Insights from a Case of Good’s Syndrome (Immunodeficiency with Thymoma)

Immunodeficiency with thymoma was described by R.A. Good in 1954 and is also named after him. The syndrome is characterized by hypogammaglobulinemia associated with thymoma and recurrent infections, bacterial but also viral, fungal and parasitic. Autoimmune diseases, mainly pure red cell aplasia, other hematological disorders and erosive lichen planus are a common finding. We describe here a typical case exhibiting all these clinical features and report a detailed immunophenotypic assessment, as well as the positivity for autoantibodies against three cytokines (IFN-alpha, IL-6 and GM-CSF), which may add to known immune abnormalities. A review of the published literature, based on case series and immunological studies, offers some hints on the still unsolved issues of this rare condition

Pushing ML Predictions into DBMSs

In the past decade, many approaches have been suggested to execute ML workloads on a DBMS. However, most of them have looked at in-DBMS ML from a training perspective, whereas ML inference has been largely overlooked. We think that this is an important gap to fill for two main reasons: (1) in the near future, every application will be infused with some sort of ML capability; (2) behind every web page, application, and enterprise there is a DBMS, whereby in-DBMS inference is an appealing solution both for efficiency (e.g., less data movement), performance (e.g., cross-optimizations between relational operators and ML) and governance. In this paper, we study whether DBMSs are a good fit for prediction serving. We introduce a technique for translating trained ML pipelines containing both featurizers (e.g., one-hot encoding) and models (e.g., linear and tree-based models) into SQL queries, and we compare in-DBMS performance against popular ML frameworks such as Sklearn and ml.net. Our experiments show that, when pushed inside a DBMS, trained ML pipelines can have performance comparable to ML frameworks in several scenarios, while they perform quite poorly on text featurization and over (even simple) neural networks

Pretargeted adjuvant radioimmunotherapy with Yttrium-90-biotin in malignant glioma patients: A pilot study

In a previous study we applied a three-step avidin–biotin pretargeting approach to target 90Y-biotin to the tumour in patients with recurrent high grade glioma. The encouraging results obtained in this phase I–II study prompted us to apply the same approach in an adjuvant setting, to evaluate (i) time to relapse and (ii) overall survival. We enrolled 37 high grade glioma patients, 17 with grade III glioma and 20 with glioblastoma, in a controlled open non-randomized study. All patients received surgery and radiotherapy and were disease-free by neuroradiological examinations. Nineteen patients (treated) received adjuvant treatment with radioimmunotherapy. In the treated glioblastoma patients, median disease-free interval was 28 months (range=9–59); median survival was 33.5 months and one patient is still without evidence of disease. All 12 control glioblastoma patients died after a median survival from diagnosis of 8 months. In the treated grade III glioma patients median disease-free interval was 56 months (range=15–60) and survival cannot be calculated as only two, within this group, died. Three-step radioimmunotherapy promises to have an important role as adjuvant treatment in high grade gliomas, particularly in glioblastoma where it impedes progression, prolonging time to relapse and overall survival. A further randomized trial is justified

Two qubits entanglement dynamics in a symmetry-broken environment

We study the temporal evolution of entanglement pertaining to two qubits interacting with a thermal bath. In particular we consider the simplest nontrivial spin bath models where symmetry breaking occurs and treat them by mean field approximation. We analytically find decoherence free entangled states as well as entangled states with an exponential decay of the quantum correlation at finite temperature.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figure

Spin-driven spatial symmetry breaking of spinor condensates in a double-well

The properties of an F=1 spinor Bose-Einstein condensate trapped in a double-well potential are discussed using both a mean-field two-mode approach and a simplified two-site Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian. We focus in the region of phase space in which spin effects lead to a symmetry breaking of the system, favoring the spatial localization of the condensate in one well. To model this transition we derive, using perturbation theory, an effective Hamiltonian that describes N/2 spin singlets confined in a double-well potential.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figure

Production of polyhydroxybutyrate by the cyanobacterium cf. Anabaena sp

Polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB) production by the cyanobacterium cf. Anabaena sp. was here studied by varying the medium composition and the carbon source used to induce mixotrophic growth conditions. The highest PHB productivity (0.06 gPHB gbiomass−1 d−1) was observed when cultivating cf. Anabaena sp. in phosphorus-free medium and in the presence of sodium acetate (5.0 g L−1 concentration), after an incubation period of 7 days. A content of 40% of PHB on biomass, a dry weight of 0.1 g L−1, and a photosynthetic efficiency equal to the control were obtained. The cyanobacterium was then grown on a larger scale (10 L) to evaluate the characteristics of the produced PHB in relation to the main composition of the biomass (the content of proteins, polysaccharides, and lipids): after an incubation period of 7 days, a content of 6% of lipids (52% of which as unsaturated fatty acids with 18 carbon atoms), 12% of polysaccharides, 28% of proteins, and 46% of PHB was reached. The extracted PHB had a molecular weight of 3 MDa and a PDI of 1.7. These promising results demonstrated that cf. Anabaena sp. can be included among the Cyanobacteria species able to produce polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) either in photoautotrophic or mixotrophic conditions, especially when it is grown under phosphorus-free conditions

Spin effects in Bose-Glass phases

We study the mechanism of formation of Bose glass (BG) phases in the spin-1 Bose Hubbard model when diagonal disorder is introduced. To this aim, we analyze first the phase diagram in the zero-hopping limit, there disorder induces superposition between Mott insulator (MI) phases with different filling numbers. Then BG appears as a compressible but still insulating phase. The phase diagram for finite hopping is also calculated with the Gutzwiller approximation. The bosons' spin degree of freedom introduces another scattering channel in the two-body interaction modifying the stability of MI regions with respect to the action of disorder. This leads to some peculiar phenomena such as the creation of BG of singlets, for very strong spin correlation, or the disappearance of BG phase in some particular cases where fluctuations are not able to mix different MI regions

An experimental study on latency-aware and self-adaptive service chaining orchestration in distributed NFV and SDN infrastructures

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) changed radically the way 5G networks will be deployed and services will be delivered to vertical applications (i.e., through dynamic chaining of virtualized functions deployed in distributed clouds to best address latency requirements). In this work, we present a service chaining orchestration system, namely LASH-5G, running on top of an experimental set-up that reproduces a typical 5G network deployment with virtualized functions in geographically distributed edge clouds. LASH-5G is built upon a joint integration effort among different orchestration solutions and cloud deployments and aims at providing latency-aware, adaptive and reliable service chaining orchestration across clouds and network resource domains interconnected through SDN. In this paper, we provide details on how this orchestration system has been deployed and it is operated on top of the experimentation infrastructure provided within the Fed4FIRE+ facility and we present performance results assessing the effectiveness of the proposed orchestration approach