How do new technologies affect surgical training: personal considerations

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Research works and the CIRIT awards: scientific talent in secondary school

Talent as a potentiality rather than a given fact, in this phase of education the individual has skills they have not been able to develop ye

Mecanismes de detecció d'organismes genèticament modificats

El contingut d'organismes genèticament modificats (OGM) a l'alimentació humana i animal està regulat per la norma europea, que n'estableix l'etiquetatge obligatori quan el contingut en OGM és superior al 0,9 %. El Comitè Europeu per a l'Estandardització ha desenvolupat mètodes de detecció, d'identificació i de quantificació dels OGM per tal de dur a terme aquesta norma europea. Els laboratoris que treballen en OGM poden aplicar aquests mètodes específics, sensibles i precisos i poden repetir-los i reproduir-los amb resultats segurs.Food and feed GMO’s content is regulated by the European standards, which establish that the labeling is mandatory when the GMO content is higher than 0.9 %. The European Committee for Standardization has developed the detection, the identification and the quantification methods of GMOs to carry out this European standard. The laboratories that work in GMO can apply these specific, sensitive and precise methods and can repeat and reproduce them with safety results

Gallstones in Elderly Patients: Impact of Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy

The use of laparoscopic cholecystectomy (LC) in elderly patients may pose problems because of their poor general condition, especially of cardiopulmonary function. Moreover, these patients present with acute cholecystitis and associated common bile duct stones more often than their younger counterparts. From 1990 to 1999, the authors performed 943 LCs; 31 (3.2%) were attempted on elderly patients, 11 (35%) of which were on an emergency basis because of acute cholecystitis, cholangitis or acute biliary pancreatitis. Ten per cent of LCs needed to be converted to an open cholecystectomy, most often because of an increase in the partial pressure of carbon dioxide in the blood produced by excessive operative time. A gasless procedure was used in the last three years of the study on eight cases; the overall rate of conversion from LC to open cholecystectomy in this group was 0%. Associated gallbladder and common bile duct stones were found in five (16%) patients (four preoperative LC endoscopic sphincterotomy and one transcystic approach). The success rate in both of these cases was 100%, overall morbidity was 29% and there was no mortality. These results show that LC is a feasible and safe procedure for use in elderly patients. Gasless LC should be preferred in patients classified as American Society of Anesthesiologists' class III because an excessive duration of operation is the most common reason for converting to an open cholecystectomy

Texting and Driving Recognition leveraging the Front Camera of Smartphones

The recognition of the activity of texting while driving is an open problem in literature and it is crucial for the security within the scope of automotive. This can bring to life new insurance policies and increase the overall safety on the roads. Many works in literature leverage smartphone sensors for this purpose, however it is shown that these methods take a considerable amount of time to perform a recognition with sufficient confidence. In this paper we propose to leverage the smartphone front camera to perform an image classification and recognize whether the subject is seated in the driver position or in the passenger position. We first applied standalone Convolutional Neural Networks with poor results, then we focused on object detection-based algorithms to detect the presence and the position of discriminant objects (i.e. the security belts and the car win-dow). We then applied the model over short videos by classifying frame by frame until reaching a satisfactory confidence. Results show that we are able to reach around 90 % accuracy in only few seconds of the video, demonstrating the applicability of our method in the real world