59 research outputs found
The Gaia AVU-GSR parallel solver: Preliminary studies of a LSQR-based application in perspective of exascale systems
Risorse linguistiche per la generazione automatica della lingua dei segni naturali
The paper focuses on “Technology Training”: blended teaching, sup-brought by technological tools. Punto strength of the reviews on the subject are the descriptions of the projects and research products, which highlight the cognitive and language teaching technology tools poten-tial used the Center of Didactics of Languages of the “Ca’Foscari” University of Venice. The starting point are the glottotechnologies of a corpus, intended as a tool for analysis, translation and text formulation of the language, both for the use of the common language for a certain type of Fachsprache.The description of the various methods for acquiring or extending skills for the drafting of specialist texts and for developing large linguistic resources such as NLG software is provided.Attention will then be given to “neutral” language applications and resources (dictionaries, morphology, sentence structure and transformation grammars), which can be used both to analyze and automatically generate INLG 2017, texts as Acro-Word (2014), that is a multifunctional software,that substitute the paper sheet and that is supported by man produces different types of text in paraphrases and free.Il paper si sofferma sulla tematica della “Technology Training”: blended teaching supportati da Technological tools1. Punto di forza delle disamine saranno le descrizioni dei progetti e prodotti di ricerca, che evidenziano le potenzialità cognitive e glottodidattiche degli strumenti tecnologici utilizzati dal Centro di Didattica delle Lingue dell’Università “Ca’ Foscari” di Venezia. Il punto dipartenza sono le glottotecnologie di un corpus, intese come strumento di analisi, di traduzione e di formulazione testo della lingua, sia per l’uso della lingua comune che per un determinato tipo di Fachsprache. Si giunge alla descrizione delle diverse modalità per acquisire o ampliare le competenze per la stesura di testi specialisti e a sviluppare risorse linguistiche di grande coperturaquali software NLG reali. Si pone, poi, attenzione alle applicazioni e alle risorse linguistiche “neutrali” (dizionari, morfologia, struttura delle frasi e grammatiche di trasformazione), che possono essere utilizzate sia per analizzare e generare automaticamente i testi INLG 2017, quale l’Acro- Word (2014), un software plurifunzionale, che sostituisce il foglio cartaceo e che, supportato dall’uomo,produce diverse tipologie testuali in parafrasi e a testo libero
The Impact of Physical Activity and Inactivity on Cardiovascular Risk across Women's Lifespan: An Updated Review
Physical inactivity (PI) represents a significant, modifiable risk factor that is more frequent and severe in the female population worldwide for all age groups. The physical activity (PA) gender gap begins early in life and leads to considerable short-term and long-term adverse effects on health outcomes, especially cardiovascular (CV) health. Our review aims to highlight the prevalence and mechanisms of PI across women's lifespan, describing the beneficial effects of PA in many physiological and pathological clinical scenarios and underlining the need for more awareness and global commitment to promote strategies to bridge the PA gender gap and limit PI in current and future female generations
The effect of pharmacological treatment on ADMA in patients with heart failure.
Asymmetric dimethylarginine (ADMA) plays a crucial role in the arginine-nitric oxide (NO) pathway. NO plays an important role in controlling vascular tone and regulates the contractile properties of cardiac myocytes. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of pharmacological treatment on asymmetrical dimethylarginine (ADMA) plasma levels in patients with acute congestive heart failure (HF). Patients with symptomatic acute congestive HF (NYHA Class III-IV) and impaired left ventricular (LV) function (ejection fraction less than 40 percent) were included in the study. ADMA and SDMA concentrations were assessed before and after pharmacological treatment in 18 critically ill patients on the intensive care unit by high performance liquid chromatography. All patients received a complete pharmacological treatment (diuretics, digoxin, ACE-inhibitors or angiotensin receptor blockers, and nitroglicerin) for the treatment of acute congestive HF. ADMA plasma levels of critically ill patients were significantly higher after pharmacological treatment respect baseline values (pre-treatment). In critically ill patients with acute congestive HF acute renal impairment function and the modulation of NOS determine plasma ADMA/SDMA levels after therapy
The MPI + CUDA Gaia AVU-GSR Parallel Solver Toward Next-generation Exascale Infrastructures
We ported to the GPU with CUDA the Astrometric Verification Unit-Global
Sphere Reconstruction (AVU-GSR) Parallel Solver developed for the ESA Gaia
mission, by optimizing a previous OpenACC porting of this application. The code
aims to find, with a [10,100]as precision, the astrometric parameters of
stars, the attitude and instrumental settings of the Gaia
satellite, and the global parameter of the parametrized Post-Newtonian
formalism, by solving a system of linear equations, , with the
LSQR iterative algorithm. The coefficient matrix of the final Gaia dataset
is large, with elements, and sparse, reaching a
size of 10-100 TB, typical for the Big Data analysis, which requires an
efficient parallelization to obtain scientific results in reasonable
timescales. The speedup of the CUDA code over the original AVU-GSR solver,
parallelized on the CPU with MPI+OpenMP, increases with the system size and the
number of resources, reaching a maximum of 14x, >9x over the OpenACC
application. This result is obtained by comparing the two codes on the CINECA
cluster Marconi100, with 4 V100 GPUs per node. After verifying the agreement
between the solutions of a set of systems with different sizes computed with
the CUDA and the OpenMP codes and that the solutions showed the required
precision, the CUDA code was put in production on Marconi100, essential for an
optimal AVU-GSR pipeline and the successive Gaia Data Releases. This analysis
represents a first step to understand the (pre-)Exascale behavior of a class of
applications that follow the same structure of this code. In the next months,
we plan to run this code on the pre-Exascale platform Leonardo of CINECA, with
4 next-generation A200 GPUs per node, toward a porting on this infrastructure,
where we expect to obtain even higher performances.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures, 1 table, published on 1st August 2023 in
Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 135, 07450
Depression pandemic and cardiovascular risk in the COVID-19 era and long COVID syndrome: gender makes a difference
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic highlighted a significant interplay between cardiovascular disease (CVD), COVID-19 related inflammatory status, and depression. Cardiovascular (CV) injury is responsible for a substantial percentage of COVID-19 deaths while COVID-19 social restrictions emerged as a non-negligible risk factor for CVD as well as a variety of mental health issues, and in particular, depression. Inflammation seems to be a shared condition between these two disorders. Gender represents a potential modifying factor both in CVD and depression, as well as in COVID-19 short- and long-term outcomes, particularly in cases involving long-term COVID complications. Results from emerging studies indicate that COVID-19 pandemic affected male and female populations in different ways. Women seem to experience less severe short-term complications but suffer worse long-term COVID complications, including depression, reduced physical activity, and deteriorating lifestyle habits, all of which may impact CV risk. Here, we summarize the current state of knowledge about the interplay between COVID-19, depression, and CV risk in women
Depression and cardiovascular disease: The deep blue sea of women's heart
Abstract Cardiovascular disease (CVD) constitutes a leading worldwide health problem, with increasing evidence of differences between women and men both in epidemiology, pathophysiology, clinical management, and outcomes. Data from the literature suggest that women experience a doubled incidence of CVD related deaths, while angina, heart failure and stroke are increasingly prevalent in females. About 20–25% of women go through depression during their life, and depressive symptoms have been considered a relevant emergent, non-traditional risk factor for CVD in this part of the general population. Underlying mechanisms explaining the link between depression and CVD may range from behavioral to biological risk factors, including sympathetic nervous system hyperactivity and impairment in hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal function. However, the neuroendocrine-driven background could only partially explain the differences mentioned above for chronic systemic inflammation, altered hemostasis and modulation of cardiac autonomic control. In addition, some evidence also suggests the existence of gender-specific differences in biological responses to mental stress. Given these premises, we here summarize the current knowledge about depression and CVD relationship in women, highlighting the sex differences in physiopathology, clinical presentation and treatments
Cardiovascular prevention in women: an update by the Italian Society of Cardiology working group on 'Prevention, hypertension and peripheral disease'
: The recent pandemic has substantially changed the approach to the prevention of cardiovascular diseases in women. Women have been significantly impacted by the changes that occurred during the pandemic and the quarantine adopted to prevent the spread of the disease. Changes involved prevention both through the reduction of visits and preventive screening and through social and economic changes. It is necessary to adopt new cardiovascular prevention approaches focused on returning to healthy lifestyles, reducing stress and depression also using modern tools such as telemedicine, mobile phone applications and the web. These tools convey messages in a persuasive way especially in young and adult women. There is less impact of these new tools on older women towards whom it is important to adopt a more traditional approach. This review focuses on the new approach to cardiovascular prevention in women in light of the lifestyle changes recorded during the pandemic and which led to an increase in obesity examines the effects on the cardiovascular system induced by stress and depression and analyses the new high blood pressure guidelines and indications that are specific to women
Effect of remote ischaemic conditioning on clinical outcomes in patients with acute myocardial infarction (CONDI-2/ERIC-PPCI): a single-blind randomised controlled trial.
BACKGROUND: Remote ischaemic conditioning with transient ischaemia and reperfusion applied to the arm has been shown to reduce myocardial infarct size in patients with ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) undergoing primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PPCI). We investigated whether remote ischaemic conditioning could reduce the incidence of cardiac death and hospitalisation for heart failure at 12 months. METHODS: We did an international investigator-initiated, prospective, single-blind, randomised controlled trial (CONDI-2/ERIC-PPCI) at 33 centres across the UK, Denmark, Spain, and Serbia. Patients (age >18 years) with suspected STEMI and who were eligible for PPCI were randomly allocated (1:1, stratified by centre with a permuted block method) to receive standard treatment (including a sham simulated remote ischaemic conditioning intervention at UK sites only) or remote ischaemic conditioning treatment (intermittent ischaemia and reperfusion applied to the arm through four cycles of 5-min inflation and 5-min deflation of an automated cuff device) before PPCI. Investigators responsible for data collection and outcome assessment were masked to treatment allocation. The primary combined endpoint was cardiac death or hospitalisation for heart failure at 12 months in the intention-to-treat population. This trial is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT02342522) and is completed. FINDINGS: Between Nov 6, 2013, and March 31, 2018, 5401 patients were randomly allocated to either the control group (n=2701) or the remote ischaemic conditioning group (n=2700). After exclusion of patients upon hospital arrival or loss to follow-up, 2569 patients in the control group and 2546 in the intervention group were included in the intention-to-treat analysis. At 12 months post-PPCI, the Kaplan-Meier-estimated frequencies of cardiac death or hospitalisation for heart failure (the primary endpoint) were 220 (8·6%) patients in the control group and 239 (9·4%) in the remote ischaemic conditioning group (hazard ratio 1·10 [95% CI 0·91-1·32], p=0·32 for intervention versus control). No important unexpected adverse events or side effects of remote ischaemic conditioning were observed. INTERPRETATION: Remote ischaemic conditioning does not improve clinical outcomes (cardiac death or hospitalisation for heart failure) at 12 months in patients with STEMI undergoing PPCI. FUNDING: British Heart Foundation, University College London Hospitals/University College London Biomedical Research Centre, Danish Innovation Foundation, Novo Nordisk Foundation, TrygFonden
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