Different approaches to assess the seismic capacity of masonry bridges by non-linear static analysis

A large portion of the existing masonry arch bridges in Italy are still in service in the infrastructure system and are located in a geographical area of high seismic risk. Most of them were built more than 100 years ago taking into account only gravitational loads during the design phase without any seismic analysis. For this reason, a seismic vulnerability assessment has been appointed asmandatory regular activity from the Italian government in order to define the priority of seismic retrofit interventions. In this study, a multi-span slender masonry bridge considered as the most vulnerable typology of masonry bridges to seismic action will be assessed. Then, the results obtained from three different seismic assessment approaches will be discussed and compared. In particular, two approaches based on different FE modeling and the last one built on rigid blocks analysis are considered. Finally, a detailed 3D finite element analysis allowed representing all the collapse mechanisms (global and local) of the bridges are presented. Simplified approaches, even though cannot describe all the collapse mechanisms of the bridges due to seismic action can lead to reliable results

Economic consequences of investing in anti-HCV antiviral treatment from the Italian NHS perspective : a real-world-based analysis of PITER data

OBJECTIVE: We estimated the cost consequence of Italian National Health System (NHS) investment in direct-acting antiviral (DAA) therapy according to hepatitis C virus (HCV) treatment access policies in Italy. METHODS: A multistate, 20-year time horizon Markov model of HCV liver disease progression was developed. Fibrosis stage, age and genotype distributions were derived from the Italian Platform for the Study of Viral Hepatitis Therapies (PITER) cohort. The treatment efficacy, disease progression probabilities and direct costs in each health state were obtained from the literature. The break-even point in time (BPT) was defined as the period of time required for the cumulative costs saved to recover the Italian NHS investment in DAA treatment. Three different PITER enrolment periods, which covered the full DAA access evolution in Italy, were considered. RESULTS: The disease stages of 2657 patients who consecutively underwent DAA therapy from January 2015 to December 2017 at 30 PITER clinical centres were standardized for 1000 patients. The investment in DAAs was considered to equal €25 million, €15 million, and €9 million in 2015, 2016, and 2017, respectively. For patients treated in 2015, the BPT was not achieved, because of the disease severity of the treated patients and high DAA prices. For 2016 and 2017, the estimated BPTs were 6.6 and 6.2 years, respectively. The total cost savings after 20 years were €50.13 and €55.50 million for 1000 patients treated in 2016 and 2017, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: This study may be a useful tool for public decision makers to understand how HCV clinical and epidemiological profiles influence the economic burden of HCV

L'Italia come modello per l'Europa e per il mondo nelle politiche sanitarie per il trattamento dell'epatite cronica da HCV

The World Health Organization foresees the elimination of HCV infection by 2030. In light of this and the curre nt, nearly worldwide, restriction in direct-acting agents (DAA) accessibility due to their high price, we aimed to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of two alternative DAA treatment policies: Policy 1 (universal): treat all patients, regardless of the fibrosis stage; Policy 2 (prioritized): treat only priori tized patients and delay treatment of the remaining patients until reaching stage F3. T he model was based on patient’s data from the PITER cohort. We demonstrated that extending HC V treatment of patients in any fibrosis stage improves health outcomes and is cost-effective

The Italian Particle "ne": Corpus Construction and Analysis

The Italian particle \u201cne\u201d exhibits interesting anaphoric properties that have not been yet explored in depth from a corpus and computational linguistic perspective. We provide: (i) an overview of the phenomenon; (ii) a set of annotation schemes for marking up occurrences of \u201cne\u201d; (iii) the description of a corpus annotated for this phenomenon ; (iv) a first assessment of the resolution task. We show that the schemes we developed are reliable, and that the actual distribution of partitive and non-partitive uses of \u201cne\u201d is inversely proportional to the amount of attention that the two different uses have received in the linguistic literature. As an assessment of the complexity of the resolution task, we find that a recency-based baseline yields an accuracy of less than 30% on both development and test data