Prior Use of Antiplatelet Therapy and Outcomes after Endovascular Therapy in Acute Ischemic Stroke Due to Large Vessel Occlusion: A Single-Center Experience

Endovascular therapy (EVT) represents the gold standard treatment in patients affected by acute ischemic stroke (AIS) due to large vessel occlusion (LVO). Prior antiplatelet (APT) therapy might increase the risk of bleeding and modify the clinical outcome of AIS patients treated with EVT. Thus, we compared effectiveness and safety of EVT in Caucasian patients with and without previous use of APT agents. We recruited consecutive patients admitted to Udine University Hospital with AIS undergoing EVT from January 2015 to December 2017. The following outcomes were documented: successful recanalization, 3-month favorable outcome, symptomatic intracranial hemorrhage (sICH), parenchymal hematoma (PH), and 3-month mortality. The study population included 100 patients (mean age 70.1 \ub1 11.2 years, 58% males). At time of admission, 34 patients were taking APT agents. Patients on APT pretreatment were older, had more vascular risk factors, and showed higher levels of serum creatinine than APT na\uefve patients. Moreover, prior APT therapy was associated with a higher rate of pre-stroke disability and a more severe stroke at admission. Patients pretreated with APT had higher rates of successful recanalization (91.2% vs. 74.2%, p = 0.04). Prevalence of 3-month unfavorable outcome and 3-month mortality was significantly higher in APT-pretreated patients than in those without APT pretreatment. However, these associations were not confirmed on multivariable analyses. Prevalence of sICH and PH did not differ in the two groups. APT pretreatment is associated to successful recanalization rate, without increasing the risk of intracranial bleeding in patients with LVO undergoing EVT

The Primary patency in endovascular treatment of femoropopliteal lesions with Eluvia Paclitaxel-Eluting Stent: single-centre experience.

Restenosis of the obstructive lesions in the superficial femoral or proximal popliteal artery, treated with angioplasty or bare nitinol stenting, frequently occurs. Paclitaxel-eluting stents have been developed to protect against restenosis with the sustained antiproliferative agent release over time. The aim of this study was to report the results about the primary patency in a cohort of patients with long and complex femoropopliteal lesions treated with the Eluvia Drug-Eluting Vascular Stent. The single-center, retrospective, single-arm, study enrolled 61 patients with chronic, symptomatic or asymptomatic, lower limb ischemia and stenotic or occlusive lesions in the superficial femoral artery or proximal popliteal artery. Mean lesion length was 129,3 ± 88,6. Efficacy measures at 18 months included primary patency, defined as duplex ultrasound peak systolic velocity ratio of ≤2.4 and the absence of target lesion revascularization or bypass. The Kaplan–Meier estimate of primary patency through 18 months was on average 83% and precisely 87.5% for patients TASC II A, 91% for patients TASC II B, 83% for patients TASC II C and 73% for patients TASC II D. Six months after the initial procedure primary patency was on average 91,5% and precisely 87.5% for patients TASC II A, 91% for patients TASC II B, 89,5% for patients TASC II C and 100% for patients TASC II D. No stent fractures were identified, and no major target limb amputations occurred. This study confirmed the efficacy of he paclitaxel-eluting Eluvia stent to treat long and complex femoropopliteal lesions

VOSpace user guide

The initial idea from which we started was to provide users with a tool to be able to easily recover their data previously stored into a tape library. The project structure then evolved into something more complex and led to the development of a VOSpace implementation compliant with the IVOA VOSpace specification[1]. The current VOSpace allows users to store and retrieve data using local, hot and cold storage points: • a local storage point stores data uploaded through the VOSpace User Interface • hot and cold storage points store data uploaded asynchronously using a transfer node. Both local and hot storage points rely on the Lustre[2] parallel file system. Retrieving data from a local storage point is immediate since users just have to launch a download, so this operation is synchronous. Conversely, data stored into hot or cold storage points must be retrieved asynchronously. More precisely, the VOSpace creates symbolic links to make data available from hot storage points. In this way there is no need to perform a copy. Data stored into cold storage points (e.g. a tape library), instead, must be recalled. This report describes all the operations and the functionalities of the current INAF VOSpace implementation from the user point of view

Dynamic Hyperglycemic Patterns Predict Adverse Outcomes in Patients with Acute Ischemic Stroke Undergoing Mechanical Thrombectomy

Admission hyperglycemia impairs outcome in acute ischemic stroke (AIS) patients undergoing mechanical thrombectomy (MT). Since hyperglycemia in AIS represents a dynamic condition, we tested whether the dynamic patterns of hyperglycemia, defined as blood glucose levels > 140 mg/dl, affect outcomes in these patients

VOSpace administrator guide

In this technical report we want to describe the underlying architecture of the INAF VOSpace from the system administrator point of view

A public data archive for the Italian radio telescopes

The amount of data delivered by modern instrumentation and observing techniques is bringing radio astronomy in the era of Big Data, and the nowadays widely adopted Open Data policies allow free and open access to data from many radio astronomy facilities. A fundamental ingredient to enable Open Science in the radio astronomical community and to engage also public participation (the so called Citizen Science) is thus the availability of public archives in which data can be accessed and searched with modern software tools. A web-based, VO-compliant public archive has been built to host data from the Italian radio telescopes managed by the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF). The archive main features consist in the capability to handle the various types of data coming from the different observing instrumentation at the telescopes; the adoption of a policy to guarantee the data proprietary period; the accessibility of data through a web interface and the adoption of VO standards to allow for successful scientific exploitation of the archive itself in the data mining era. We present the progress status of the public Data Archive for the Italian radio telescopes being developed to provide the international community with a state-of-the-art archive for radio astronomical data

Radio data archiving system

Radio Astronomical Data models are becoming very complex since the huge possible range of instrumental configurations available with the modern Radio Telescopes. What in the past was the last frontiers of data formats in terms of efficiency and flexibility is now evolving with new strategies and methodologies enabling the persistence of a very complex, hierarchical and multi-purpose information. Such an evolution of data models and data formats require new data archiving techniques in order to guarantee data preservation following the directives of Open Archival Information System and the International Virtual Observatory Alliance for data sharing and publication. Currently, various formats (FITS, MBFITS, VLBI's XML description files and ancillary files) of data acquired with the Medicina and Noto Radio Telescopes can be stored and handled by a common Radio Archive, that is planned to be released to the (inter)national community by the end of 2016. This state-of-the-art archiving system for radio astronomical data aims at delegating as much as possible to the software setting how and where the descriptors (metadata) are saved, while the users perform user-friendly queries translated by the web interface into complex interrogations on the database to retrieve data. In such a way, the Archive is ready to be Virtual Observatory compliant and as much as possible user-friendly

Be social, be agile: team engagement with Redmine

System engineering and project-team management are essential tools to ensure the project success and the Redmine is a valuable platform for the work organization and for a system engineered approach. We review in this work the management needs related to our project, and suggest the possibility that they fit to many research activities with a similar scenario: small team, technical difficulties (or unknowns), intense activity sprints and long pauses due to external schedule management, a large degree of shared leadership. We will then present our implementation with the Redmine, showing that the use of the platform resulted in a strong engagement and commitment of the team. The explicit goal of this work is also to rise, at least internally, the awareness about team needs and available organizational tools and methods; and to highlight a shareable approach to team management and small scale system engineering

Thoracic duct identification with indocyanine green fluorescence during minimally invasive esophagectomy with patient in prone position

Chylothorax is a serious complication of transthoracic esophagectomy. Intraoperative thoracic duct (TD) identification represents a possible tool for preventing or repairing its lesions, and it is most of the time difficult, even during high-definition thoracoscopy. The aim of the study is to demonstrate the feasibility of using near-infrared fluorescence-guided thoracoscopy to identify TD anatomy and check its intraoperative lesions during minimally invasive esophagectomy. A 0.5 mg/kg solution of indocyanine green (ICG) was injected percutaneously in the inguinal nodes of 19 patients undergoing minimally invasive esophagectomy in a prone position, before thoracoscopy. TD anatomy and potential intraoperative lesions were checked with the KARL STORZ OPAL1\uae Technology. In all of the 19 patients where transthoracic esophagectomy was feasible, the TD was clearly identified after a mean of 52.7 minutes from injection time. The TD was cut for oncological radicality in two patients, and it was successfully ligated under the ICG guide. No postoperative chylothorax or adverse reactions from the ICG injection occurred. The TD identification with indocyanine green fluorescence during minimally invasive esophagectomy is a simple, effective, and non-time-demanding tool; it may become a standard procedure to prevent postoperative chylothorax