumor progression and metastatization initiate within the cancer cell itself, that accumulates mutations and de-differentiate until reaching a very unstable stage. But these events alone are not sufficient to maintain sustained metastasis development and growth. Support from the host is required in order to promote angiogenesis and inhibit immune response that would kill cancer cells. The sum of these events is the result of the interaction between the tumor and cellular or non-cellular components that surround the cancer cells. This concept gained more and more importance during the recent years due to the possibility to develop a wide range of therapeutic strategies to target those components and pathways involved in the establishment of tumor microenvironment. However, it has been reported that cancer lesions, even within the same patient, may express different markers, thus, needing two different therapeutic approaches. Therefore, there is the need of a non-invasive tool to characterize each lesion before planning the most appropriate therapy. This will allow to save money, time and reduce the side-effects as much as possible. In this scenario, nuclear medicine offers a wide set of potential radiopharmaceuticals to image markers expressed by both cancer cells and microenvironment allowing to plan the most appropriate therapy in each patient. In this thesis we present four different strategies to image tumor specific antigens and microenvironment focusing on cancer, immune system and angiogenesis

Market expansion and the co-opetition of criminal organizations in Italy

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and EconomicsA mafia modernization process will be addressed. That is the process by which the expansion growth into new territories coincided with a shift of objectives and interests of the mafia itself, which turned from being "traditional" to "entrepreneurial." Beside that we will examine the strategies adopted by the criminal organizations in order to successfully face the legal market and maintain at the same time a deep control over their home-regions

Immunoscintigraphy for therapy decision making and follow-up of biological therapies

With the availability of new biological therapies there is the need of more accurate diagnostic tools to noninvasively assess the presence of their targets. In this scenario nuclear medicine offers many radiopharmaceuticals for SPECT or PET imaging of many pathological conditions. The availability of monoclonal antibodies provides tools to target specific antigens involved in angiogenesis, cell cycle or modulation of the immune systems. The radiolabelling of such therapeutic mAbs is a promising method to evaluate the antigenic status of each cancer lesion or inflamed sites before starting the therapy. It may also allow to perform follow-up of such biological therapies. In the present review we provide an overview of the most studied radiolabelled antibodies for therapy decision making and follow-up of patients affected by cancer and other pathological conditions

Path Integral Monte Carlo study confirms a highly ordered snowball in 4He nanodroplets doped with an Ar+ ion

By means of the exact Path Integral Monte Carlo method we have performed a detailed microscopic study of $^4$He nanodroplets doped with an argon ion, Ar$^+$, at $T=0.5$ K. We have computed density profiles, energies, dissociation energies and characterized the local order around the ion for nanodroplets with a number of 4He atoms ranging from 10 to 64 and also 128. We have found the formation of a stable solid structure around the ion, a "snowball", consisting of 3 concentric shells in which the 4He atoms are placed on at the vertices of platonic solids: the first inner shell is an icosahedron (12 atoms); the second one is a dodecahedron with 20 atoms placed on the faces of the icosahedron of the first shell; the third shell is again an icosahedron composed of 12 atoms placed on the faces of the dodecahedron of the second shell. The "magic numbers" implied by this structure, 12, 32 and 44 helium atoms, have been observed in a recent experimental study [Bartl et al, J. Phys. Chem. A 118, 2014] of these complexes; the dissociation energy curve computed in the present work shows jumps in correspondence with those found in the nanodroplets abundance distribution measured in that experiment, strengthening the agreement between theory and experiment. The same structures were predicted in Ref. [Galli et al, J. Phys. Chem. A 115, 2011] in a study regarding Na$^+$@$^4$He$_n$ when n>30; a comparison between Ar$^+$@$^4$He$_n$ and Na$^+$@$^4$He$_n$ complexes is also presented.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure

Un ricordo di Francesco Palla

Lo scorso Gennaio è improvvisamente mancato Francesco Palla, direttore dell’Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri fino al 2011, molto conosciuto a Firenze anche per le sua attività di comunicazione della scienza, e tra i fondatori di questa rivista. Ne ricordiamo la figura di scienziato e di divulgatore appassionato.Francesco Palla, Director of the Arcetri Astrophysical Observatory up to 2011, died suddenly last January. He was also well known in Florence for his commitment to spreading knowledge of science and was one of the founders of this journal. Here we should like to remember Francesco in his role of eclectic scientist and passionate communicator

Advancing Personalized Federated Learning: Group Privacy, Fairness, and Beyond

Federated learning (FL) is a framework for training machine learning models in a distributed and collaborative manner. During training, a set of participating clients process their data stored locally, sharing only the model updates obtained by minimizing a cost function over their local inputs. FL was proposed as a stepping-stone towards privacy-preserving machine learning, but it has been shown vulnerable to issues such as leakage of private information, lack of personalization of the model, and the possibility of having a trained model that is fairer to some groups than to others. In this paper, we address the triadic interaction among personalization, privacy guarantees, and fairness attained by models trained within the FL framework. Differential privacy and its variants have been studied and applied as cutting-edge standards for providing formal privacy guarantees. However, clients in FL often hold very diverse datasets representing heterogeneous communities, making it important to protect their sensitive information while still ensuring that the trained model upholds the aspect of fairness for the users. To attain this objective, a method is put forth that introduces group privacy assurances through the utilization of $d$-privacy (aka metric privacy). $d$-privacy represents a localized form of differential privacy that relies on a metric-oriented obfuscation approach to maintain the original data's topological distribution. This method, besides enabling personalized model training in a federated approach and providing formal privacy guarantees, possesses significantly better group fairness measured under a variety of standard metrics than a global model trained within a classical FL template. Theoretical justifications for the applicability are provided, as well as experimental validation on real-world datasets to illustrate the working of the proposed method

Leukocyte and bacteria imaging in prosthetic joint infection

There has been a significant increase in the number of joint prosthesis replacements worldwide. Although relatively uncommon, complications can occur with the most serious being an infection. Various radiological and nuclear imaging techniques are available to diagnose prosthetic joint infections (PJI). In this review article, we describe the pathophysiology of PJI, the principles of nuclear medicine imaging and the differences between Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET). The value of nuclear medicine techniques for clinical practice is also discussed.Then we provide an overview of the most often used radionuclide imaging techniques that may be helpful in diagnosing prosthetic joint infection: the 67Ga-citrate, labelled white blood cells in vitro and in vivo (monoclonal antibodies directed against specific targets on the leukocytes), and 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose (18F-FDG). We describe their working methods, the pitfalls, and the interpretation criteria. Furthermore, we review recent advances in imaging bacteria, a molecular imaging method that holds promises for the detection of occult infections. We conclude proposing two diagnostic flow-charts, based on data in the literature, that could help the clinicians to choose the best nuclear imaging method when they have a patient with suspicion of or with proven PJI

Optimum VM Placement for NFV Infrastructures

This paper shows how to use a Linux-based operating system as a real-time processing platform for low-latency and predictable packet processing in cloudified radio-access network (cRAN) scenarios. This use-case exhibits challenging end-to-end processing latencies, in the order of milliseconds for the most time-critical layers of the stack. A significant portion of the variability and instability in the observed end-to-end performance in this domain is due to the power saving capabilities of modern CPUs, often in contrast with the low-latency and high-performance requirements of this type of applications. We discuss how to properly configure the system for this scenario, and evaluate the proposed configuration on a synthetic application designed to mimic the behavior and computational requirements of typical software components implementing baseband processing in production environments