Personalized medicine in interventional cardiology: pharmacologic and mechanical strategies to balance ischemic and bleeding complications during and after percutaneous cardiovascular interventions -- Searching for and fighting with a Chimera --

In the Greek mythology, the Chimera was a monstrous firebreathing hybrid creature of Lycia in Asia Minor, composed of the parts of more than one animal (usually depicted as a lion, with the head of a goat arising from its back, and a tail of snake). Homer's brief description in the Iliad is the earliest surviving literary reference. The term Chimera has come to describe any mythical or fictional animal with parts taken from various animals, or to describe anything composed of very disparate parts, or perceived as wildly imaginative, implausible, difficult to realize or utopian. Bellerophon was the hero who fought and killed the Chimera. When he arrived in Lycia, the Chimera was truly ferocious, and he could not harm the monster even while riding on Pegasus. He felt the heat of the breath the Chimera expelled, and was struck with an idea. He got a large block of lead and mounted it on his spear. Then he flew head-on towards the Chimera, holding out the spear as far as he could. Before he broke off his attack, he managed to lodge the block of lead inside the Chimera's throat. The beast's firebreath melted the lead, and blocked its air passage. The Chimera suffocated, and Bellerophon returned victorious to King Iobates. Percutaneous cardiovascular interventions are the cornerstone treatment of cardiovascular diseases. Antithrombotic therapy during and after these interventions is fundamental to prevent ischemic recurrences, but has the risk to increase bleeding complications. To find the optimal strategy to prevent ischemia without affecting bleeding in all patients is matter of ongoing discussion and research, and probably remains a chimera. Like Bellerophon searching for and fighting with the Chimera, clinicians should be aware of the trade-off of both bleeding and ischemia and their impact on patients’ health, thus searching for the optimal therapy which has not to face with a single animal (ischemia or bleeding), rather must account and balance for the effects on both these entities. In such a context, personalized medicine characterized by individualization of therapies patient-by-patient based on the individual risk/benefit profile appears to be a promising approach that clinicians might adopt to kill this nightmare

Doubling of the Algebra and Neutrino Mixing within Noncommutative Spectral Geometry

We study physical implications of the doubling of the algebra, an essential element in the construction of the noncommutative spectral geometry model, proposed by Connes and his collaborators as offering a geometric explanation for the standard model of strong and electroweak interactions. Linking the algebra doubling to the deformed Hopf algebra, we build Bogogliubov transformations and show the emergence of neutrino mixing.Comment: 7 pages; slightly modified version to match publicatio

Caratterizzazione di aerosols contenenti Legionella spp., al variare delle condizioni sperimentali in ambienti confinati

Caratterizzazione di aerosols contenenti Legionella spp., al variare delle condizioni sperimentali in ambienti confinat

Volevamo braccia, sono nate seconde generazioni: esperienze scolastiche dei figli delle migrazioni nella città di Napoli

Figli del paradosso dell'integrazione (Wrench, Rea e Ouali, 1992), per gli studenti con background migratorio la scuola è il principale elemento costitutivo degli orizzonti di attesa (Jedlowski, 2017). Nonostante miglioramenti, i dati (MIUR, 2019) indicano che questi studenti hanno maggiori probabilità di fare esperienza del fenomeno di tracking. Dall'analisi di focus group condotti in alcune scuole secondarie di primo grado a Napoli, si configura la presenza del paradosso delle aspirazioni (Salikutluk, 2013). Se, da un lato, gli approcci dell'ottimismo degli immigrati e delle opportunità bloccate sembrano spiegare alte aspirazioni, dall'altro, adottando la teoria degli altri significativi, insegnanti e gruppo dei pari sembrano giocare un ruolo ambiguo. In particolare, parrebbero essere le forme di esclusione più o meno intenzionali generate dalle istituzioni scolastiche (Serpieri e Grimaldi, 2013) a riverberare con più forza sulle aspirazioni, prefigurando pericolose profezie che si autoavverano (Ravecca, 2009)

A CNN-based fusion method for feature extraction from sentinel data

Sensitivity to weather conditions, and specially to clouds, is a severe limiting factor to the use of optical remote sensing for Earth monitoring applications. A possible alternative is to benefit from weather-insensitive synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. In many real-world applications, critical decisions are made based on some informative optical or radar features related to items such as water, vegetation or soil. Under cloudy conditions, however, optical-based features are not available, and they are commonly reconstructed through linear interpolation between data available at temporally-close time instants. In this work, we propose to estimate missing optical features through data fusion and deep-learning. Several sources of information are taken into account—optical sequences, SAR sequences, digital elevation model—so as to exploit both temporal and cross-sensor dependencies. Based on these data and a tiny cloud-free fraction of the target image, a compact convolutional neural network (CNN) is trained to perform the desired estimation. To validate the proposed approach, we focus on the estimation of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), using coupled Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 time-series acquired over an agricultural region of Burkina Faso from May–November 2016. Several fusion schemes are considered, causal and non-causal, single-sensor or joint-sensor, corresponding to different operating conditions. Experimental results are very promising, showing a significant gain over baseline methods according to all performance indicators

Effect of aminergic signaling on the humoral innate immunity response of Drosophila

Biogenic amines are crucial signaling molecules that modulate various physiological life functions both in vertebrates and invertebrates. In humans, these neurotransmitters influence the innate and adaptive immunity systems. In this work, we analyzed whether the aminergic neurotransmission of dopamine, serotonin, and octopamine could have an impact on the humoral innate immune response of Drosophila melanogaster. This is a powerful model system widely used to uncover the insect innate immunity mechanisms which are also conserved in mammals. We found that the neurotransmission of all these amines positively modulates the Toll-responsive antimicrobial peptide (AMP) drosomycin (drs) gene in adult flies infected with the Micrococcus luteus bacterium. Indeed, we showed that either blocking the neurotransmission in their specific aminergic neurons by expressing shibire(ts) (Shi(ts)) or silencing the vesicular monoamine transporter gene (dVMAT) by RNAi caused a significantly reduced expression of the Toll-responsive drs gene. However, upon M. luteus infection, the block of aminergic transmission did not alter the expression of AMP attacin genes responding to the immune deficiency (Imd) and Toll pathways. Overall, our results not only reveal a neuroimmune function for biogenic amines in humoral immunity but also further highlight the complexity of the network controlling AMP gene regulation

Three-Dimensional Angle Assessment and Plaque Distribution Classification in Left Main Disease: Impact of Geometry on Outcome.

Bifurcation geometry and plaque distribution in a diseased left main artery (LM) have the potential to drive operators' decisions regarding treatment strategies, techniques, and material selection. The three-dimensional (3D) geometry of the LM bifurcation typically results in specific patterns of plaque distribution. Plaque distribution may, in turn, significantly affect the procedural and long-term clinical and angiographic outcomes of LM percutaneous coronary intervention. Each LM bifurcation must be treated according to its unique anatomic and pathologic characteristics. Novel classification schemes of plaque distribution and 3D assessment may be valuable aids to obtaining a working picture of the bifurcation geometry

EcR-B1 and Usp nuclear hormone receptors regulate expression of the VM32E eggshell gene during Drosophila oogenesis

AbstractEcdysone signaling plays key roles in Drosophila oogenesis, as its activity is required at multiple steps during egg chamber maturation. Recently, its involvement has been reported on eggshell production by controlling chorion gene transcription and amplification. Here, we present evidence that ecdysone signaling also controls the expression of the eggshell gene VM32E, whose product is a component of vitelline membrane and endochorion layers. Specifically blocking the function of the different Ecdysone receptor (EcR) isoforms we demonstrate that EcR-B1 is responsible for ecdysone-mediated VM32E transcriptional regulation. Moreover, we show that the EcR partner Ultraspiracle (Usp) is also necessary for VM32E expression. By analyzing the activity of specific VM32E regulatory regions in usp2 clones we identify the promoter region mediating ecdysone-dependent VM32E expression. By in vitro binding assay and site-directed mutagenesis we demonstrate that this region contains a Usp binding site necessary for VM32E regulation.Our results further support the crucial role of ecdysone signaling in controlling transcription of eggshell structural genes and suggest that the heterodimeric complex EcR-B1/Usp mediates the ecdysone-dependent VM32E transcriptional activation in the main body follicle cells