Integrating cerebrospinal fluid and [18F]-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography to diagnose Alzheimer's disease and research its pathophysiological substrates

Revealing the complex interactions and assessing potential integration between biomarkers is essential, especially in the early stages of AD, when biomarker alterations may serve to stage patients throughout the disease spectrum, improve phenotyping, and indicate the likelihood of progression to dementia. In this research, the integration of [18F]-FDG-PET and CSF biomarkers, two of the most used biomarkers in centers focused on neurocognitive disorders, enabled us to collect evidence on their analytical and diagnostic performance when used in a step-wise fashion. As part of the ongoing endeavor to create a common diagnostic chart for the precise and cost-effective use of biomarkers in neurocognitive diseases with neurodegenerative origin, these data gain further significance. Additionally, by combining semiquantitative [18F]-FDG-PET and CSF data, we were able to identify precise topographic correlations between metabolic values and CSF proteins that indicated distinct underlying disease processes. These findings add to the knowledge regarding the distribution of hypometabolism linked to neuronal loss, which is distinct from metabolic changes reflecting synaptic or axonal injury, and provide an indirect insight of the pathological processes taking place at various times in different parts of the brain. These results will be expanded into bigger cohorts in future research, which will also integrate additional newly discovered synaptopathy-expressing proteins for diagnostic and prognostic purposes

Spline-shaped ultra-wideband antenna operating in the ECC released frequency spectrum

A spline-shaped antenna for Ultra-Wideband (UWB) communications that operates in the Electronic Communications Committee (ECC) released band from 6 GHz up to 8.5 GHz is described. Selected simulated and measured data are reported to assess the achieved impedance matching over the whole band of interest, and the distortionless behavior as well as to show the omnidirectional radiation properties. This paper is a postprint of a paper submitted to and accepted for publication in Electronics Letters and is subject to Institution of Engineering and Technology Copyright. The copy of record is available at IET Digital Library

A SVM-Based Multi-Resolution Procedure for the Estimation of the DOAS of Interfering Signals in a Communication System

In this work, the use of a planar antenna system for the estimation of the directions of arrivals (DOAs) of multiple signals impinging on the receiver has been considered. Towards this end, an efficient multi-resolution method based on a SVM-classifier is proposed for determining a probabilitic map of the DOAs of the unknown interfering signals. Numerical results dealing with multiple interferers scenarios in noisy environments are provided in order to assess the feasibility as well as the capability of the proposed approach

Tracking performances of the ATLAS detector for the HL-LHC and impact on the H--> ZZ*-->4 mu channel

This thesis is focused on the assessment of the performances of the tracking system (ITk) which will replace the current tracker of the ATLAS experiment during the high-luminosity upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), scheduled for 2026. LHC has been working at a center-of-mass energy of 7 - 8 TeV during Run-1 and at 13 TeV during Run-2, which started last year. It is scheduled to be upgraded in two different stages: the first one will begin after the end of Run-2 After the Long Shutdown 2, scheduled for 2019-2020, LHC will work at an energy of 14 TeV, reaching its maximum design value; the second one will start at the end of Run 3 during the Long Shutdown 3 in 2024-2026. The latter stage will lead to what is dubbed as High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) during which the instantaneous luminosity will reach the maximum value of 7.5×1034 cm^−2s^−1, corresponding to approximately 3000 fb−1 over ten years of data taking. The increase of the instantaneous luminosity will cause the average number of proton- proton interactions per bunch crossing (“pile-up” events) to reach the value 〈μ〉 = 200, which is about 10 times the current one (〈μ〉 = 23). By the end of Run-3, ATLAS detector will be using 15-20 years old components. In particular, the pixel and strip sensors of the current Inner Detector will have reached the end of their lifetime, while the Transition Radiation Tracker will not be able to withstand the harsh conditions imposed by HL-LHC. Thus, the Inner Detector must be completely replaced by the Inner Tracker (ITk), which will have to guarantee the same or an improved performance during that phase. Due to the large number of pile-up events, the time required by the Monte Carlo simulations is extremely high, making it difficult to produce samples with large statistics. In this thesis, a fast simulation method that significantly decreases the time required by the simulation while allowing to simulate the effect of the high number of pile-up events on the tracking and physics performances was developed. The idea is to limit the simulation to specific regions of interest, excluding a considerable part of the generated event. While the idea was inspired from previous works, we extended the use of this technique to samples containing physics processes. At the moment, the ATLAS Collaboration is working on the design of a robust ITk layout (with extended angular coverage with respect to the current Inner Detector) which will be able to perform adequately in the high-luminosity conditions. A fast simulation method is particu- larly useful as we want to quickly compare, in a realistic scenario, different detector designs and layouts. In this thesis, the performances of three ITk layouts are compared both from the point of view of the track reconstruction capabilities, which have been explored by considering single particle samples with either charged pions or muons, and from the point of view of the physics performances, in the H → ZZ* → 4μ channel. In fact, as Higgs physics is of the utmost importance, it is useful to check our capability to perform well in the high pile-up environment. Results obtained in this thesis showed that the layouts proposed are robust, as no significant dependence of the performance on the pile-up scenario (up to 〈μ〉 = 200) was observed. Also, the three layouts respect the requirements fixed by the Collaboration on the expected track parameters resolution in the central region. Our work shows also that, while no clear choice among the different layouts can be drawn at this stage, the extension of the angular coverage up to |η| = 4.0 will provide the Higgs studies with better statistics. A signal-to-background ratio of at least 7 can be obtained in the H → Z Z ∗ → 4μ channel alone, with an estimated experimental ∆μ/μ of about 2.5% (before inclusion of luminosity uncertainty) for the various layouts, which is very close to the requirement of the Collaboration

A SVM-Based Three-Dimensional Multi-Resolution Approach for Biomedical Inverse Scattering Problems

In the last few years, microwave imaging techniques have been successfully used to provide the spatial distribution of tissues. In particular, because of the significant contrast of the dielectric properties between the normal tissue and the malignant tissue at microwave frequencies, microwave methods seem to be very promising diagnosis methods for the early cancer detection [1]

Towards Real-World Indoor Smart Electromagnetic Environments -- A Large-Scale Experimental Demonstration

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this work presents the first large-scale indoor experimental assessment of an implementation of the emerging Smart ElectroMagnetic Environment (SEME) paradigm, which is based on the deployment of static-passive EM skins (SP-EMSs) to enhance the coverage in a 5 [GHz] Wi-Fi network. Unlike standard (laboratory-based) validations reported in the state-of-the-art (SoA) literature, the scenario at hand mimics a realistic indoor environment to replicate as close as possible the user experience when using commodity devices. Representative results from the experimental field trials are re-ported to confirm the performance predictions arising from the numerical studies and the tolerance analyses carried out with a commercial ray-tracing (RT) tool. Besides experimentally validating the SEME idea, this study is also aimed at (roughly) quantifying the economic advantage of a SEME implementation, relying on simple-manufacturing/low-cost field manipulating devices without any additional biasing circuitry, with respect to standard approaches that imply the densification of the active radiating sources

Trastornos de la conducta alimentaria en niños y adolescentes.

Los TCA son una realidad clínica. La epidemiología de los TCA plantea una pregunta: esta «epidemia» ¿es más aparente que real? Los datos sugieren que no existe evidencia de un incremento de las tasas de incidencia de la anorexia nerviosa. La Prevención Primaria de los Trastornos Mentales en la infancia y en la adolescencia representa una intervención de gran importancia, pero la prevención primaria de los TCA¿puede ser más perjudicial que beneficiosa

Trastornos de la conducta alimentaria en niños y adolescentes.

Los TCA son una realidad clínica. La epidemiología de los TCA plantea una pregunta: esta «epidemia» ¿es más aparente que real? Los datos sugieren que no existe evidencia de un incremento de las tasas de incidencia de la anorexia nerviosa. La Prevención Primaria de los Trastornos Mentales en la infancia y en la adolescencia representa una intervención de gran importancia, pero la prevención primaria de los TCA¿puede ser más perjudicial que beneficiosa