KINEMATICS OF SPRINTING: COMPARISON BETWEEN NORMAL AND AMPUTEES ATHLETES

The paper introduces the initial activities of a project related to the kinetic analysis of amputees athletes running by means of dedicated orthopaedic prostheses. In this first session it has been analysed the kinematics of four athletes sample, three normal (the first a high-level pro, the second a junior and the third an amateur) and one unilateral below-knee paralympic amputee. Research objective is to analyse the kinematics of the amputee athlete and the differences in respect of normal athletes. It has to be considered that each normal athlete has its own way of running which depends on his anthropometrical parameters and on its motion strategy: an ideal biomechanics of running, which is a reference to optimise the performance of athlete, doesn't exist. First of all it has been described the running biomechanical phases of normal athletes and the structural components of a sprinting prosthesis; then the system to analyse human movement and finally the adopted protocol for acquisition. The kinematical parameters and the motion strategy adopted by amputee are different in comparison to normal athletes: it has been analysed the anthropometrical parameters, the time-space parameters and pelvis, hip, knee and ankle angles. The collected data will be applied to the design process of running prosthesis in the socket manufacturing and in the alignment of prosthetic components to optimise the performance of the athlete

Automated and traceable processing for large-scale high-throughput sequencing facilities

Scaling up production in medium and large high-throughput sequencing facilities presents a number of challenges. As the rate of samples to process increases, manually performing and tracking the center’s operations becomes increasingly difficult, costly and error prone, while processing the massive amounts of data poses significant computational challenges. We present our ongoing work to automate and track all data-related procedures at the CRS4 Sequencing and Genotyping Platform, while integrating state-of-the-art processing technologies such as Hadoop, OMERO, iRODS, and Galaxy into our automated workflows. Currently, the core system is in its testing phase and it is on schedule to be in production use at CRS4 by May 2013. The results thus far obtained are encouraging and the authors are confident that the CRS4 Platform will increase its efficiency and capacity thanks to this system. In the near future, the integration components will be released as as open source software.23-24Pubblicat

Stream network dynamics of non-perennial rivers: numerical simulations data

Input and output files of the numerical simulations run with the integrated surface-subsurface hydrological model CATH