Discussing energy volatility and policy in the aftermath of the Russia–Ukraine conflict

The ongoing Russo–Ukrainian War has highly affected energy markets in the EU and worldwide, with different EU- and country-level emergency policy measures being advanced to tackle high energy prices. Despite the progress in green energy initiatives and the race toward climate neutrality by 2050, high energy prices are a matter of concern for all EU countries in the short-to-medium term. The current study investigates the energy price volatility in the aftermath of the Russia–Ukraine conflict, which is of high interest for designing effective government measures (such as monetary and energy policies) addressing the consequent changes occurring in employment, economic activity, commodity and food prices, and, ultimately, sustainable development. For the empirical analysis, we employed generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity models to capture the volatility of the following energy commodities: Brent crude oil, TTF natural gas, and UK natural gas. The empirical results reveal an elevated degree of persistence of the volatility, namely, that the generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity term has a slow decay and pronounced fluctuations for all the energy products. The vulnerability of the EU’s energy policy to geopolitical factors is highlighted, especially for gas, which could be due to its dependence on Russian imports. Moreover, the sanctions imposed by the EU on Russia, namely the sixth package of sanctions, have a minimal immediate effect on stabilizing energy returns. The study offers several policy recommendations to improve the resilience of the EU’s energy sector

Clinical Trial of Oral Nelfinavir before and during Radiation Therapy for Advanced Rectal Cancer

Purpose Nelfinavir, a PI3-kinase pathway inhibitor, is a radiosensitizer which increases tumor blood flow in preclinical models. We conducted an early-phase study to demonstrate the safety of nelfinavir combined with hypofractionated radiotherapy (RT) and to develop biomarkers of tumor perfusion and radiosensitization for this combinatorial approach. Patients and Methods Ten patients with T3-4 N0-2 M1 rectal cancer received 7 days of oral nelfinavir (1250 mg bd) and a further 7 days of nelfinavir during pelvic RT (25 Gy/5 fractions/7 days). Perfusion CT (p-CT) and DCE-MRI scans were performed pre-treatment, after 7 days of nelfinavir and prior to last fraction of RT. Biopsies taken pre-treatment and 7 days after the last fraction of RT were analysed for tumor cell density (TCD). Results There were 3 drug-related grade 3 adverse events: diarrhea, rash, lymphopenia. On DCE-MRI, there was a mean 42% increase in median Ktrans, and a corresponding median 30% increase in mean blood flow on p-CT during RT in combination with nelfinavir. Median TCD decreased from 24.3% at baseline to 9.2% in biopsies taken 7 days after RT (P=0.01). Overall, 5/9 evaluable patients exhibited good tumor regression on MRI assessed by Tumor Regression Grade (mrTRG). Conclusions This is the first study to evaluate nelfinavir in combination with RT without concurrent chemotherapy. It has shown that nelfinavir-RT is well tolerated and is associated with increased blood flow to rectal tumors. The efficacy of nelfinavir-RT versus RT alone merits clinical evaluation, including measurement of tumor blood flow

Research and Science Today Supplement No.1(3)/2012

Research and Science Today Journal is a publication founded in 2011 and it is dedicated to the students of all levels (license, master and doctoral) of faculties in the country and abroad. We want to offer the participants the opportunity to present their scientific works in the following areas: Social Sciences, Economic Sciences, Legal Sciences, Humanities, Education Sciences, Engineering, Medicine and Sport. This journal provides students the opportunity to create and / or to improve their abilities to write scientific papers. So each appearance (two appearances per year at which we can add supplements) contains a number of papers written by students, masters and doctoral from the faculties from the country or / and abroad. The journal promotes original studies contributing to the progress of knowledge and it is motivated by the need to address issues of theory and practice in the areas mentioned above. The Journal is a training means of the factors involved in the conceptualization, development, implementation and evaluation , aiming the formation of creative personalities who could be able to adapt through the changing conditions of life. Journal wants to be a forum for debates disciplinaries and interdisciplinaries theoretical topics, to become a research support, to leverage this work at regional, national and international levels. We believe that this gathering will enjoy the support from both parts of the researchers and of the practitioners, and will provide appropriate training sources held professional through the current problems

Spatio-temporal image analysis with application to cancer

Cancer is one of the main causes of premature death worldwide, leading to almost one in three deaths in the UK. Medical imaging plays a fundamental role in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer patients. This thesis focuses on the assessment of early stage clinical trials of novel cancer treatment, which is performed based on dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) and perfusion computed tomography (pCT). From a clinical viewpoint, the objectives are tumour microenvironment characterisation, which involves the assessment of tumour perfusion and vascularity, and early prediction of response to treatment. From a methodological viewpoint, this thesis is at the interface between pharmacokinetic (PK) modelling and image registration for dynamic images. Major challenges addressed in this work are PK model selection and arterial input function derivation, as well as intrasequence motion correction for dynamic imaging data. Registration of dynamic imaging data is a particularly challenging problem due to the variety of motion types that appear in these data: bulk patient motion, periodic motion due to breathing, and random motion of small features due to peristalsis. Moreover, contrast-enhanced modalities such as DCE-MRI and pCT pose additional challenges as image intensities change due to contrast inflow. The key contributions of this thesis are the derivation of patient-specific arterial input functions from pCT data, which are employed for performing PK modelling of contemporaneous DCE-MRI scans of the same patients, and the development of an MRF-based discrete optimisation framework for the nonrigid registration of dynamic sequences. While the former was applied on DCE-MRI and pCT images from an early stage trial of new treatment for colorectal cancer, the latter was employed for the motion correction of DCE-MRI images from the same trial. Additionally, this new registration framework was applied to dynamic CT images of the lung to demonstrate the advantage of temporal regularisation in an application where there is periodic motion (i.e. breathing). Experimental validation shows that the proposed registration framework improves over state-of-the-art methods based on continuous optimisation in terms of registration accuracy and computational complexity.</p

Spatio-temporal image analysis with application to cancer

Cancer is one of the main causes of premature death worldwide, leading to almost one in three deaths in the UK. Medical imaging plays a fundamental role in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer patients. This thesis focuses on the assessment of early stage clinical trials of novel cancer treatment, which is performed based on dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) and perfusion computed tomography (pCT). From a clinical viewpoint, the objectives are tumour microenvironment characterisation, which involves the assessment of tumour perfusion and vascularity, and early prediction of response to treatment. From a methodological viewpoint, this thesis is at the interface between pharmacokinetic (PK) modelling and image registration for dynamic images. Major challenges addressed in this work are PK model selection and arterial input function derivation, as well as intrasequence motion correction for dynamic imaging data. Registration of dynamic imaging data is a particularly challenging problem due to the variety of motion types that appear in these data: bulk patient motion, periodic motion due to breathing, and random motion of small features due to peristalsis. Moreover, contrast-enhanced modalities such as DCE-MRI and pCT pose additional challenges as image intensities change due to contrast inflow. The key contributions of this thesis are the derivation of patient-specific arterial input functions from pCT data, which are employed for performing PK modelling of contemporaneous DCE-MRI scans of the same patients, and the development of an MRF-based discrete optimisation framework for the nonrigid registration of dynamic sequences. While the former was applied on DCE-MRI and pCT images from an early stage trial of new treatment for colorectal cancer, the latter was employed for the motion correction of DCE-MRI images from the same trial. Additionally, this new registration framework was applied to dynamic CT images of the lung to demonstrate the advantage of temporal regularisation in an application where there is periodic motion (i.e. breathing). Experimental validation shows that the proposed registration framework improves over state-of-the-art methods based on continuous optimisation in terms of registration accuracy and computational complexity.</p

Graph-based statistical shape, appearance and deformation modeling for simultaneous segmentation and registration

Enescu M., Maes F., Suetens P., ''Graph-based statistical shape, appearance and deformation modeling for simultaneous segmentation and registration'', Internal report KUL/ESAT/PSI/1001, K.U.Leuven, ESAT, September 2010, Leuven, Belgium.status: publishe

Biocompatibility Analysis of GelMa Hydrogel and Silastic RTV 9161 Elastomer for Encapsulation of Electronic Devices for Subdermal Implantable Devices

The natural differences between human-made electronics and biological tissues constitute a huge challenge in materials and the manufacturing of next-generation bioelectronics. As such, we performed a series of consecutive experiments for testing the biofunctionality and biocompatibility for device implantation, by changing the exterior chemical and physical properties of electronics coating it with silicone or hydrogels. In this article, we present a comparison of the main characteristics of an electronic device coated with either silicone or hydrogel (GelMa). The coating was performed with a bioprinter for accurate silicone and hydrogel deposition around different electronic chips (Step-Down Voltage Regulator U3V15F5 from Pololu Corporation). The results demonstrate that the hydrogel coating presents an augmented biomechanical and biochemical interface and superior biocompatibility, lowers foreign body response, and considerably extends the capabilities for bioelectronic applications

Fundamentals and Applications of Chitosan

International audienceChitosan is a biopolymer obtained from chitin, one of the most abundant and renewable material on Earth. Chitin is a primary component of cell walls in fungi, the exoskeletons of arthropods, such as crustaceans, e.g. crabs, lobsters and shrimps, and insects, the radulae of molluscs, cephalopod beaks, and the scales of fish and lissamphibians. The discovery of chitin in 1811 is attributed to Henri Braconnot while the history of chitosan dates back to 1859 with the work of Charles Rouget. The name of chitosan was, however, introduced in 1894 by Felix Hoppe-Seyler. Because of its particular macromolecular structure, biocompatibility, biode-gradability and other intrinsic functional properties, chitosan has attracted major scientific and industrial interests from the late 1970s. Chitosan and its derivatives have practical applications in food industry, agriculture, pharmacy, medicine, cos-metology, textile and paper industries, and chemistry. In the last two decades, chito-san has also received much attention in numerous other fields such as dentistry, ophthalmology, biomedicine and bio-imaging, hygiene and personal care, veterinary medicine, packaging industry, agrochemistry, aquaculture, functional textiles and cosmetotextiles, catalysis, chromatography, beverage industry, photography, wastewater treatment and sludge dewatering, and biotechnology. Nutraceuticals and cosmeceuticals are actually growing markets, and therapeutic and biomedical products should be the next markets in the development of chitosan. Chitosan is also the N. Morin-Crini (*) · Laboratoire Chrono-environnement, UMR 6249, UFR Sciences et Techniques