Unexpected delayed death after manual strangulation: need for careful examination in the emergency room

The aim of this case report was to demonstrate the importance of detailed clinical assessment in victims of attempted manual strangulation, to prevent the occurrence of delayed death due to an airway collapse; and to provide an update on clinical management of these patients. An elderly male patient presented with a sore throat and speech impairment after attempting manual strangulation. Physical examination showed reddish skin of the neck, an extensive haematoma of the hard palate and anterior tongue. Flexible laryngoscopy failed to show any swelling of the hypopharynx or larynx. A few hours after presentation, the patient developed acute dyspnoea and died. Autopsy and post-mortem CT scan showed a haematoma in the thyro-epiglottal space. In conclusion, victims of manual strangulation can survive despite internal neck injury which can lead to delayed fatal airway collapse. This is because often there are few or no signs of assault, therefore medical evaluation should be thorough and timely. Sometimes immediate tracheotomy can be life saving

LYMPHANGIOMA OF THE TONGUE: CASE REPORT

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JUVENILE DIFFUSE LARYNGEAL PAPILLOMATOSIS: CASE REPORT

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Editorial for special issue “fine art pattern extraction and recognition”

: Cultural heritage, especially the fine arts, plays an invaluable role in the cultural, historical, and economic growth of our societies [...]

Density-based clustering with fully-convolutional networks for crowd flow detection from drones

Crowd analysis from drones has attracted increasing attention in recent times due to the ease of use and affordable cost of these devices. However, how this technology can provide a solution to crowd flow detection is still an unexplored research question. To this end, we propose a crowd flow detection method for video sequences shot by a drone. The method is based on a fully-convolutional network that learns to perform crowd clustering in order to detect the centroids of crowd-dense areas and track their movement in consecutive frames. The proposed method proved effective and efficient when tested on the Crowd Counting datasets of the VisDrone challenge, characterized by video sequences rather than still images. The encouraging results show that the proposed method could open up new ways of analyzing high-level crowd behavior from drones

Recognizing the Emotions Evoked by Artworks Through Visual Features and Knowledge Graph-Embeddings

Recognizing the emotion an image evokes in the observer has long attracted the interest of the community for its many potential applications. However, it is a challenging task mainly due to the inherent complexity and subjectivity of human feelings. Such a difficulty is exacerbated in the domain of visual arts, mainly because of their abstract nature. In this work, we propose a new version of the artistic knowledge graph we were working on, namely ArtGraph, obtained by integrating the emotion labels provided by the ArtEmis dataset. The proposed graph enables emotion-based information retrieval and knowledge discovery even without training a learning model. In addition, we propose an artwork emotion classification system that jointly exploits visual features and knowledge graph-embeddings. Experimental evaluation revealed that while improvements in emotion classification depend mainly on the use of visual features, the prediction of style, genre and emotion can benefit from the simultaneous exploitation of visual and contextual features and can assist each other in a synergistic way

PLENARY: Explaining black-box models in natural language through fuzzy linguistic summaries

We introduce an approach called PLENARY (exPlaining bLack-box modEls in Natural lAnguage thRough fuzzY linguistic summaries), which is an explainable classifier based on a data-driven predictive model. Neural learning is exploited to derive a predictive model based on two levels of labels associated with the data. Then, model explanations are derived through the popular SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) tool and conveyed in a linguistic form via fuzzy linguistic summaries. The linguistic summarization allows translating the explanations of the model outputs provided by SHAP into statements expressed in natural language. PLENARY accounts for the imprecision related to model outputs by summarizing them into simple linguistic statements and for the imprecision related to the data labeling process by including additional domain knowledge in the form of middle-layer labels. PLENARY is validated on preprocessed speech signals collected from smartphones from patients with bipolar disorder and on publicly available mental health survey data. The experiments confirm that fuzzy linguistic summarization is an effective technique to support meta-analyses of the outputs of AI models. Also, PLENARY improves explainability by aggregating low-level attributes into high-level information granules, and by incorporating vague domain knowledge into a multi-task sequential and compositional multilayer perceptron. SHAP explanations translated into fuzzy linguistic summaries significantly improve understanding of the predictive modelling process and its outputs

Unexpected delayed death after manual strangulation: need for careful examination in the emergency room.

The aim of this case report was to demonstrate the importance of detailed clinical assessment in victims of attempted manual strangulation, to prevent the occurrence of delayed death due to an airway collapse; and to provide an update on clinical management of these patients. An elderly male patient presented with a sore throat and speech impairment after attempting manual strangulation. Physical examination showed reddish skin of the neck, an extensive haematoma of the hard palate and anterior tongue. Flexible laryngoscopy failed to show any swelling of the hypopharynx or larynx. A few hours after presentation, the patient developed acute dyspnoea and died. Autopsy and post-mortem CT scan showed a haematoma in the thyro-epiglottal space. In conclusion, victims of manual strangulation can survive despite internal neck injury which can lead to delayed fatal airway collapse. This is because often there are few or no signs of assault, therefore medical evaluation should be thorough and timely. Sometimes immediate tracheotomy can be life saving

Juvenile Diffuse Laryngeal papillomatosis: case report

Introduction. Juvenile laryngeal papillomatosis is a rare benign neoplasm of the larynx in children; incidence is estimated about 4.3/100.000 children and extralaryngeal spread to the lower airway is relatively uncommon. Although it has a clear viral origin factors that characterize the onset and progress are still uncertain. Materials and methods. We report a 7 year old boy with chronic dysphonia, dyspnoea, haemoptysis and anemia who was admitted in our Clinic. The patient was submitted to left cord vocal biopsy for hoarseness. At 2 years it was diagnosed squamous papilloma and it was managed with microdebrider in another country . A laryngo-tracheo-bronchoscopy was performed with biopsies for viral identification and histology, treatment with laser CO2, tracheotomy for diffuse papillomatosis and intralaryngeal antiviral injection. The papillomatosis was extended in glottic and subglottic. Histological report is laryngeal papillomatosis due to HPV types 11. Identification of HPV genotypes was based on PCR. Results. He had 3 procedures of laser CO2 and the mean time between two consecutive surgeries was 20 days. A third laryngoscopy, after 5 week, found no lesion, no scar formation, no bleeding. The patient was discharged after 3 mounth. Conclusion. The natural history of laryngeal papillomatosis is highly variable and unpredictable. The disease may undergo spontaneous remission, persist in a stable state requiring only periodic surgical treatment, or may be aggressive, requiring surgical treatment every few days to weeks and consideration of adjuvant medical therapy