3rd International Conference on Avian heRpetological and Exotic mammal medicine

Japanese Encephalitis Virus (JEV) can be responsible for encephalitis in humans and horses and for reproductive disorders in pigs. Birds are amplifying hosts and JEV has been detected in different organs. There are no published data showing the presence of the virus in the organs of healthy birds, captured during inter epidemic periods. We report the results obtained from samples from 12 young birds collected in Italy in 2011 - 2012. Serial sections from formalin-fixed and paraffinembedded tissue samples were routinely processed for histopathology, immunohistochemistry (IHC; pAb, PG 10004, Genesis Biotech Inc.) and Sybr Green real time PCR. IHC to JEV was positive in 9 of 12 bone marrows, showing reaction products in stem cells concurrently positive also for anti CD11b antibody. Four of 12 bone marrows were positive by real time PCR, while other samples showed low quality nucleic acids. JEV localization in bird’s bone marrow myeloid lineage cells, suggest that monocytemacrophage precursors may represent a target cell for the virus, as recently demonstrated in the arbovirus Chikungunya virus. Our results suggest that birds could be reservoir for JEV maintaining myeloid cells persistently infected with the virus

IT WAS A WAR THAT WORE OUT BOTH MEN AND WOMEN... - METAPHORS IN AN INFORMATION SYSTEM PROJECT

This study looks at metaphors from the perspective of cognitive metaphor theory. Using the theory developed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) we examine the use of metaphors by project members in an information system (IS) project. The data was collected from 22 interviews. Interviews were conducted with a range of stakeholders, including representatives of users, software developers, experts and IT and service managers. The findings of this qualitative case study indicate that IS developers and experts use many kinds of metaphors to make sense of the IS project they work on. The findings also show that metaphor is pervasive in IS development work, not just in language but also in thought and action and various metaphors are used to make sense of the different phases of the project. It can be argud that the dominant metaphors of any given project will strongly affect the trajectory of the project. Thus the metaphors in use in a project should be a concern for project management and we suggest that emphasizing constructive metaphors could be beneficial for many projects

Clinical, Histological and Trichoscopic Correlations in Scalp Disorders

Trichoscopy is the term coined for the dermoscopic imaging of scalp and hair. This diagnostic technique, simple and noninvasive, can be used as a handy bedside tool for the diagnosis and follow-up of hair and scalp disorders. It allows the recognition of morphologic structures not visible by the naked eye and provides the clinician with a range of dermoscopic findings necessary for differential diagnosis. Trichoscopy observation can be broadly grouped as interfollicular patterns and follicular patterns. Recently, a third mixed class, called the follicular plus interfollicular pattern, has been introduced. Some of these features are specific to a certain scalp disease, while others can be found in many hair disorders. Although studies suggest that the use of trichoscopy can improve clinical accuracy, further investigation is needed. This review provides update information on the trichoscopic features of the most common scalp disorders, striving to show a histopathological and clinical correlation

Idiopathic Eosinophilic Pneumonia with Associated Pulmonary Vasculitis in Horse: A Case Series

Various eosinophilic lesions and their association with diseases have been described in horses. Multisystemic Eosinophilic Epitheliotropic Disease (MEED) characterized by eosinophilic granulomas in various organs represent the most diffuse manifestation. In the present study, we describe the gross and microscopic lesions of idiopathic eosinophilic pneumonia with associated pulmonary vasculitis in 11 horses without systemic involvement. Lungs were enlarged, pale pink, poorly collapsed with white-reddish nodules, randomly distributed throughout the parenchyma. Histologically the lesions ranged from mild eosinophilic bronchointerstitial pneumonia to severe eosinophilic lobular bronchopneumonia associated with eosinophilic necrotizing vasculitis affecting small to medium-size vessels. There was no histologic evidence of parasites within the lesion of any of these horses. Eosinophilic pneumonia with vasculitis and without intralesional parasites have not been previously reported in horses. The current histologic findings are similar to pathologic lung findings observed in Churg-Strauss syndrome of man

Challenges in Transitioning to an Agile Way of Working

This longitudinal study examined how an information systems development team transitioned to an agile way of working. We describe the main events of a large, inter-organizational project, where agile methods and practices were applied for the first time. The organizations involved had a long tradition in heavy, waterfall style projects, and many of those past projects had severe challenges. We examine how the agile way of working was understood by particular groups (project team, management and suppliers), as well as how these understandings changed over time. The lack of experience with agile development, no common view on ‘agility’ and its key principles and practices were obvious challenges for the transition. Our study suggests that complex agile projects need to have very clear goals and management has to be able to communicate these, while preserving the autonomy of teams and individual team members

EGFR-Mutant Non-small Cell Lung Cancer: State-of-the-Art and Future Perspectives

EGFR mutations are the first identified targetable driver alterations in advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), for which specific epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR)-tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKI) have been developed. These small molecules, administered orally, changed the natural history of patients with EGFR-mutated NSCLC, reporting impressive response and survival data. Osimertinib, a third-generation EGFR-TKI, can be considered the standard first-line therapy for the ‘common’ EGFR mutations, which include the exon 19 deletion and Leu858Arg point mutation in exon 21, accounting for 90% of cases. The ‘uncommon’ EGFR mutations, highly heterogeneous and with a low frequency, seem to be more sensitive to afatinib and osimertinib, a second-generation EGFR-TKI, excluding the EGFR exon 20 insertions mutations, for which a platinum-based regimen should be recommended while waiting for specific targeted inhibitors to reach the market. However, after an initial activity to first-line EGFR-TKI treatment, a disease progression is reported due to the presence of an intrinsic resistance or the onset of an acquired resistance. The latter can be broadly grouped into EGFR-dependent or EGFR-independent mechanisms of resistance, for which several new drugs and strategic approaches are under investigation. This review focuses on the state-of-the-art EGFR-TKIs in the treatment of metastatic NSCLC harbouring EGFR mutations, and also discusses potential future perspectives

Dermoscopy and methyl aminolevulinate: A study for detection and evaluation of field cancerization

Actinic keratosis (AK) is a keratinocyte intraepidermal neoplasia UV light – induced that frequently appears in sun-exposed areas of the skin. Although historically AK was de fi ned as “ precancerous ” , actually it is considered as the earliest stage of squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) in situ. Since AKs can progress into invasive SCC, their treatment isrecommended. AKsrarely developasa singlelesion;usually multiplelesions commonly affect anen- tire area of chronically actinic damaged skin. This has led to the concept of “ fi eld cancerization ” , an area chroni- cally sun-exposed that surrounds peripherally visible lesions, in which are individualized subclinical alterations. One of the main principles endpoint in the management of AKs is the evaluation and the treatment of fi eld cancerization. In this view, in order to detect and quantify fi eld cancerization, we employed a method based on the topical application of methyl aminolevulinate (MAL) and the detection of the fl uorescence emitted by its metabolite Protoporphyrin IX (PpIX); then, considering the extension and the intensity of measured fl uores- cence, we create a score of fi eld cancerization. The results show that patients underwent to daylight PDT had a reduction of total score, from T0 to T2. Whereas in the group untreated we observed a stability of total score or a slightly worse. So, the method and the score used allows to evaluate with a good approximation the dimension of fi eld cancerization and show the modi fi cation of it after treatment

Mitigating the measurement overhead of ADAPT-VQE with optimised informationally complete generalised measurements

ADAPT-VQE stands out as a robust algorithm for constructing compact ans\"atze for molecular simulation. It enables to significantly reduce the circuit depth with respect to other methods, such as UCCSD, while achieving higher accuracy and not suffering from so-called barren plateaus that hinder the variational optimisation of many hardware-efficient ans\"atze. In its standard implementation, however, it introduces a considerable measurement overhead in the form of gradient evaluations trough estimations of many commutator operators. In this work, we mitigate this measurement overhead by exploiting a recently introduced method for energy evaluation relying on Adaptive Informationally complete generalised Measurements (AIM). Besides offering an efficient way to measure the energy itself, Informationally Complete (IC) measurement data can be reused to estimate all the commutators of the operators in the operator pool of ADAPT-VQE, using only classically efficient post-processing. We present the AIM-ADAPT-VQE scheme in detail, and investigate its performance with several H4 Hamiltonians and operator pools. Our numerical simulations indicate that the measurement data obtained to evaluate the energy can be reused to implement ADAPT-VQE with no additional measurement overhead for the systems considered here. In addition, we show that, if the energy is measured within chemical precision, the CNOT count in the resulting circuits is close to the ideal one. With scarce measurement data, AIM-ADAPT-VQE still converges to the ground state with high probability, albeit with an increased circuit depth in some cases

The Tanl Named Entity Recognizer at Evalita 2009

We describe the tagger present in the Tanl toolkit, which is a flexible and customizable tool for use in various tagging tasks, including POS tagging and SuperSense tagging. The tagger uses a variety of features, both local and global, which can be specified in a configuration file. The tagger is based on a Maximum Entropy classifier and uses dynamic programming to select accurate sequences of tags. We applied it to the NER tagging task in Evalita 2009, customizing the set of features to use and generating a set of dictionaries from the training corpus, that also provide additional features. The final accuracy is further improved by applying simple symbolic rules

Ex vivo evaluation of imatinib mesylate for induction of cell death on canine neoplastic mast cells with mutations in c-Kit exon 11 via apoptosis

Several studies of canine spontaneous mast cell tumours have described mutations in the c-kit proto-oncogene. These mutations produce a constitutively activated product and have been suggested to play a role in the malignant transformation of mast cells. We hypothesize that the selective tyrosine kinase inhibitor imatinib mesylate inhibits signal transduction and induces apoptosis when tested in cutaneous canine mast cell tumour samples positive for mutation in c-kit exon 11. Three-dimensional ex vivo cultures of canine grade II mast cell tumour treated with STI-571 at 48, 72, and 96 h and tested for signal transduction and apoptosis using appropriate assays were used. There was a progressive and significant increase in caspase-3 and TUNEL-positive mast cells compared to the untreated cultures. Additionally, a concurrent reduced expression of Ki67 and BCL-2 was observed. Furthermore, the treated cultures showed a marked reduction of Kit expression. Our results demonstrate that STI-571 induces Caspase-dependent apoptosis in a canine neoplastic mast cells possessing mutations in c-kit exon 11. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht