AIRO Breast Cancer Group Best Clinical Practice 2022 Update

Introduction: Breast cancer is the most common tumor in women and represents the leading cause of cancer death. Radiation therapy plays a key-role in the treatment of all breast cancer stages. Therefore, the adoption of evidence-based treatments is warranted, to ensure equity of access and standardization of care in clinical practice.Method: This national document on the highest evidence-based available data was developed and endorsed by the Italian Association of Radiation and Clinical Oncology (AIRO) Breast Cancer Group.We analyzed literature data regarding breast radiation therapy, using the SIGN (Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network) methodology (www.sign.ac.uk). Updated findings from the literature were examined, including the highest levels of evidence (meta-analyses, randomized trials, and international guidelines) with a significant impact on clinical practice. The document deals with the role of radiation therapy in the treatment of primary breast cancer, local relapse, and metastatic disease, with focus on diagnosis, staging, local and systemic therapies, and follow up. Information is given on indications, techniques, total doses, and fractionations.Results: An extensive literature review from 2013 to 2021 was performed. The work was organized according to a general index of different topics and most chapters included individual questions and, when possible, synoptic and summary tables. Indications for radiation therapy in breast cancer were examined and integrated with other oncological treatments. A total of 50 questions were analyzed and answered.Four large areas of interest were investigated: (1) general strategy (multidisciplinary approach, contraindications, preliminary assessments, staging and management of patients with electronic devices); (2) systemic therapy (primary, adjuvant, in metastatic setting); (3) clinical aspects (invasive, non-invasive and micro-invasive carcinoma; particular situations such as young and elderly patients, breast cancer in males and cancer during pregnancy; follow up with possible acute and late toxicities; loco-regional relapse and metastatic disease); (4) technical aspects (radiation after conservative surgery or mastectomy, indications for boost, lymph node radiotherapy and partial breast irradiation).Appendixes about tumor bed boost and breast and lymph nodes contouring were implemented, including a dedicated web application. The scientific work was reviewed and validated by an expert group of breast cancer key-opinion leaders.Conclusions: Optimal breast cancer management requires a multidisciplinary approach sharing therapeutic strategies with the other involved specialists and the patient, within a coordinated and dedicated clinical path. In recent years, the high-level quality radiation therapy has shown a significant impact on local control and survival of breast cancer patients. Therefore, it is necessary to offer and guarantee accurate treatments according to the best standards of evidence-based medicine

Using Reinforcement Learning for Load Testing of Video Games

Different from what happens for most types of software systems, testing video games has largely remained a manual activity performed by human testers. This is mostly due to the continuous and intelligent user interaction video games require. Recently, reinforcement learning (RL) has been exploited to partially automate functional testing. RL enables training smart agents that can even achieve super-human performance in playing games, thus being suitable to explore them looking for bugs. We investigate the possibility of using RL for load testing video games. Indeed, the goal of game testing is not only to identify functional bugs, but also to examine the game's performance, such as its ability to avoid lags and keep a minimum number of frames per second (FPS) when high-demanding 3D scenes are shown on screen. We define a methodology employing RL to train an agent able to play the game as a human while also trying to identify areas of the game resulting in a drop of FPS. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach on three games. Two of them are used as proof-of-concept, by injecting artificial performance bugs. The third one is an open-source 3D game that we load test using the trained agent showing its potential to identify areas of the game resulting in lower FPS.Comment: accepted for publication at ICSE 202

Collection methods of wild barn owl pellets at low environmental contamination and proposals of microbiological and ecological investigations

Abstract Background The barn owl Tyto alba is a medium-sized nocturnal raptor, predator of small mammals, birds, reptiles, and insects, distributed all over the world. Environmentally uncontaminated wild barn owl pellets are hard and rare to find and provide a natural matrix for biological investigations. Results Different solutions for collecting wild barn owl pellets at low environmental contamination are proposed. These solutions are based on a daily sanitized surface for sample retrieval, followed by rapid analysis. As an example of the possible investigations that can be carried out on these matrices, with the aim to highlight the relevance of the obtained results also from a biotechnological perspective. Two rare pellet samples from wild barn owl T. alba, appropriately collected in a rural area of central Italy, were analyzed using culture-dependent, molecular (Next-Generation Sequencing), and enzyme profile analysis techniques. The osteological observations of the bone remains provided useful information for identifying the prey, mainly rodents (Apodemus sp.). Under our experimental conditions, the results revealed both a wide heterogeneity between the pellet microbiota and a great percentage of uncultured bacteria not classified at the species level. Furthermore, microbial cultures of Malbranchea albolutea, Debaryomyces hansenii, and Lactobacillus sp. were isolated and studied. Finally, we quantified the environmental impact of our experimental work in terms of CO2 equivalent release. To compensate for the release of 300 kg/CO2 eq., three Taxus. baccata L. were planted. Conclusions This work provides a starting point for developing an effective strategy to study and characterize wild barn owl pellets at low environmental contamination. It presents a simple and easy technique/protocol for collecting the pellets. The microbiota heterogeneity found in the two analyzed samples suggests that barn owl pellets can represent a potential natural reservoir for the discovery of new microorganisms to be used in various biotechnological applications. This could open the way for further large-scale studies on a greater number of samples and populations. Graphical Abstrac

Replication Package for "A Comprehensive Evaluation of SZZ Variants Through a Developer-informed Oracle"

This is the replication package for "A Comprehensive Evaluation of SZZ Variants Through a Developer-informed Oracle" Abstract: "Automatically linking bug-fixing changes to bug-inducing ones (BICs) is one of the key data-extraction steps behind several empirical studies in software engineering. The SZZ algorithm is the de facto standard to achieve this goal, with several improvements proposed over time. Evaluating the performance of SZZ implementations is, however, far from trivial. In previous works, researchers (i) manually assessed whether the BICs identified by the SZZ implementation were correct or not, or (ii) defined oracles in which they manually determined BICs from bug-fixing commits. However, ideally, the original developers should be involved in defining a labeled dataset to evaluate SZZ implementations. We propose a methodology to define a “developer-informed” oracle for evaluating SZZ implementations, without requiring a manual inspection from the original developers. We use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to identify bug-fixing commits in which developers explicitly reference the commit(s) that introduced the fixed bug. We use the built oracle to extensively evaluate existing SZZ variants defined in the literature. We also introduce and evaluate two new variants aimed at addressing two weaknesses we observed in state-of-the-art implementations (i.e., processing added lines and handling of revert commits)" @article{rosa2023szz2,        title={A Comprehensive Evaluation of SZZ Variants Through a Developer-informed Oracle},        author={Rosa, Giovanni and Pascarella, Luca and Scalabrino, Simone and Tufano, Rosalia and Bavota, Gabriele and Lanza, Michele and Oliveto, Rocco},        journal={Journal of Systems and Software},        pages={To Appear},        year={2023},        publisher={Elsevier}  }</p

AIRO breast cancer group Best Clinical Practice 2022 update

Introduction: Breast cancer is the most common tumor in women and represents the leading cause of cancer death. Radiation therapy plays a key-role in the treatment of all breast cancer stages. Therefore, the adoption of evidence-based treatments is warranted, to ensure equity of access and standardization of care in clinical practice. Method: This national document on the highest evidence-based available data was developed and endorsed by the Italian Association of Radiation and Clinical Oncology (AIRO) Breast Cancer Group. We analyzed literature data regarding breast radiation therapy, using the SIGN (Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network) methodology (www.sign.ac.uk). Updated findings from the literature were examined, including the highest levels of evidence (meta-analyses, randomized trials, and international guidelines) with a significant impact on clinical practice. The document deals with the role of radiation therapy in the treatment of primary breast cancer, local relapse, and metastatic disease, with focus on diagnosis, staging, local and systemic therapies, and follow up. Information is given on indications, techniques, total doses, and fractionations. Results: An extensive literature review from 2013 to 2021 was performed. The work was organized according to a general index of different topics and most chapters included individual questions and, when possible, synoptic and summary tables. Indications for radiation therapy in breast cancer were examined and integrated with other oncological treatments. A total of 50 questions were analyzed and answered. Four large areas of interest were investigated: (1) general strategy (multidisciplinary approach, contraindications, preliminary assessments, staging and management of patients with electronic devices); (2) systemic therapy (primary, adjuvant, in metastatic setting); (3) clinical aspects (invasive, non-invasive and micro-invasive carcinoma; particular situations such as young and elderly patients, breast cancer in males and cancer during pregnancy; follow up with possible acute and late toxicities; loco-regional relapse and metastatic disease); (4) technical aspects (radiation after conservative surgery or mastectomy, indications for boost, lymph node radiotherapy and partial breast irradiation). Appendixes about tumor bed boost and breast and lymph nodes contouring were implemented, including a dedicated web application. The scientific work was reviewed and validated by an expert group of breast cancer keyopinionleaders. Conclusions: Optimal breast cancer management requires a multidisciplinary approach sharing therapeutic strategies with the other involved specialists and the patient, within a coordinated and dedicated clinical path. In recent years, the high-level quality radiation therapy has shown a significant impact on local control and survival of breast cancer patients. Therefore, it is necessary to offer and guarantee accurate treatments according to the best standards of evidence-based medicine