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Lingua e metrica dei Fragmenta
No full textIl capitolo descrive gli aspetti linguistici e formali del Canzoniere di Petrarca: fono-morfologia, lessico, sintassi, metrica
Are sleep disturbances a risk factor for suicidal behavior in the first episode of psychosis? Evidence from a systematic review
Get PDFSleep disturbances are common in individuals with first-episode psychosis (FEP) and have been identified as potential contributors to an increased risk of suicidal behavior. This systematic review aims to synthesize the existing evidence on the association between sleep disturbances and suicidal behavior in individuals experiencing FEP, a critical period for early intervention. In accordance with the guidelines established by PRISMA, this systematic review was duly registered in PROSPERO (CRD42024598203) prior to its initiation. A comprehensive search was conducted across databases including PubMed, Web of Science, EMBASE, and PsycINFO, encompassing studies from their inception through February 2025. The review specifically included observational studies that investigated the association between sleep disturbances and suicidal behaviors, which include suicidal ideation, attempts, or completed suicides, among individuals with FEP. The inclusion criteria required that all studies featured adult participants aged 18 years and older, employed validated measures for both sleep disturbances and suicidality, and concentrated on populations with FEP. Reviews, case reports, and studies not published in English were systematically excluded. The selection of studies, extraction of data, and assessment of quality were conducted independently by two reviewers. Seven studies met the inclusion criteria, with sample sizes ranging from 118 to 688 participants. The findings indicate that sleep disturbances, especially insomnia, are significantly linked to an increased risk of suicidal ideation and behavior in individuals with FEP. The strength of these associations varied among the studies, with some reporting moderate to strong effect sizes. However, there was noted methodological heterogeneity, including variations in sleep assessment tools. This systematic review highlights sleep disturbances as a key modifiable risk factor for suicidal behavior in individuals with FEP. Future research should prioritize longitudinal designs and standardized sleep assessments to better characterize this relationship and guide targeted interventions
Multimodal imaging of the amygdala in non-clinical subjects with high vs. low autistic-like social skills traits
Get PDFRecent clinical and theoretical frameworks suggest that social skills and theory of mind impairments characteristic of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are distributed in the general population on a continuum between healthy individuals and patients. The present multimodal study aimed at investigating the amygdala's function, perfusion, and volume in 56 non-clinical subjects from the general population with high (n = 28 High-SOC) or low (n = 28 Low-SOC) autistic-like social skills traits. Participants underwent magnetic resonance imaging to evaluate the amygdala's functional connectivity at rest, blood perfusion by means of arterial spin labelling, its activation during a face evaluation task and lastly grey matter volumes. The High-SOC group was characterised by higher blood perfusion in both amygdalae, lower volume of the left amygdala and higher activations of the right amygdala during processing of human faces with fearful value. Resting state analyses did not reveal any significant difference between the two groups. Overall, our results highlight the presence of overlapping morpho-functional alterations of the amygdala between healthy individuals and ASD patients confirming the importance of the amygdala in this disorder and in social and emotional processing. Our findings may help disentangle the neurobiological facets of ASD elucidating aetiology and the relationship between clinical symptomatology and neurobiology
Increasing nitric oxide availability via ingestion of nitrate-rich beetroot juice improves vascular responsiveness in individuals with Alzheimer's Disease
Get PDFPoor vascular function and reduced nitric oxide (NO)-bioavailability have been recognized to be involved in aging and Alzheimer's Disease (AD). A non-pharmacological treatment that is gaining clinical interest in the context of vascular function is dietary inorganic nitrate () supplementation which increases NO-bioavailability through the -nitrite () - NO pathway. This treatment has been demonstrated to improve vascular function in several clinical populations, but no study has investigated the effects in individuals with AD. Therefore, changes in plasma and and vascular responsiveness (hyperemic response to single-passive leg movement (ΔPLM)) were measured in individuals with AD (n=10, 76±9 years), healthy elderly (OLD, n=10, 75±6 years), and young individuals (YN, n=10, 25±4 years) before (T0) and hourly for 4 hours (T1, T2, T3, and T4) after ingestion of either -rich beetroot juice (BR) or a placebo (PLA). No changes in and , nor ΔPLM were detected in any group following PLA intake. Plasma and increased significantly in all three groups at T1 (p<0.001) and remained elevated for the remainder of the trial. The same trend was found in ΔPLM, which significantly increased in all three groups over the time (p<0.001). However, AD exhibited significantly lower ΔPLM values at any time point compared to YN (p<0.001) and OLD (p<0.001). These data suggest that AD-individuals included in this study were able to reduce to and to increase NO-mediated vascular responsiveness as non-AD-individuals. Other mechanisms, beyond NO-bioavailability, may be involved in vascular dysfunction in patients with AD. This research suggests that an acute administration of inorganic nitrate is not enough to revert chronically adapted vascular properties and completely restore vascular responsiveness in AD
New theoretical results on the Monotone Boolean Duality and the Monotone Boolean Dualization problems
No full textThis work presents a new decomposition for the Monotone Boolean Duality problem, which consists of checking whether two monotone Boolean functions f (described by its unique irredundant DNF) and g (described by its unique irredundant CNF) are equivalent. This coNP problem has several applications and relevance in many research areas (e.g., data mining and knowledge discovery, artificial intelligence, matroid theory, computational biology, and, last but not least, mathematical programming). Best-known algorithms run in quasi-polynomial time; no polynomial-time algorithm has been discovered yet, even if for many special classes these are known. The exact complexity of the general problem is still an open question. Based on both classical results by Berge (1989) and Fredman and Khachiyan (1996), and also on the concept of full covers used by Boros and Makino (2009) and Elbassioni (2008), we propose a new approach to decompose the problem and obtain new theoretical results. Our scheme offers a strong bound which, in the worst case only, has the same time complexity as Fredman and Khachiyan (1996). Anyway, it better highlights the inherent symmetry of the problem, lets us present another polynomial-space algorithm for the Monotone Boolean Dualization problem, and motivates further study on full covers. (c) 2024 Elsevier B.V. All rights are reserved, including those for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies
Comparative evaluation of routine coagulation testing on Stago sthemO 301 and Werfen ACL TOP 750
No full textObjectives: We performed a comparative evaluation of analytical performance between the novel bench-top Stago sthemO 301 hemostasis analyzer and the Werfen ACL TOP 750 coagulometer using routine plasma samples.
Methods: A minimum of 100 fresh plasma samples per test were analyzed using both analytical systems. The tests included prothrombin time (PT) expressed as international normalized ratio (INR) and seconds (s), activated partial thromboplastin time (APTT) in ratio and seconds, fibrinogen, antithrombin and D-dimer. Clotting assays were performed using mechanical clot detection on sthemO and optical detection on ACL TOP. The comparative evaluation included the calculation of Spearman's correlation, Passing-Bablok regression and Bland-Altman plots.
Results: Correlation coefficients ranged between 0.76 for APTT to 0.98 for PT-INR and D-dimer, indicating a generally acceptable/good agreement. The regression slopes varied from 0.82 for D-dimer to 1.17 for APTT-s. A significant bias was observed for all tests except antithrombin, with differences for sthemO ranging between -31 % for D-dimer and 13.7 % for PT-s.
Conclusions: SthemO demonstrates acceptable global comparability with ACL TOP for routine coagulation testing. Nevertheless, reagent- and method-dependent bias has been observed, which highlight the need for additional harmonization efforts
SFPQ::TFE3-rearranged PEComa: Differences and analogies with renal cell carcinoma carrying the same translocation
No full text: Among perivascular epithelioid cell neoplasms (PEComas), some tumors have been found to carry rearrangements of the TFE3 gene. Such tumors can rarely occur in the kidney, closely resembling TFE3-rearranged renal cell carcinoma. This study describes one additional case of TFE3-rearranged PEComa, two TFE3-rearranged renal cell carcinomas, and a detailed literature review. All three tumors were composed of nested clear to eosinophilic cells with peculiar morphological findings in each case. By immunohistochemistry, PEComa expressed cathepsin K, HMB45, and CD68 (PG-M1), while labeling negative for PAX8, Melan-A, S100, smooth muscle actin, desmin, CD10, CD13, and keratins 7 and AE1/AE3. Conversely, both TFE3-rearranged renal cell carcinomas were positive for PAX8, HMB45, and CD10, alongside staining negative for CD68 (PG-M1), Melan-A, CD13, and keratins. One of them expressed cathepsin K. TFE3 gene rearrangement was identified in all three cases by FISH, along with SFPQ::TFE3 fusion by molecular analysis. Our cases, combined with a comprehensive literature review, highlight several key differences and similarities: SFPQ::TFE3-rearranged PEComas lack the pseudorosettes frequently observed in SFPQ::TFE3-rearranged renal cell carcinoma, although both may exhibit nested epithelioid morphology. Both tumor types can be positive for cathepsin K and melanogenesis markers and negative for smooth muscle markers. However, PAX8, keratins, and CD10 were expressed in TFE3-rearranged renal cell carcinoma while CD68(PG-M1) was positive in PEComa. Notably, the SFPQ gene is the most common fusion partner in TFE3-rearranged PEComas, while it is the third most frequent one in TFE3-rearranged renal cell carcinoma. Nevertheless, the exon breakpoints are analogous in both tumor types
AI4Health: empowering telemedicine through explainable AI methods for personalized diagnosis, monitoring and treatment
Get PDFNowadays, advancing healthcare requires moving beyond traditional diagnostic, monitoring and therapeutic paradigms. Innovative artificial intelligence (AI)-based models could help integrate new technologies into everyday life. AI and biomedical signal analysis find great potential in the neuroengineering field, allowing the extraction of complex patterns from several signals, like brain, muscle, or motion activities. However, adopting these technologies is still barely used in uncontrolled settings due to several issues, such as complex acquisition setups, high inter- and intra-subject variability that needs long calibration time and the lack of transparency of AI-based methodologies. Among these, neural interface (NI), also known as brain computer interface (BCI), when input originates from the human brain, is a system that is able to assess both motor and cognitive interactions in neurorehabilitation scenarios. New solutions need to be developed to extend their application beyond laboratory environments or hospitals into telerehabilitation, fusing multiple heterogeneous data sources coming from wearable devices. From a methodological point of view, state-of-the-art approaches, typically based on single-channel feature extraction, do not consider brain connectivity features, which could potentially improve the outcome. This thesis aims to i) propose novel approaches for better understanding motor and cognitive interaction by fusing multimodal data from wearable devices and ii) develop algorithms integrating brain connectivity and eXplainable artificial intelligence (XAI) to improve interpretability and model outcomes. For these purposes, solutions for diagnosis, monitoring and treatment of neurological disease will be proposed. The first part of the thesis explores the most important steps typically used to construct a signal processing pipeline based on AI. Moreover, it discusses the application of AI and wearable technologies for home-based upper limb rehabilitation through a systematic literature review. The second part presents the results of two pipelines based on translation invariant and brain connectivity-based features to improve the BCI performance in binary and multiclass motor imagery tasks. Moreover, novel approaches to fuse and analyze wearable electroencephalography (EEG), electromyography (EMG) and inertial data are proposed. In detail, a deep learning model was developed to estimate wrist kinematics continuously from EMG and inertial measurement unit (IMU) data collected through ergonomic wearable devices. In addition, dry EEG, EMG and IMU were integrated to assess motor and cognitive interaction during a dual-task timed up and go (TUG) protocol involving groups of subjects affected by Multiple sclerosis (MS). Finally, the third part presents methodologies based on brain connectivity and XAI in support of medical diagnosis in the context of visual perception and Parkinson’s Disease (PD) classification. In the first study, a time-varying brain connectivity approach and graph analysis for studying hemispheric asymmetries in signal propagation dynamics following occipital transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is proposed, providing potentially better insight into diagnostic and prognostic markers in the field of visual perception. The second study demonstrated how the combined impact of cognitive and brain reserves, based on functional connectivity measures extracted from resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI), potentially enhances the PD classification and assists clinicians in its diagnosis. The findings achieved by this thesis underlie the potential of wearable devices and advanced signal processing pipelines to enhance the diagnosis, monitoring and treatment of neurological diseases. We focused our attention on portable devices with the aim of promoting a green economy and sustainability by reducing the need for patients to reach the hospital for periodic monitoring and follow-up
In un gravoso equilibrio di carte
No full textl castello è uno degli ultimi romanzi, rimasto incompiuto, dello scrittore boemo Franz Kafka, si tratta di un testo enigmatico che, riprendendo le parole di Roberto Leydi, si pone a metà «fra realismo quotidiano e trasposizione fantastica». Diviene pertanto scontato che un eccentrico artista come Otello Sarzi, a cui si deve molto del rinnovamento del teatro di figura, si avvicinasse all’opera dello scrittore praghese. Non si tratta di un’operazione di semplice riscrittura teatrale da testo letterario, in questo caso è stato utile e fondamentale mettere in luce, già dal testo e dalla sua composizione tutti gli espedienti necessari per l’animazione delle figure. Il volume, a fianco del copione concepito con Gabriele Marchesini per i burattini di Sarzi e le musiche di Giorgio Gaslini, presenta la storia e l’evoluzione sia della rielaborazione drammaturgica sia della prima messinscena dello spettacolo, realizzata nel 1980 presso il Teatro Nazionale di Milano, attraverso gli interventi dei protagonisti e dei testimoni del tempo
Game-Based Learning to Promote Clinical Reasoning: An Innovative Educational Proposal in Pediatric Dentistry
No full textPediatric dentistry requires different professional knowledge and skills, including technical and analytical thinking skills, essential for deep clinical reasoning. To analyze the students' awareness of their cognitive processes when solving clinical problems, a qualitative and inductive study with second and fifth year students in the Degree Course in Dentistry and Dental Prosthetics at the University of Verona was conducted. Adopting a phenomenological approach, it focused on participants' lived experiences, gathering their reflections on solving clinical problems through two structured questions. The data, analyzed using content analysis, revealed that sometimes students focused on operational steps rather than reflecting on them, and underscored the necessity of innovating university teaching methods to enhance reflective moments. To respond to this need, a literature review was conducted, underscoring the value of active learning in innovating dentistry education. Accordingly, a game-based learning activity was elaborated: a dental-themed adaptation of the games where you guess an image without using certain predetermined words. Its goal is to create an interactive and engaging environment that facilitates sharing and reflection, challenging students to apply their competencies to practical scenarios. Finally, our research identified students' educational needs to develop teaching strategies that shape their reflective process in clinical reasoning so as to be more deliberate and conscious