Bacterial Vaginosis and Sexually Transmitted Diseases: Relationship and Management

In the last few decades, bacterial vaginosis (BV) has become an emerging pathology; its relationship with pregnancy, pelvic inflammatory disease (PID), infertility, preterm delivery, and neonatal small for gestational age are well established. BV substantially changes vaginal microbiome and these modifications could facilitate sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Several studies have reported an association between abnormal vaginal microbiota, in particular, BV and depletion of lactobacilli species, and increased risk of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) acquisition. Immunologic, enzymatic, and metabolic mechanisms could operate independently or in combination to enhance STIs’ transmission. Several studies have pointed out this association: vaginal microbiome modifications in BV could predispose to sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Considering the high social impact of BV together with its relationship with STDs, it seems to be “crucial” to restore vaginal microbiome in childbearing age women in order to reduce STIs acquisition. Some experimental clinical data seem to confirm this observation: vaginal microbiome restoration by probiotics/synbiotics seems to improve not only STIs’ acquisition but also STDs’ pathology progression. Restoring vaginal microbiome could represent an international, innovative, and less-expensive gold standard to counteract STDs’ spread and acquisition

Computational Studies of Materials for Energy Technology: CO2 Methanation, and Halloysite Carbon-Coating

The models and theories of quantum chemistry are applied in order to study two kinds of materials of interest in the field of energy technology, to understand their behavior and to verify their suitability for possible application. In particular, the effect of single Ru/Fe atom deposition on the CO2 methanation reaction occurring on the Ni(111) surface, and the effect on the band gap produced by carbon atom deposition and carbon cluster accretion on the silicic surface of halloysite, have been investigated by means of the periodic and molecular flavours of density functional theory. In order to accomplish the investigations above two entirely new computer codes were written and are actually maintained: Emphates, implementing a general interface for transition states identification through climbing-image nudged elastic band calculations, and Pathgen, which by using graph theory finds all possible paths between reactant and product for microkinetic analysys

A Data-Driven Approach for Tag Refinement and Localization in Web Videos

Tagging of visual content is becoming more and more widespread as web-based services and social networks have popularized tagging functionalities among their users. These user-generated tags are used to ease browsing and exploration of media collections, e.g. using tag clouds, or to retrieve multimedia content. However, not all media are equally tagged by users. Using the current systems is easy to tag a single photo, and even tagging a part of a photo, like a face, has become common in sites like Flickr and Facebook. On the other hand, tagging a video sequence is more complicated and time consuming, so that users just tag the overall content of a video. In this paper we present a method for automatic video annotation that increases the number of tags originally provided by users, and localizes them temporally, associating tags to keyframes. Our approach exploits collective knowledge embedded in user-generated tags and web sources, and visual similarity of keyframes and images uploaded to social sites like YouTube and Flickr, as well as web sources like Google and Bing. Given a keyframe, our method is able to select on the fly from these visual sources the training exemplars that should be the most relevant for this test sample, and proceeds to transfer labels across similar images. Compared to existing video tagging approaches that require training classifiers for each tag, our system has few parameters, is easy to implement and can deal with an open vocabulary scenario. We demonstrate the approach on tag refinement and localization on DUT-WEBV, a large dataset of web videos, and show state-of-the-art results.Comment: Preprint submitted to Computer Vision and Image Understanding (CVIU

Socializing the Semantic Gap: A Comparative Survey on Image Tag Assignment, Refinement and Retrieval

Where previous reviews on content-based image retrieval emphasize on what can be seen in an image to bridge the semantic gap, this survey considers what people tag about an image. A comprehensive treatise of three closely linked problems, i.e., image tag assignment, refinement, and tag-based image retrieval is presented. While existing works vary in terms of their targeted tasks and methodology, they rely on the key functionality of tag relevance, i.e. estimating the relevance of a specific tag with respect to the visual content of a given image and its social context. By analyzing what information a specific method exploits to construct its tag relevance function and how such information is exploited, this paper introduces a taxonomy to structure the growing literature, understand the ingredients of the main works, clarify their connections and difference, and recognize their merits and limitations. For a head-to-head comparison between the state-of-the-art, a new experimental protocol is presented, with training sets containing 10k, 100k and 1m images and an evaluation on three test sets, contributed by various research groups. Eleven representative works are implemented and evaluated. Putting all this together, the survey aims to provide an overview of the past and foster progress for the near future.Comment: to appear in ACM Computing Survey

Robotic and clinical evaluation of upper limb motor performance in patients with Friedreich's Ataxia: an observational study

Background: Friedreich’s ataxia (FRDA) is the most common hereditary autosomal recessive form of ataxia. In this disease there is early manifestation of gait ataxia, and dysmetria of the arms and legs which causes impairment in daily activities that require fine manual dexterity. To date there is no cure for this disease. Some novel therapeutic approaches are ongoing in different steps of clinical trial. Development of sensitive outcome measures is crucial to prove therapeutic effectiveness. The aim of the study was to assess the reliability and sensitivity of quantitative and objective assessment of upper limb performance computed by means of the robotic device and to evaluate the correlation with clinical and functional markers of the disease severity. Methods: Here we assess upper limb performances by means of the InMotion Arm Robot, a robot designed for clinical neurological applications, in a cohort of 14 children and young adults affected by FRDA, matched for age and gender with 18 healthy subjects. We focused on the analysis of kinematics, accuracy, smoothness, and submovements of the upper limb while reaching movements were performed. The robotic evaluation of upper limb performance consisted of planar reaching movements performed with the robotic system. The motors of the robot were turned off, so that the device worked as a measurement tool. The status of the disease was scored using the Scale for the Assessment and Rating of Ataxia (SARA). Relationships between robotic indices and a range of clinical and disease characteristics were examined. Results: All our robotic indices were significantly different between the two cohorts except for two, and were highly and reliably discriminative between healthy and subjects with FRDA. In particular, subjects with FRDA exhibited slower movements as well as loss of accuracy and smoothness, which are typical of the disease. Duration of Movement, Normalized Jerk, and Number of Submovements were the best discriminative indices, as they were directly and easily measurable and correlated with the status of the disease, as measured by SARA. Conclusions: Our results suggest that outcome measures obtained by means of robotic devices can improve the sensitivity of clinical evaluations of patients’ dexterity and can accurately and efficiently quantify changes over time in clinical trials, particularly when functional scales appear to be no longer sensitive