STATE OF THE ART INVESTIGATION IN MEDICAL ULTRASOUND DIAGNOSTICS USING PATENT PUBLICATIONS DATABASE

Patents are now an integral part of global economy. The creation of the world trade system has also redefined the value of intellectual property protection and generated an unprecedented demand for patent protection that is no longer limited to the traditionally patent-oriented economies of Europe, Japan and the USA. Countries like China, India and Korea, and Singapore and Israel too, are just some of the new players heavily involved in patent-driven innovative competition. Patents protect technical inventions. An invention can, for example, be a product, process or apparatus. Inventions are only patentable if they are novel, industrially applicable and involve an inventive step, but even then patent protection is not granted automatically. The application must be accompanied by a full technical description of the invention, which the Office then examines for compliance with the European Patent Convention. Patents give their owners the right to prevent others from using their invention, and are thus of major economic importance. They also help to recoup research costs, allowing the inventor to reinvest in research and development. The publication requirement allows competitors to build on patented inventions and come up with even better technical solutions. In doing so, patents boost the innovation which Europe badly needs to keep up with other economies, and contribute to the further development of a knowledge society. The 56 million or so patent documents contained in the public EPO database constitute a vast trove of technical information. The field of medical device, according to European Patent Office Annual Report of 2005, is one of the technical fields with the most filings. This state of the art investigation, performed using the patent publications database, is focused on the field of diagnostic ultrasound, a field that thanks to its non ionizing nature and low cost is a very high growing area and a lot of scientific research is made. Scope of this work is to provide an useful tool that allows to check the level of the ultrasound technology and to indicate the future direction of this technique. Scope of this work is also to provide information to all the researchers and inventors who want to set out a patent procedure of an invention. As known, the patent procedure, from the filing day until the decision of granting the patent is quite expensive, this work could be used as a primary consultation tool before to present a patent application. All chapters of this work contains an introduction that explain the technical problematic of a field and in the subsequent sections the solutions are described. In the first chapter of this work the European Patent Office and the world of patents is introduced. A special attention is revolted to several articles of the EPC (European Patent Convention) and to the classification system adopted by the EPO. Some statistics about European patent application filed in 2005 are illustrated and the difference between the first to invent system adopted by EPO (and by the majority of countries) and the first to invent system (adopted by U.S.A.) will be treated at the end of this chapter. In the second chapter the basics of ultrasound are illustrated with particular attention to the physics principles that are at the base of ultrasound devices described in this state of the art investigation. The state of the art is divided in 5 chapters, from 3 to 7, each chapter is about a specific technique. In the third chapter the ultrasound contrast agents are introduced and their main diagnostic application are disclosed. The fourth chapter is about three dimensional imaging, this field is divided in 4 section: mechanical, free-hand, 2D arrays and catheters. In the fifth chapter the technique of elastography and its application is described focusing on the stimulation protocols and methods. The sixth chapter is directed to all the devices that allow to study the blood flow inside vessels and arteries and the seventh chapter treats about the ultrasound catheters and their characteristics. At the end of each chapter statistics about the trends in European patent application in the last 25 years will be illustrated. In the conclusion of this work the future developments field of ultrasound technique will be illustrated

«FERRAMONTI VERGESSEN WIR NICHT»: HISTORICAL AND AESTHETICAL PERSPECTIVES ON MUSIC IN A FASCIST INTERNMENT CAMP 1940-1945

Ferramonti di Tarsia (Cosenza) was the largest fascist internment camp in Italy in terms of both its size and number of internees. Although its existence and the historical events concerning it - i.e. its founding preceding the Italian entry into the Second World War, its liberation on September 14, 1943 and definitive closure in 1945 after a period of British administration \u2013 represent an almost forgotten chapter of Italian history \u2013 considerable cultural and musical activities took place there. Being characterized by the presence of almost exclusively foreign prisoners, mostly Jews coming from Germany or countries under Nazi occupation (especially Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia), from the Balkans (significant presence of Croats and Serbs) and from the Italian possessions in the Mediterranean Sea (Rhodes and Benghazi), Ferramonti served as an absurd and random meeting place of cultures, languages, traditions and religions in the inaccessible Calabrian hinterland. Among the prisoners, often with a very high level of education, there were several professional musicians, such as Lav Mirski, Kurt Sonnenfeld, Isak Thaler, Paul Gorin, Oscar Klein, Leon Levitch, Ladislav Sternberg, etc. The extreme cultural diversity was reflected in the musical production and several performing activities accompanied everyday life in the camp: concerts and variety programs, which took place in a barrack serving as a theatre; the establishment of a choir that accompanied both Jewish, Catholic and Greek-Orthodox rituals (a unique case not only with regard to KZ-Musik); musical and general education for children attending the Lagerschule, just to mention few striking aspects. On the basis of personal and administrative sources and documents, this work focuses on the specific relationships between a non-lieu of deportation such as Ferramonti and the musical and human experience of interned musicians; the way in which detention and coexistence within the camp of people of various backgrounds who were forced to interact was indeed a crucial factor, not only for musical production but also for the survival and the future of most of the inmates. The different forms of Lagermusik are analyzed also in comparison with literary production from internment camps and through a philosophical perspective

First time evidence of pronounced plateaus right above the Coulomb barrier in 8Li + 4He fusion

We investigate unprecedented experimental information on the fusion reaction induced by the radioactive projectile 8 Li on a 4 He gas target, at center-of-mass energies between 0.6 and 5 MeV. The main issue is the tendency of the dimensionless fusion cross section σfπƛ2 to form well visible plateaus alternated to steep rises. This finding is likely to be the most genuine consequence of the discrete nature of the intervening angular momenta observed so far in fusion reactions right above the Coulomb barrier. A partial-wave analysis, exclusively based on a pure quantal penetration fusion model and sensitive to the interaction potential, identifies a remarkably low-height barrier

Equilibrium Propagation for Memristor-Based Recurrent Neural Networks

Among the recent innovative technologies, memristor (memory-resistor) has attracted researchers attention as a fundamental computation element. It has been experimentally shown that memristive elements can emulate synaptic dynamics and are even capable of supporting spike timing dependent plasticity (STDP), an important adaptation rule that is gaining particular interest because of its simplicity and biological plausibility. The overall goal of this work is to provide a novel (theoretical) analog computing platform based on memristor devices and recurrent neural networks that exploits the memristor device physics to implement two variations of the backpropagation algorithm: recurrent backpropagation and equilibrium propagation. In the first learning technique, the use of memristor–based synaptic weights permits to propagate the error signals in the network by means of the nonlinear dynamics via an analog side network. This makes the processing non-digital and different from the current procedures. However, the necessity of a side analog network for the propagation of error derivatives makes this technique still highly biologically implausible. In order to solve this limitation, it is therefore proposed an alternative solution to the use of a side network by introducing a learning technique used for energy-based models: equilibrium propagation. Experimental results show that both approaches significantly outperform conventional architectures used for pattern reconstruction. Furthermore, due to the high suitability for VLSI implementation of the equilibrium propagation learning rule, additional results on the classification of the MNIST dataset are here reported

Topological Twistons in Crystalline Polyethylene

We introduce an alternate model to describe twistons in crystalline polyethylene. The model couples torsional and longitudinal degrees of freedom and appears as an extension of a model that describes only the torsional motion. We find exact solutions that describe stable topological twistons, in good agreement with the torsional and longitudinal interactions in polyethylene.Comment: Latex, 10 pages; some stylistic corrections, to appear in Chemical Physics Letter

A dynamic system approach to spiking second order memristor networks

Second order memristors are two terminal devices that present a conductance depending on two orders of variables, namely the geometric parameters and the internal temperature. They have shown to be able to mimic some specific features of neuron synapses, specifically Spike-Timing-Dependent-Plasticity (STDP), and consequently to be good candidates for neuromor- phic computing. In particular, memristor crossbar structures appear to be suitable for implementing locally competitive algorithms and for tackling classification problems by exploiting temporal learning techniques. On the other hand, neuromorphic studies and experiments have revealed the existence of differ- ent kinds of plasticity and have shown the effect of calcium concentration on synaptic changes. Computational studies have investigated the behavior of spiking networks in the context of supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning. In this paper, we first derive a simplified, almost analytical, model of a second-order memristor, only involving two variables, the mem- conductance, and the temperature, directly attributable to the synaptic efficacy and to the calcium concentration. Then we study in detail the response of a single memristive synapse to the most relevant plasticity models, including cycles of spike pairs, triplets, and quadruplets at different frequencies. Finally, we accurately characterize memristor spiking networks as discrete nonlinear dynamic systems, with mem-conductances as state variables and pre and postsynaptic spikes as inputs and outputs, respectively. The result shows that the model developed in this manuscript can explain and accurately reproduce a significant portion of observed synaptic behaviors, including those not captured by classical spike pair-based STDP models. Furthermore, under such an approach, the global dynamic behavior of memristor networks and the related learning mechanisms can be deeply analyzed by employing advanced nonlinear dynamic techniques

Computing with Memristor-based Nonlinear Oscillators

Among the recent disruptive technologies, volatile/nonvolatile memory-resistor (memristor) has attracted the researchers' attention as a fundamental computation element. It has been experimentally shown that memristive elements can emulate synaptic dynamics and are even capable of supporting spike timing dependent plasticity (STDP), an important adaptation rule for neuromorphic computing systems. The overall goal of this work is to provide an unconventional computing platform exploiting memristor-based nonlinear oscillators described by means of phase deviation equations. Experimental results show that the approach significantly outperforms conventional architectures used for pattern recognition tasks

Equilibrium Propagation and (Memristor-based) Oscillatory Neural Networks

Weakly Connected Oscillatory Networks (WCONs) are bio-inspired models which exhibit associative memory properties and can be exploited for information processing. It has been shown that the nonlinear dynamics of WCONs can be reduced to equations for the phase variable if oscillators admit stable limit cycles with nearly identical periods. Moreover, if connections are symmetric, the phase deviation equation admits a gradient formulation establishing a one-to-one correspondence between phase equilibria, limit cycle of the WCON and minima of the system’s potential function. The overall objective of this work is to provide a simulated WCON based on memristive connections and Van der Pol oscillators that exploits the device mem-conductance programmability to implement a novel local supervised learning algorithm for gradient models: Equilibrium Propagation (EP). Simulations of the phase dynamics of the WCON system trained with EP show that the retrieval accuracy of the proposed novel design outperforms the current state-of-the-art performance obtained with the Hebbian learning

Estratégias de marketing de relacionamento para microempresas : uma análise da Triple Crown T-shirts

Orientador : Claudimar VeigaArtigo (especialização) - Universidade Federal do Paraná, Setor de Ciências Sociais Aplicadas, Curso de Especialização MBA em Gestão EstratégicaInclui referênciasResumo : Para uma empresa de qualquer porte, ter uma vantagem competitiva dentre seus concorrentes é essencial para sobrevivência e crescimento. Neste trabalho, trato o relacionamento da marca com seus clientes como um ponto-chave para estabelecer vantagem competitiva, e trazendo especificamente para o cenário de uma microempresa de camisetas, Triple Crown T-shirts. O objetivo é apontar embasamento teórico e prático sobre como ter um bom relacionamento com os consumidores tendo em vista as restrições de uma microempresa recente, conseguindo por fim, traçar estratégias de marketing de relacionamento com real aplicabilidade

Diagonal compression testing of masonry panels with irregular texture strengthened with inorganic composites

AbstractInorganic composites for enhancing the in-plane shear capacity of masonry walls with irregular texture were investigated on twenty-one panels under diagonal compression tests. Three specimens were used as control and twelve specimens were strengthened with two Fibre Reinforced Mortars (FRM-A and FRM-B), characterized by a different content of fibres embedded in the lime-based matrix. The remaining six specimens were strengthened with Fabric Reinforced Cementitious Mortars (FRCM), consisting in a GFRP grid embedded in a fibre reinforced matrix (the same used for FRM-A). The influence of single-side and double-side strengthening configurations on the capacity of strengthened panels was also investigated, to point out the reduction in strengthening effectiveness in case of single-sided applications. The results showed that all the inorganic composites adopted for the strengthening techniques provided a substantial increase of shear capacity. The grid in FRCM strengthened panels played an important role in both strength and deformation capacity at peak. The different fibres content (lower than 50% in weight) in FRM systems slightly affected the overall performance of panels. Finally, analytical predictions of experimental results were reported and discussed and a preliminary analytical model for estimating the FRM shear contribution was proposed, obtaining a good agreement with test results