Implementation of a new cost efficacy method for blood irradiation using a non dedicated device

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Objectives</p> <p>To implement a new cost efficacy internal Service for blood component irradiation, we carried out specific procedures and quality assurance reports using the linear accelerators (LINACs) of the Regina Elena Institute (IRE) Radiotherapy Department instead of a dedicated device.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The technical aspects, quality assurance and regulatory requirements of the internal procedure to set up a local irradiated blood bank have been defined. The LINACs of the IRE Radiotherapy Department were used to deliver a mean dose of 32 Gy and dose accuracy was checked with gafchromic film. The overall time/cost of this procedure was compared with the previous procedure, out-sourcing the irradiation of blood components.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A total of 1996 blood component units were internally irradiated in the first year. Moreover, reducing the overall procedure time by a third. Overall cost/bag of external and internal procedures was approx. 66 € and 11 €, respectively. Thus the average saving of cost/bag was higher than 80%. The use of gafchromic films in all irradiated blood component bags allowed the accuracy of the dose delivered to blood to be checked.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>By utilizing LINACs installed in the Radiotherapy Department it is possible to provide an internal blood component irradiation service, capitalizing on internal resources without any inconvenience/discomfort to patients undergoing radiotherapy and satisfying governmental regulatory requirements. The internal irradiation procedures has proven to be safe and feasible, and along with the significant cost/time reduction suggests that it is more advantageous than external procedures.</p

Diagnostic and surgical management of primary central nervous system angioleiomyoma: A case report and literature review

Angioleiomyoma (ALM) is a benign smooth muscle neoplasm that mainly occurs in lower extremities subcutaneous tissue and generally affects middle-aged adults. This tumor histotype may rarely localize intracranially, although only a few cases have been described in the literature. We report a case of intracranial ALM, whose differential diagnosis has been particularly challenging, and firstly provide a comprehensive radiological and intra-operative evaluation of a such rare entity. This represents also the first report of the use of intraoperative confocal microscopy in ALM and the first documented short-term recurrence. At this regard, a scoping literature review has been conducted with the aim of presenting the major clinical and diagnostic features along with the proposed therapeutic strategies

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Investigation on an innovative technology for wet separation of plastic wastes

This paper presents an original device for the separation of plastic polymers from mixtures. Due to the combination of a characteristic flow pattern developing within the apparatus and density, shape and size differences among two or more polymers, this device allows their separation into two products, one collected within the instrument and the other one expelled through its outlet ducts. Experimental tests have been conducted to investigate the effectiveness of the apparatus, using two geometric arrangements, nine hydraulic configurations and three selections of polymers at three stages of a material life cycle. Tests with samples composed of a single typology of polymer have been used to understand the interaction between the particles and the carrying fluid within the apparatus in different hydraulic configurations and geometric arrangements. Multi-material tests are essential to simulate the real conditions in an industrial recycling plant. The separation results have been evaluated in terms of grade and recovery of a useful material. Under the proper hydraulic configurations, the experimentation showed that it is possible to produce an almost pure concentrate of Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) from a mixture of 85% PET and 15% Polycarbonate (PC) (concentrate grade and recovery equal to 99.5% and 95.1%) and a mixture of 85% PET and 15% Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) (concentrate grade and recovery equal to 97.9% and 100.0%). It is further demonstrated that almost pure concentrates of PVC and PC can be produced from a mixture of 85% PVC and 15% PC (PVC grade and recovery equal to 99.9% and 99.7%) and a mixture of 85% PC and 15% PVC (PC grade and recovery equal to 99.0% and 99.5%)

Investigating issues and needs of dyslexic students at university: proof of concept of an artificial intelligence and virtual reality-based supporting platform and preliminary results

7sinoneSpecific learning disorders affect a significant portion of the population. A total of 80% of its instances are dyslexia, which causes significant difficulties in learning skills related to reading, memorizing and the exposition of concepts. Whereas great efforts have been made to diagnose dyslexia and to mitigate its effects at primary and secondary school, little has been done at the university level. This has resulted in a sensibly high rate of abandonment or even of failures to enroll. The VRAIlexia project was created to face this problem by creating and popularizing an innovative method of teaching that is inclusive for dyslexic students. The core of the project is BESPECIAL, a software platform based on artificial intelligence and virtual reality that is capable of understanding the main issues experienced by dyslexic students and to provide them with ad hoc digital support methodologies in order to ease the difficulties they face in their academic studies. The aim of this paper is to present the conceptual design of BESPECIAL, highlighting the role of each module that composes it and the potential of the whole platform to fulfil the aims of VRAIlexia. Preliminary results obtained from a sample of about 700 dyslexic students are also reported, which clearly show the main issues and needs that dyslexic students experience and these will be used as guidelines for the final implementation of BESPECIAL.noneZingoni, Andrea; Taborri, Juri; Panetti, Valentina; Bonechi, Simone; Aparicio-Martinez, Pilar; Pinzi, Sara; Calabrò, GiuseppeZingoni, Andrea; Taborri, Juri; Panetti, Valentina; Bonechi, Simone; Aparicio-Martinez, Pilar; Pinzi, Sara; Calabrò, Giusepp

Identification of small-molecule EGFR allosteric inhibitors by high-Throughput docking

Aim: The EGFR inhibitors represent the first-line treatment of non-small-cell lung cancer. However, the emergence of resistance urgently requires the development of new inhibitors targeting drug-resistant mutants. Methodology: A recently released structure of an EGFR kinase domain in complex with an allosteric inhibitor and a mutant protein model derived from it were used to set up a low-cost high-Throughput docking protocol for the fast identification of EGFR allosteric inhibitors. Conclusion: The virtual screening of commercially available compounds led to the identification of interesting new hit compounds. The most promising hit was confirmed to be a new allosteric inhibitor of wild-Type and T790M/L858R double mutant EGFR which was able to inhibit the growth of non-small-cell lung cancer cell lines

Stereotactic radiosurgery for the treatment of brainstem metastases: a multicenter retrospective study

Background Brainstem metastases (BSM) are associated with a poor prognosis and their management represents a therapeutic challenge. BSM are often inoperable and, in absence of randomized trials, the optimal radiation treatment of BSM remains to be defined. We evaluated the efficacy and toxicity of linear accelerator (linac)-based stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) and hypofractionated steretotactic radiotherapy (HSRT) in the treatment of BSM in a series of patients treated in different clinical centers. Methods We conducted a multicentric retrospective study of patients affected by 1-2 BSM from different histologies who underwent SRS/HSRT. Freedom from local progression (FLP), cancer-specific survival (CSS), overall survival (OS), and treatment-related toxicity were evaluated. In addition, predictors of treatment response and survivals were evaluated. Results Between 2008 and 2021, 105 consecutive patients with 111 BMS who received SRS or HSRT for 1-2 BSM were evaluated. Median follow-up time was 10 months (range 3-130). One-year FLP rate was 90.4%. At the univariate analysis, tumor volume <= 0.4 cc, and concurrent targeted therapy were associated with longer FLP, with combined treatment that remained a significant independent predictor [0.058, HR 0.139 (95% CI 0.0182-1.064]. Median OS and CSS were 11 months and 14.6 months, respectively. At multivariate analysis, concurrent targeted therapy administration was significantly associated with longer OS [HR 0.514 (95%CI 0.302-0.875); p = 0.01]. Neurological death occurred in 30.4% of patients, although this was due to local progression in only 3 (2.8%) patients. Conclusion Linac-based SRS/HSRT offers excellent local control to patients with BSM, with low treatment-related toxicity and no apparent detrimental effects on OS. When treated with ablative intent, BSM are an uncommon cause of neurological death. The present results indicates that patients with BSM should not be excluded a priori from clinical trials