Rapid protocol for irinotecan desensitization: a case report and literature review

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Role of magnetic resonance imaging in managing selected women with newly diagnosed breast cancer

The purpose of this study is evaluation of therapeutic impact of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in breast cancer patients that cannot be imaged adequately with traditional radiology: dense breasts, microcalcifications suspicious for carcinoma in situ or discordance between mammography and ultrasound. A review was performed of 493 patients' records: determination of breast MRI effect on clinical management was made for the selected 70 cases by analysing pre-MRI and post-MRI therapeutic plans. Analysis of final pathology was useful to determine if the change in surgical plan prompted by MRI was appropriate. Breast MRI added clinical information in 52.9% of patients that resulted in 44.3% of management changes that were judged as appropriate in 83.9% of cases. Breast MRI provides additional useful information, but causes more extensive surgery (40%) with no proven prognostic benefit. MRI should be considered optional in the clinical staging of breast cancer and performed in selected cases

Expressive Stream Reasoning with Laser

An increasing number of use cases require a timely extraction of non-trivial knowledge from semantically annotated data streams, especially on the Web and for the Internet of Things (IoT). Often, this extraction requires expressive reasoning, which is challenging to compute on large streams. We propose Laser, a new reasoner that supports a pragmatic, non-trivial fragment of the logic LARS which extends Answer Set Programming (ASP) for streams. At its core, Laser implements a novel evaluation procedure which annotates formulae to avoid the re-computation of duplicates at multiple time points. This procedure, combined with a judicious implementation of the LARS operators, is responsible for significantly better runtimes than the ones of other state-of-the-art systems like C-SPARQL and CQELS, or an implementation of LARS which runs on the ASP solver Clingo. This enables the application of expressive logic-based reasoning to large streams and opens the door to a wider range of stream reasoning use cases.Comment: 19 pages, 5 figures. Extended version of accepted paper at ISWC 201

New development: Directly elected mayors in Italy: creating a strong leader doesn’t mean creating strong leadership

More than 20 years after their introduction, directly elected mayors are key players in Italian urban governance. This article explains the main effects of this reform on local government systems and provides lessons for other countries considering directly elected mayors

Marvels and Pitfalls of the Langevin Algorithm in Noisy High-Dimensional Inference

Gradient-descent-based algorithms and their stochastic versions have widespread applications in machine learning and statistical inference. In this work, we carry out an analytic study of the performance of the algorithm most commonly considered in physics, the Langevin algorithm, in the context of noisy high-dimensional inference. We employ the Langevin algorithm to sample the posterior probability measure for the spiked mixed matrix-tensor model. The typical behavior of this algorithm is described by a system of integrodifferential equations that we call the Langevin state evolution, whose solution is compared with the one of the state evolution of approximate message passing (AMP). Our results show that, remarkably, the algorithmic threshold of the Langevin algorithm is suboptimal with respect to the one given by AMP. This phenomenon is due to the residual glassiness present in that region of parameters. We also present a simple heuristic expression of the transition line, which appears to be in agreement with the numerical results

Effect of different irrigation volumes during fruit development on quality of virgin olive oil of cv. Frantoio

An experiment was carried out in a high-density olive (Olea europaea L. cv. Frantoio) orchard to determine the effect of different irrigation regimes (full, deficit, complementary) on virgin olive oil (VOO) quality over three consecutive years. Irrigation had negligible effects on free acidity, peroxide value, and fatty acid composition of VOO, but strongly influenced its phenolic concentration. Trees with high water status yielded oils with lower concentrations of total phenols and O-diphenols with respect to oils from severely stressed trees. The concentrations of secoiridoids, like the dialdehydic form of decarboxymethyl elenolic acid linked to (3,4-dihydroxyphenyl)ethanol (3,4-DHPEA-EDA), the isomer of the oleuropein aglycon (3,4-DHPEA-EA) and the dialdehydic form of decarboxymethyl elenolic acid linked to (p-hydroxyphenyl) ethanol (p-HPEA-EDA), were lower in fully-irrigated trees than in trees under deficit irrigation or those that received complementary irrigation only. The concentrations of lignans (+)-1-acetoxipinoresinol and (+)-1-pinoresinol were unaffected by the irrigation regime. Volatile compounds, evaluated on the VOO head space, seemed to be more consistently influenced by the year rather than soil water availability

Overview of the design of the ITER heating neutral beam injectors

The heating neutral beam injectors (HNBs) of ITER are designed to deliver 16.7MWof 1 MeVD0 or 0.87 MeVH0 to the ITER plasma for up to 3600 s. They will be the most powerful neutral beam\uf0a0(NB) injectors ever, delivering higher energy NBs to the plasma in a tokamak for longer than any previous systems have done. The design of the HNBs is based on the acceleration and neutralisation of negative ions as the efficiency of conversion of accelerated positive ions is so low at the required energy that a realistic design is not possible, whereas the neutralisation ofH 12 andD 12 remains acceptable ( 4856%). The design of a long pulse negative ion based injector is inherently more complicated than that of short pulse positive ion based injectors because: \u2022 negative ions are harder to create so that they can be extracted and accelerated from the ion source; \u2022 electrons can be co-extracted from the ion source along with the negative ions, and their acceleration must be minimised to maintain an acceptable overall accelerator efficiency; \u2022 negative ions are easily lost by collisions with the background gas in the accelerator; \u2022 electrons created in the extractor and accelerator can impinge on the extraction and acceleration grids, leading to high power loads on the grids; \u2022 positive ions are created in the accelerator by ionisation of the background gas by the accelerated negative ions and the positive ions are back-accelerated into the ion source creating a massive power load to the ion source; \u2022 electrons that are co-accelerated with the negative ions can exit the accelerator and deposit power on various downstream beamline components. The design of the ITER HNBs is further complicated because ITER is a nuclear installation which will generate very large fluxes of neutrons and gamma rays. Consequently all the injector components have to survive in that harsh environment. Additionally the beamline components and theNBcell, where the beams are housed, will be activated and all maintenance will have to be performed remotely. This paper describes the design of theHNBinjectors, but not the associated power supplies, cooling system, cryogenic system etc, or the high voltage bushingwhich separates the vacuum of the beamline fromthehighpressureSF6 of the high voltage (1MV) transmission line, through which the power, gas and coolingwater are supplied to the beam source. Also themagnetic field reduction system is not described

Tight junction dynamics: the role of junctional adhesion molecules (JAMs)

Junctional adhesion molecules (JAMs) are a family of adhesion molecules localized at the tight junction of polarized cells and on the cell surface of leukocytes. The last 20years of research in this field has shown that several members of the family play an important role in the regulation of cell polarity, endothelium permeability and leukocytes migration. They mediate these pleiotropic functions through a multitude of homophilic and heterophilic interactions with intrafamily and extrafamily partners. In this article, we review the current status of the JAM family and highlight their functional role in tight junction dynamics and leukocyte transmigration