The effect of placebo and neurophysiological involvements

Placebo and placebo effect are important issues related to the drug therapy for clinical and scientific meanings. The rates of placebo may get as many as 50% for analgesic drugs in headache. The high answer to placebo brings questions on pathophysiology of headache. Answers may offer a new strategy in the implementation of trials and new insight in neurophysiology of headache. Current knowledge on placebo and placebo effect will be analysed and dicussed looking for new direction in headache field

Enhancing Automated GUI Exploration Techniques for Android Mobile Applications

Mobile software applications ("apps") are used by billions of smartphone owners worldwide. The demand for quality to these apps has grown together with their spread. Therefore, effective techniques and tools are being requested to support developers in mobile app quality engineering activities. Automation tools can facilitate these activities since they can save humans from routine, time consuming and error prone manual tasks. Automated GUI exploration techniques are widely adopted by researchers and practitioners in the context of mobile apps for supporting critical engineering tasks such as reverse engineering, testing, and network traffic signature generation. These techniques iteratively exercise a running app by exploiting the information that the app exposes at runtime through its GUI to derive the set of input events to be fired. Although several automated GUI exploration techniques have been proposed in the literature, they suffer from some limitations that may hinder them from a thorough app exploration. This dissertation proposes two novel solutions that contribute to the literature in Software Engineering towards improving existing automated GUI exploration techniques for mobile software applications. The former is a fully automated GUI exploration technique that aims to detect issues tied to the app instances lifecycle, a mobile-specific feature that allows users to smoothly navigate through an app and switch between apps. In particular, this technique addresses the issues of crashes and GUI failures, that consists in the manifestation of unexpected GUI states. This work includes two exploratory studies that prove that GUI failures are a widespread problem in the context of mobile apps. The latter solution is a hybrid exploration technique that combines automated GUI exploration with capture and replay through machine learning. It exploits app-specific knowledge that only human users can provide in order to explore relevant parts of the application that can be reached only by firing complex sequences of input events on specific GUIs and by choosing specific input values. Both the techniques have been implemented in tools that target the Android Operating System, that is today the world’s most popular mobile operating system. The effectiveness of the proposed techniques is demonstrated through experimental evaluations performed on real mobile apps

Do Memories Haunt You? An Automated Black Box Testing Approach for Detecting Memory Leaks in Android Apps

Memory leaks represent a remarkable problem for mobile app developers since a waste of memory due to bad programming practices may reduce the available memory of the device, slow down the apps, reduce their responsiveness and, in the worst cases, they may cause the crash of the app. A common cause of memory leaks in the specific context of Android apps is the bad handling of the events tied to the Activity Lifecycle. In order to detect and characterize these memory leaks, we present FunesDroid, a tool-supported black box technique for the automatic detection of memory leaks tied to the Activity Lifecycle in Android apps. FunesDroid implements a testing approach that can find memory leaks by analyzing unnecessary heap object replications after the execution of three different sequences of Activity Lifecycle events. In the paper, we present an exploratory study that shows the capability of the proposed technique to detect memory leaks and to characterize them in terms of their size, persistence and growth trend. The study also illustrates how memory leak causes can be detected with the support of the information provided by the FunesDroid tool

Antiviral therapy in acute viral hepatitis B: why and when

Acute viral hepatitis B is cleared in more than 95% of patients, while the remainder ones may develop either chronic HBV infection or, rarely, fulminant hepatitis

SBST tool competition 2021

​© 2021 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.We report on the organization, challenges, and results of the ninth edition of the Java Unit Testing Competition as well as the first edition of the Cyber-Physical Systems Testing Tool Competition. Java Unit Testing Competition. This year, five tools, Randoop, UtBot, Kex, Evosuite, and EvosuiteDSE, were executed on a benchmark with (i) new classes under test, selected from three open-source software projects, and (ii) the set of classes from three projects considered in the eighth edition. We relied on an improved Docker infrastructure to execute the tools and the subsequent coverage and mutation analysis. Given the high number of participants, we considered only two time budgets for test case generation: thirty seconds and two minutes. Cyber-Physical Systems Testing Tool Competition. Five tools, Deeper, Frenetic, GABExplore, GABExploit, and Swat, competed on testing self-driving car software by generating simulationbased tests using our new testing infrastructure. We considered two experimental settings to study test generators’ transitory and asymptotic behaviors and evaluated the tools’ test generation effectiveness and the exposed failures’ diversity. This paper describes our methodology, the statistical analysis of the results together with the contestant tools, and the challenges faced while running the competition experiments

Reduced intracranial volume in Fabry Disease: Evidence of abnormal neurodevelopment?

Introduction: Lysosomal storage disorders (LSD) are often characterized by abnormal brain development, reflected by a reduction of intracranial volume (ICV). The aim of our study was to perform a volumetric analysis of intracranial tissues in Fabry Disease (FD), investigating possible reductions of ICV as a potential expression of abnormal brain development in this condition. Materials and Methods: Forty-two FD patients (15males,mean age 43.3±13.0 years) were enrolled along with 38 healthy controls (HC) of comparable age and sex. Volumetric MRI data were segmented using SPM12 to obtain intracranial tissue volumes, from which ICV values were derived. Results: Mean ICV of FD patients was 8.1% smaller compared to the control group (p<5·10−5). Unlike what typically happens in neurodegenerative disorders, no significant differences emerged when comparing between the two groups the fractional volumes of gray matter, white matter and CSF (i.e., normalized by ICV), consistent with a harmonious volumetric reduction of intracranial structures. Discussion: The present results suggest that in FD patients an abnormality of brain development is present, expanding the current knowledge about central nervous system involvement in FD, further emphasizing the importance of an early diagnosis

Physical exercise and Sport activities in patients with and without coronary heart disease

Background: The quantity and intensity of physical activity required for the primary prevention of coronary heart disease remain unclear. Therefore, we examined the association between physical activity and coronary risk. Methods: We studied 100 patients with chest pain, 78 men and 22 women, not older than 65 years, admitted to a coronary care unit. Patients were subdivided in 3 groups: the first group included patients with acute myocardial infarction, the second group included patients with chronic heart disease, the third included patients with non-ischemic chest-pain. A questionnaire on daily physical activity was filled by each patient. Results: A significantly higher percentage of patients with myocardial infarction and coronary heart disease had a sedentary life style compared to patients of the third group. Compared with subjects without heart disease, a significantly higher percentage of patients of the first and second group covered a daily average distance shorter than 500 meters, while a significantly inferior percentage covered a distance longer than 1 Km every day. A significantly lower percentage of patients with coronary heart disease practised sport compared with the third group. At the time of hospitalization a very small percentage of coronary heart disease patients still practised sport. Conclusions: The association between physical activity and reduced coronary risk is clear; in order to obtain benefits it is sufficient just walking every day. Regarding physical activity, continuity is important: patients, who practised sport only in juvenile age, breaking off when older, may lose the obtained advantages

ANALYSIS OF SYNTHETIC ADULTERANTS, MEAN WEIGHT AND LABELING IN TRADITIONAL PHYTOTHERAPIC PRODUCTS

Traditional phytotherapic products (TPP) use is nowadays common in society. As they are known to be natural products, there is an assumption that the effects are exclusively beneficial and the potential harmful effects are disregarded. As well as adulterations with synthetic drugs capable of masking adverse effects or acting synergistically with biologically active compounds, potentiating their effects, considered by law as fraud. The aim of the present study was to evaluate common TPP and its compliance with the current law regarding labeling, average weight and research on synthetic adulterants using comparative thin layer chromatography. Twenty PTFs were evaluated, of which all failed the labeling assessment, one contained average weight consistent with legislation and there was no evidence of adulteration by increment of synthetic drugs in any of them. Evaluating the quality of a product ensuring its compliance with the legislation is crucial for the reliability of consumers and the credibility of producers.O uso de produtos tradicionais fitoterápicos (PTF) é um costume comum na sociedade atual. Por serem produtos ditos naturais, há a suposição dos efeitos serem exclusivamente benéficos e os potenciais efeitos nocivos desconsiderados. Assim como as adulterações com fármacos sintéticos capazes de mascarar efeitos adversos ou atuar sinergicamente com compostos biologicamente ativos potencializando seus efeitos, considerado pela lei como fraude. O objetivo do presente estudo foi avaliar PTF comuns e suas conformidades com a lei atual quanto rotulagem, peso médio e pesquisa de adulterantes sintéticos pelo uso de cromatografia em camada delgada comparativa. Foram avaliados 20 PTF, dos quais todos foram reprovados na avaliação da rotulagem, apenas uma continha peso médio condizente com legislação e em nenhuma houve a comprovação de adulteração por incremento de fármacos sintéticos. Avaliar a qualidade de um produto garantindo sua conformidade com a legislação é determinante para a confiabilidade dos consumidores e credibilidade dos produtores

A New Orbiting Deployable System for Small Satellite Observations for Ecology and Earth Observation

In this paper, we present several study cases focused on marine, oceanographic, and atmospheric environments, which would greatly benefit from the use of a deployable system for small satellite observations. As opposed to the large standard ones, small satellites have become an effective and affordable alternative access to space, owing to their lower costs, innovative design and technology, and higher revisiting times, when launched in a constellation configuration. One of the biggest challenges is created by the small satellite instrumentation working in the visible (VIS), infrared (IR), and microwave (MW) spectral ranges, for which the resolution of the acquired data depends on the physical dimension of the telescope and the antenna collecting the signal. In this respect, a deployable payload, fitting the limited size and mass imposed by the small satellite architecture, once unfolded in space, can reach performances similar to those of larger satellites. In this study, we show how ecology and Earth Observations can benefit from data acquired by small satellites, and how they can be further improved thanks to deployable payloads. We focus on DORA—Deployable Optics for Remote sensing Applications—in the VIS to TIR spectral range, and on a planned application in the MW spectral range, and we carry out a radiometric analysis to verify its performances for Earth Observation studies