Efficacy of IV Immunoglobulins on Psychiatric Symptoms: A Case Report

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a fairly common psychiatric illness with a prevalence between 1.8% and 2% in the general population..

Combination of Depth and Texture Descriptors for Gesture Recognition

Automatic hand gesture recognition is a challenging problem that is attaining a growing interest due to its applications in natural interfaces for human-machine interaction, automatic sign-language recognition, computer gaming, robotics and healthcare. This chapter briefly reviews existing approaches for automatic hand gesture recognition and proposes a novel system exploiting together color and depth data. The proposed approach is based on a set of four descriptors extracted from the depth map and three texture descriptors extracted from the 2D image, while the classification is performed by an ensemble of support vector machines and decision trees. A main novelty for feature extraction is a method based on the histogram of gradients used for describing the curvature image obtained from the depth map. Another novelty is the evaluation of different colorimetric spaces for improving the recognition performance of the texture descriptors: the best performance is obtained using the lightness band of the L*c*h* color space. In the experimental Section the performances of different "stand-alone" descriptors are firstly compared and their correlation is analyzed for assessing their complementarity, and eventually the advantage gained by their fusion is demonstrated by the Wilcoxon Signed-Rank test

Multicenter APULIA HF study: Efficacy of a shared management protocol between hospital and territory of patients hospitalized for acute heart failure

Background. The aim of this study was to demonstrate the efficacy of a management model to reduce hospitalizations in patients recently admitted for acute decompensated heart failure. Methods. The management model was based on a close integration between hospital and territory health services. Clinical evaluation, ECG, echocardiographic findings, total body bioimpedance and brain natriuretic peptide serum levels were used to assess clinical stability of patients at discharge and during follow-up. A dedicated nurse (care manager) was involved in patient empowerment, telephone follow-up, check of adherence to therapy and clinical conditions, and management of scheduled evaluations. All hospitalizations occurring prior to or after enrolment in the municipalities involved in the study were considered, as well as the hospitalizations occurring among enrolled patients. Results. A total of 301 patients were enrolled, 226 of them from the Centers of the Puglia Region, Italy. An overall reduction of 6[%] in total hospitalizations with DRG 127 was observed; the reduction was most evident in the two centers with the smaller reference population (-16[%] and -26[%], respectively). In the group of patients enrolled, an overall reduction in hospital admissions was observed after comparing the period before and after enrolment. A significant increase in the prescription rate of angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor/angiotensin receptor blockers, beta-blockers and aldosterone antagonists was also observed. Finally, an overall reduction in the costs for patient management was demonstrated. Similar results were obtained in the two additional Centers of the Basilicata and Lazio Regions. Conclusions. An integrated management between hospital and territory allows optimization of the management of heart failure patients, with improvement of therapy and reduction in hospitalizations and management costs