Deep Learning for Predicting Congestive Heart Failure

Congestive heart failure (CHF) is one of the most debilitating cardiac disorders. It is a costly disease in terms of both lives and financial outlays, given the high rate of hospital re-admissions and mortality. Heart failure (HF) is notoriously difficult to identify on time, and is frequently accompanied by additional comorbidities that further complicate diagnosis. Many decision support systems (DSS) have been developed to facilitate diagnosis and to raise the standard of screening and monitoring operations, even for non-expert staff. This is confirmed in the literature by records of highly performing diagnosis-aid systems, which are unfortunately not very relevant to expert cardiologists. In order to assist cardiologists in predicting the trajectory of HF, we propose a deep learning-based system which predicts severity of disease progression by employing medical patient history. We tested the accuracy of four models on a labeled dataset, composed of 1037 records, to predict CHF severity and progression, achieving results comparable to studies based on much larger datasets, none of which used longitudinal multi-class prediction. The main contribution of this work is that it demonstrates that a fairly complicated approach can achieve good results on a medium size dataset, providing a reasonably accurate means of determining the evolution of CHF well in advance. This potentially constitutes a significant aid for healthcare managers and expert cardiologists in designing different therapies for medication, healthy lifestyle changes and quality of life (QoL) management, while also promoting allocation of resources with an evidence-based approach. © 2022 by the authors

Careggi Smart Hospital: A mobile app for patients, citizens and healthcare staff

This paper presents a mobile app called “Careggi Smart Hospital” which has been developed for the Careggi Polyclinic in Florence. The application is designed for Android smartphones and tablets and it is freely downloadable from the Google Play Store. It provides various useful tools to the hospital's users such as personnel and structures finding, way-finding and the possibility to access personal medical records collected on regional electronic health record

Bridging the gap between 3D navigation and semantic search. The INCEPTION platform

The paper presents the main outcomes and future development of the INCEPTION project, “Inclusive Cultural Heritage in Europe through 3D semantic modelling”, funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 Work Programme Europe in a changing world – inclusive, innovative and reflective Societies (Call Reflective-7-2014, Advanced 3D modelling for accessing and understanding European cultural assets) and completed in May 2019. In particular, the key-targeted project achievement will be presented: a specific cloud-based platform conceived to accomplish the main objectives of accessing, understanding and strengthening European Cultural Heritage by means of enriched 3D models. The need for digital data interpretation, in addition to documentation, guided the overall process of the cross-disciplinary work methodology, based on new methods and tools for 3D surveying and H-BIM modelling, new approaches and methodologies for Cultural Heritage 3D data inclusive access and exploitation by means of the Platform

Bridging the gap between 3D navigation and semantic search. The INCEPTION platform

The paper presents the main outcomes and future development of the INCEPTION project, “Inclusive Cultural Heritage in Europe through 3D semantic modelling”, funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 Work Programme Europe in a changing world – inclusive, innovative and reflective Societies (Call Reflective-7-2014, Advanced 3D modelling for accessing and understanding European cultural assets) and completed in May 2019. In particular, the key-targeted project achievement will be presented: a specific cloud-based platform conceived to accomplish the main objectives of accessing, understanding and strengthening European Cultural Heritage by means of enriched 3D models. The need for digital data interpretation, in addition to documentation, guided the overall process of the cross-disciplinary work methodology, based on new methods and tools for 3D surveying and H-BIM modelling, new approaches and methodologies for Cultural Heritage 3D data inclusive access and exploitation by means of the Platform

Pupillometry via smartphone for low-resource settings

The photopupillary reflex regulates the pupil reaction to changing light conditions. Being controlled by the autonomic nervous system, it is a proxy for brain trauma and for the conditions of patients in critical care. A prompt evaluation of brain traumas can save lives. With a simple penlight, skilled clinicians can do that, whereas less specialized ones have to resort to a digital pupilometer. However, many low-income countries lack both specialized clinicians and digital pupilometers. This paper presents the early results of our study aiming at designing, prototyping and validating an app for testing the photopupillary reflex via Android, following the European Medical Device Regulation and relevant standards. After a manual validation, the prototype underwent a technical validation against a commercial Infrared pupilometer. As a result, the proposed app performed as well as the manual measurements and better than the commercial solution, with lower errors, higher and significant correlations, and significantly better Bland-Altman plots for all the pupillometry-related measures. The design of this medical device was performed based on our expertise in low-resource settings. This kind of environments imposes more stringent design criteria due to contextual challenges, including the lack of specialized clinicians, funds, spare parts and consumables, poor maintenance, and harsh environmental conditions, which may hinder the safe operationalization of medical devices. This paper provides an overview of how these unique contextual characteristics are cascaded into the design of an app in order to contribute to the Sustainable Development Goal 3 of the World Health Organization: Good health and well-being

Integrated HTA and FMECA methodology for the evaluation of robotic surgery

Robotic surgery has been strongly improved since the beginning of the twenty-first century and chased important level of technical and clinical performances. Within the robotic area, the most worldwide used surgical robot is the da Vinci® system made by Intuitive Surgical Inc. The aim of this study was to evaluate at the hospital scale the robotic surgery (Hospital –Based Health Technology Assessment) in comparison to the open and laparoscopic procedures yet combining a FMECA analysis to accurately assess all those aspects involving patient and staff safety. The total number of robotic procedures directly observed by the surgical department and reported in the following study was 44, including 28 urology interventions and 16 general surgeries. The study confirmed clinical benefits carried out with the robot but bigger complexity in managing the whole surgical system in terms of structural needs, staff and technology. For the future, further steps regard the necessity to dispose of a wider number of robotic procedures in order to strength the analysis reliability and complete the socio-economic assessment with medium and long terms observation. Finally a new FMECA application will be essential to monitor the real effects of the suggested actions on the evaluated risks according to the already known and new failure modes

Follow-Up of Coiled Cerebral Aneurysms at 3T: Comparison of 3D Time-of-Flight MR Angiography and Contrast-Enhanced MR Angiography

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Our aim was to compare contrast-enhanced MR angiography (CE-MRA) and 3D time-of-flight (TOF) MRA at 3T for follow-up of coiled cerebral aneurysms. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Fifty-two patients treated with Guglielmi detachable coils for 54 cerebral aneurysms were evaluated at 3T MRA. 3D TOF MRA (TR/TE = 23/3.5; SENSE factor = 2.5) and CE-MRA by using a 3D ultrafast gradient-echo sequence (TR/TE = 5.9/1.8; SENSE factor = 3) enhanced with 0.1-mmol/kg gadobenate dimeglumine were performed in the same session. Source images, 3D maximum intensity projection, 3D shaded surface display, and/or 3D volume-rendered reconstructions were evaluated in terms of aneurysm occlusion/patency and artifact presence. RESULTS: In terms of clinical classification, the 2 MRA sequences were equivalent for 53 of the 54 treated aneurysms: 21 were considered fully occluded, whereas 16 were considered to have a residual neck and 16 were considered residually patent at follow-up MRA. The remaining aneurysm appeared fully occluded at TOF MRA but had a residual patent neck at CE-MRA. Visualization of residual aneurysm patency was significantly ( P = .001) better with CE-MRA compared with TOF MRA for 10 (31.3%) of the 32 treated aneurysms considered residually patent with both sequences. Coil artifacts were present in 5 cases at TOF MRA but in none at CE-MRA. No relationship was apparent between the visualization of patency and either the size of the aneurysm or the interval between embolization and follow-up. CONCLUSION: At follow-up MRA at 3T, unenhanced TOF and CE-MRA sequences are similarly effective at classifying coiled aneurysms as occluded or residually patent. However, CE-MRA is superior to TOF MRA for visualization of residual patency and is associated with fewer artifacts

Semantic Web Technologies Meet BIM for Accessing and Understanding Cultural Heritage

Within the EU funded project INCEPTION – Inclusive Cultural Heritage in Europe through 3D semantic modelling, the key-targeted achievement is the development of a specific cloud based platform, in order to accomplish the main objectives of accessing, understanding and strengthening European Cultural Heritage by means of enriched 3D models. The whole INCEPTION project is based on the close connection between state-of-the-art architectural modeling technologies (BIM, Building Information Modeling) and the latest cutting-edge web technologies. The platform is grounded on semantic web technologies and makes extensive use of WebGL and RESTful APIs, in order to enrich heritage 3D models by using Semantic Web standards. The INCEPTION platform will be a space for interchange of information and for the dialogue among professionals, students, scholars, curators, non-expert users, etc. Furthermore, the Semantic Web structure interlinks the platform with external Cultural Heritage available linked data and makes it gradually enhanced by specific flexible data structures provided as project specific ontologies. The paper will describe solutions based on the match between BIM, Cloud and Semantic Web

Programmable Edge-to-Cloud Virtualization for 5G Media Industry: The 5G-MEDIA Approach

To ensure high Quality of Experience (QoE) for end users, many media applications require significant quantities of computing and network resources, making their realization challenging in resource constrained environments. In this paper, we present the approach of the 5G-MEDIA project, providing an integrated programmable service platform for the development, design and operations of media applications in 5G networks, facilitating media service management across the service life cycle. The platform offers tools to service developers for efficient development, testing and continuous correction of services. One step further, it provides a service virtualization platform offering horizontal services, such as a Media Service Catalogue and accounting services, as well as optimization mechanisms to flexibly adapt service operations to dynamic conditions with efficient use of infrastructure resources. The paper outlines three use cases where the platform was tested and validated