Resource-Limited Automated Ki67 Index Estimation in Breast Cancer

The prediction of tumor progression and chemotherapy response has been recently tackled exploiting Tumor Infiltrating Lymphocytes (TILs) and the nuclear protein Ki67 as prognostic factors. Recently, deep neural networks (DNNs) have been shown to achieve top results in estimating Ki67 expression and simultaneous determination of intratumoral TILs score in breast cancer cells. However, in the last ten years the extraordinary progress induced by deep models proliferated at least as much as their resource demand. The exorbitant computational costs required to query (and in some cases also to store) a deep model represent a strong limitation in resource-limited contexts, like that of IoT-based applications to support healthcare personnel. To this end, we propose a resource consumption-aware DNN for the effective estimate of the percentage of Ki67-positive cells in breast cancer screenings. Our approach reduced up to 75% and 89% the usage of memory and disk space respectively, up to 1.5x the energy consumption, and preserved or improved the overall accuracy of a benchmark state-of-the-art solution. Encouraged by such positive results, we developed and structured the adopted framework so as to allow its general purpose usage, along with a public software repository to support its usage

Association between red cell distribution width and response to methotrexate in rheumatoid arthritis

Red cell distribution width (RDW) is an unconventional biomarker of inflammation. We aimed to explore its role as a predictor of treatment response in rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Eighty-two RA patients (55 females), median age [interquartile range] 63 years [52-69], were selected by scanning the medical records of a rheumatology clinic, to analyze the associations between baseline RDW, disease activity scores and inflammatory markers, as well as the relationship between RDW changes following methotrexate (MTX) and treatment response. The lower the median baseline RDW, the greater were the chances of a positive EULAR response at three months, 13.5% [13.0-14.4] being among those with good response, vs 14.0% [13.2-14.7] and 14.2% [13.5- 16.0] (p=0.009) among those with moderate and poor response, respectively. MTX treatment was followed by a significant RDW increase (p<0.0001). The increase of RDW was greater among patients with good EULAR response, becoming progressively smaller in cases with moderate and poor response (1.0% [0.4-1.4] vs. 0.7 [0.1-2.0] vs. 0.3 [-0.1-0.8]; p=0.03). RDW is a strong predictor of early response to MTX in RA. RDW significantly increases after MTX initiation in parallel to treatment response, suggesting a role as a marker of MTX effectiveness

Potential-driven Chirality manifestations and impressive enantioselectivity by inherently chiral electroactive films

Molecular materials coupling electroactivity with enantiorecognition capability are an attractive objective in materials research. The usual strategy, hinging on attaching chiral pendants to an electroactive polyconjugated backbone, generally results in modest chirality manifestations. We have thus designed electroactive chiral polyheterocycles, where chirality is not external to the electroactive backbone, but inherent to it, resulting from a tailored torsion produced by the presence of atropisomeric, conjugatively active biheteroaromatic scaffolds. The coincidence of the stereogenic element with the whole electroactive backbone affords by electrooligomerization enantiopure electroactive films of impressive chiroptical activity, which can be finely and reversibly tuned by the electric potential, since injection of positive charges results in decrease of the atropisomeric scaffold angle to favour delocalization, as revealed by CD spectroelectrochemistry, suggesting us the image of a "breathing chirality". To test the enantiorecognition ability of the new inherently chiral conducting films we have developed an efficient protocol in ionic liquid affording preparation of very reproducible electrode surfaces by electrooxidation of the enantiopure monomers on screen printed electrode supports. The resulting specular R and S electrodes have been tested with (R)-(+)- and S-(-)-N,N-dimethyl-1-ferrocenylethylamine specular probes. The response is highly and reproducibly enantioselective (with \uf07e100 mV separation between R and S probes with single enantiomers and even more with the racemate), specular for R vs S surfaces with respect to S and R probes, and reversible in repeated alternating sequences of S and R probe sensing on a single electrode.[1] With the contribution of Fondazione Cariplo, grant no. 2011-0417. [1] F. Sannicol\uf2, S. Arnaboldi, T. Benincori, V. Bonometti, R. Cirilli, L. Dunsch, W. Kutner, G. Longhi, P.R. Mussini, M. Panigati, M. Pierini, S. Rizzo, Angew. Chemie 2014, 53, 2623-2627

Inflammatory markers predict insulin sensitivity in active rheumatoid arthritis but not in psoriatic arthritis

Whether the insulin resistance commonly observed in patients with inflammatory arthritis is a disease-specific feature and/or is limited to a disease phase (i.e., it occurs only during phases of high disease activity) is unknown. Fifty-three rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and 44 psoriatic arthritis (PsA) patients were recruited consecutively along with 194 controls matched for age, sex and body mass index for a case-control study. All underwent an oral glucose tolerance test, the results of which were analysed to derive the following indexes: homeostatic model of insulin resistance (HOMA-IR), insulin sensitivity index (ISI) and early insulin sensitivity index (EISI). These data were related to anthropometric, clinical and laboratory findings. Metabolic parameters of patients and controls were similar. Neither inflammatory markers nor disease activity scores were related to glucose metabolism for the generality of RA and PsA patients; however, by restricting the analysis to the subset of RA patients with residual disease activity, an association emerged between erythrocyte sedimentation rate, on the one hand, and fasting insulin (β=0.46, p=0.047) and HOMA-IR (β=0.44, p=0.02), on the other. Moreover, C-reactive protein (CRP) levels were associated with plasma glucose and insulin levels measured 120 min after the glucose load (β=0.91, p=0.0003 and β=0.77, p=0.0006, respectively); ISI and EISI were predicted by CRP (β=-0.79, p=0.0006; β=-0.80, p=0.0001, respectively). The same did not hold true for PsA patients. The association between systemic inflammation and insulin resistance indexes is a feature of RA with residual disease activity, not a universal feature of inflammatory arthritides

Reinforced Concrete Panel Ductility under Cyclic Shear Loads

Università degli Studi di Brescia, Dipartimento DICATA, Technical Report. 2006 (vol. 1)

Simulating permanent magnet brushless motors in DYMOLA

Multi-domain dynamic simulation is becoming an issue in the design of high performance mechatronic systems, where advances are foreseen only if the mutual interaction of different parts of the system is well understood. The modelling environment provided by DYMOLA with Modelica language proved to be idealfor studying the mutual effects of mechanics, electronics and control in a brushless motor, whose model has been conceived as one of the building blocks of a wider project, aimed at simulating a complete machining centre. Details on the model of the brushless motor as well as on its simulation are given in the present paper