1731 research outputs found
Sort by
A Lexi-ontological Resource for Consumer Healthcare: The Italian Consumer Medical Vocabulary
No full textIn the era of Consumer Health Informatics, healthcare consumers and patients play an active role because they increasingly explore health related information sources on their own, and they become more responsible for their personal healthcare, trying to find information on the web, consulting decision-support healthcare systems, trying to interpret clinical notes or test results provided by their physician, or filling in parts of their own Personal Health Record (PHR).
In spite of the advances in Healthcare Informatics for answering consumer needs, it is still difficult for laypersons who do not have a good level of healthcare literacy to find, understand, and act on health information, due to the communication gap which still persists between consumer and professional language (in terms of lexicon, semantics, and explanation). Significant
effort has been devoted to promote access to and the integration of medical information, and many standard terminologies have been developed for this aim, some of which have been formalized into ontologies.
Many of these terminological resources are used in healthcare information systems, but one of the most important problems is that these types of terminologies have been developed according to the physicians’perspective, and thus cannot provide sufficient support when integrated into consumer-oriented applications, such as Electronic Health Records, Personal Health Records, etc. This highlights the need for intermediate consumer-understandable terminologies or ontologies being integrated with more technical ones in order to support communication between patient-applications and those designed for experts. The aim of this thesis is to develop a lexical-ontological resource for consumer-oriented healthcare applications which is based on the construction of a Consumer-oriented Medical Vocabulary for Italian, able to reflect the different ways consumers and patients express and think about health topics, helping to bridge the vocabulary gap, integrated with standard medical terminologies/ontologies used by professionals in the general practice for representing the process of care, by means of Semantic Web technologies, in order to have a coherent semantic medical resource useful both for professionals and for consumers.
The feasibility of this consumer-oriented resource and of the Integration Framework has been tested by its application to an Italian Personal Health Record in order to help consumers and patients in the process of querying healthcare information, and easily describe their problems, complaints and clinical history
A Study on Seismic Behaviour of Masonry Towers
No full textIl presente lavoro è dedicato all’analisi semplificata della vulnerabilità sismica delle torri in muratura, in particolare alla definizione della geometria del cinematismo di collasso.
Dopo un’analisi preliminare dei danni e dei meccanismi innescati dal sisma sulle torri, e una rassegna dei metodi di analisi presenti in letteratura, si è elaborato un metodo per determinare la geometria del piano di frattura che individua i blocchi di un meccanismo di ribaltamento globale, a partire da semplici considerazioni di equilibrio.
Secondo le Norme Tecniche Nazionali, infatti, le torri (campanarie), vengono classificate come uno dei macroelementi in cui vengono schematizzate le chiese, caratterizzato da propri meccanismi di collasso; a differenza tuttavia di altri macroelementi, per le torri, considerate le masse e le altezze in gioco, lievi variazioni nella geometria del meccanismo comportano sensibili modifiche nel moltiplicatore di collasso; è quindi importante una corretta definizione della geometria del cinematismo. Il metodo proposto è stato applicato anche rimuovendo l’ipotesi, tipica nell’analisi limite di strutture murarie, di resistenza a compressione infinita della muratura.
Al fine di rendere di immediato utilizzo pratico i risultati, l’andamento della frattura è stato determinato tramite analisi parametriche per diverse configurazioni geometriche a cui facilmente si possono ricondurre le strutture a torre esistenti.
Infine, oltre a un confronto con meccanismi reali rilevati a seguito di terremoti avvenuti in passato, si è applicato il metodo proposto alla analisi di vulnerabilità di una torre medievale, la Ghirlandina del Duomo di Modena
La garanzia costituzionale dell'autonomia locale: un'analisi comparata tra diritto tedesco e diritto italiano
No full textL’indagine è costituita dall’analisi comparata, a livello costituzionale, dei principi della kommunale Selbstverwaltung e dell’autonomia locale negli ordinamenti tedesco ed italiano, con particolare attenzione alla realtà del Comune/Gemeinde. Quale tertium comparationis per effettuare la comparazione tra i due sistemi giuridici viene scelta ed utilizzata la Carta europea dell’autonomia locale.
Il lavoro si struttura in cinque capitoli oltre all’introduzione – dove vengono trattati i concetti fondamentali della materia ed esposte alcune premesse terminologiche e di metodo – e alle conclusioni, presentate in forma ipotesi ideali (in quanto formulate non in principio bensì al termine del lavoro, a fini espositivi), seguite da alcune considerazioni svolte alla luce di quanto si è venuti analizzando ed esponendo nei vari capitoli. Il primo capitolo si concentra sulle istituzioni del governo locale, tra cui, specificamente il Comune, focalizzando le relazioni tra i diversi livelli di governance (Bund, Länder, Kommunen in Germania, Stato, Regioni ed Enti locali in Italia). Il secondo capitolo tratteggia lo sviluppo storico del concetto e degli istituti dell’autonomia locale. Il terzo capitolo indaga il fondamento giuridico dell’autonomia locale, analizzando in particolar modo la fattispecie costituzionale del principio autonomistico. Nel quarto capitolo vengono trattate le funzioni amministrative al livello locale, approfondendo poi la dimensione della potestà normativa dell’ente locale. Infine nel capitolo quinto viene afforntato il tema della tutela dell’autonomia locale in sede giurisdizionale, cercando di enucleare i limiti al legislatore nella disciplina dell’autonomia locale e i parametri del controllo giurisdizionale della disciplina dell’autonomia locale.
Le conclusioni che vengono tratte dal lavoro di comparazione investono tanto la natura dell’istituzione Comune (unitamente alle sue competenze ed ai rapporti che lo legano agli altri livelli di governance dell’ordinamento) quanto il principio dell’autonomia locale (inteso quale principio organizzatorio nell’ambito dell’ordinamento giuridico generale, nonché quale status costituzionale di ordinamenti peraticolari, tutelato dall’ordinamento generale), quanto infine l’aspetto per così dire “dinamico” dato dai limiti all’azione di disciplina del principio autonomistico da parte del legislatore, nonché, in maniera corrispondente, dai parametri utilizzati dal giudice – segnatamente quello costituzionale – per la valutazione dell’attività del legislatore. In sintesi si tenta di esprimer una valutazione complessiva sulla posizione del principio autonomistico all’interno del “tessuto” costituzionale dei due ordinamenti considerati
Undertaking the Responsibility: international community, states, R2P and humanitarian intervention
No full textIn the last decades, an increasing awareness of instances of grave violation of human rights on a massive scale has brought to attention the problematic that whether states and the international community have an ethical responsibility to react to such cases, and (when the conditions require so) to undertake humanitarian military interventions. In the immediate post-Cold War environment, this has taken place parallel to the shift of focus in the security literature from national security towards human security. The varying responses to the grave cases of the 1990s such as Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo reaffirmed the necessity to undertake decisive and timely collective action, reminded the question of an ethical duty on the part of the international community to react to mass atrocities. By December 2001, the introduction of the concept of the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) set a new framework to take up this question with the aim of transforming the notion of the “right to intervene” into a “responsibility to react”.
With all its controversies humanitarian intervention continues to be a part of international political conduct. At the current state of affairs, humanitarian intervention has become politically relevant within the context of the RtoP doctrine. In this context, this dissertation seeks to assess the role of moral/ethical motives in the decisions and/or behaviour of the international community. Accordingly, it takes the assumption of humanitarian intervention as a moral duty as its subject matter, and puts it into test in relation to its newly defined limits and conduct within the RtoP framework
Responsabilidad y Procedimiento: Las Dilaciones Indebidas Procedimentales
No full textThis Doctoral Thesis develops the illegal procedure delays in Spain, making a comparison with Italian system, which is more advanced in this matter and recently issued the Law 69 of 2009 on the damage delay.
The illegal delays can be defined as a: “Postpone incurred by the Spanish Public Administration exceeding the term provided to decide, causing damages to the associates”.
Currently at Spain, despite of the obligation of solving established in Article 42 of Law 30 of 1992, does not exist a truly liability when public authorities non fulfillment the term to provide and the citizens are defenseless against Administration’s inactivity
A Multicomponent Bioactive Tissue-Engineered Blood Vessel: Fabrication, Mechanical Evaluation and Biological Evaluation with Physiological-Relevant Conditions
No full textThe high long-term failure rate of synthetic vascular grafts in the replacement of small vessels is known to be associated with the lack of physiological signals to vascular cells causing adverse hemodynamic, inflammatory or coagulatory events. Current studies focus on developing engineered vascular devices with ability of directing cell activity in vitro and in vivo for tissue regeneration. It is also known that controlled molecule release from scaffolds can dramatically increase the scaffold ability of directing cell activities in vitro and in vivo for tissue regeneration. To address the mechanical and biological problems associated with graft materials, we demonstrated a degradable polyester-fibroin composite tubular scaffolds which shows well-integrated nanofibrous structure, endothelial-conducive surface and anisotropic mechanical property, suitable as engineered vascular constructs.
Tissue regeneration needs not only functional biomolecules providing signaling cues to cells and guide tissue remodeling, but also an adequate modality of molecule delivery. In fact, healthy tissue formation requires specific signals at well-defined place and time. To develop scaffolds with multi-modal presentation of biomolecules, we patterned electrospun nanofibers over the thickness of the 3-dimensional scaffolds by programming the deposition of interpenetrating networks of degradable polymers poly(ε-caprolactone) and poly(lactide-co-glycolide) acid in tailored proportion. Fluorescent model molecules, drug and growth factors were embedded in the polymeric fibers with different techniques and release profiles were obtained and discussed.
Fabrication process resulted in precise gradient patterns of materials and functional biomolecules throughout the thickness of the scaffold. These graded materials showed programmable spatio-temporal control over the release. Molecule release profiles on each side of the scaffolds were used to determine the separation efficiency of molecule delivery, which achieved >90% for proteins in 200µm scaffolds. Gradient-patterned scaffolds were also used to program simultaneous release of two proteins to the opposite sides of the scaffold and sequential release of proteins to a defined space, which further demonstrate the ability of patterned nanofibers to spatially and temporally confine sustained release. Moreover, results showed that temporal release kinetics could be altered by the structural patterns. Thus, the hierarchically-structured scaffolds presented here may enable development of novel multifunctional scaffolds with defined 3D dynamic microenvironments for tissue regeneration
Component-Based Textual Entailment: a Modular and Linguistically-Motivated Framework for Semantic Inferences
No full textTextual Entailment (TE) aims at capturing major semantic inference needs across applications in Natural Language Processing. Since 2005, in the TE recognition (RTE) task, systems are asked to automatically judge whether the meaning of a portion of text, the Text, entails the meaning of another text, the Hypothesis. Although several approaches have been experimented, and improvements in TE technologies have been shown in RTE evaluation campaigns, a renewed interest is rising in the research community towards
a deeper and better understanding of the core phenomena involved in textual inference. In line with this direction, we are convinced that crucial progress may derive from a focus on decomposing the complexity of the TE task into basic phenomena and on their combination. Analysing TE in the light of the notions provided in logic to define an argument, and to evaluate its validity, the aim of our work is to understand how the common intuition of decomposing TE would allow a better comprehension of the problem from both a linguistic and a computational viewpoint. We propose a framework for component-based TE, where each component is in
itself a complete TE system, able to address a TE task on a specific phenomenon in isolation. Five dimensions of the problem are investigated: i) the definition of a component-based TE architecture; ii) the implementation of TE-components able to address specific inference types; iii) the linguistic analysis of the phenomena relevant to component-based TE; iv) the automatic acquisition of knowledge to support component-based entailment judgements; v) the development of evaluation methodologies to assess component-based TE systems capabilities to address single phenomena in a pair
Mathematical modelling of emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases in human and animal populations
No full textThe works presented in this thesis are very different one from the other but they all deal with the mathematical modelling of emerging infectious diseases which, beyond being the leitmotiv of this thesis, is an important research area in the field of epidemiology and public health.
A minor but significant part of the thesis has a theoretical flavour. This part is dedicated to the mathematical analysis of the competition model between two HIV subtypes in presence of vaccination and cross-immunity proposed by Porco and Blower (1998). We find the sharp conditions under which vaccination leads to the coexistence of the strains and using arguments from bifurcation theory, draw conclusions on the equilibria stability and find that a rather unusual behaviour of histeresis-type might emerge after repeated variations of the vaccination rate within a certain range.
The most of this thesis has been inspired by real outbreaks occurred in Italy over the last 10 years and is about the modelling of the 1999-2000 H7N1 avian influenza outbreak and of the 2009-2010 H1N1 pandemic influenza.
From an applied perspective, parameter estimation is a key part of the modelling process and in this thesis statistical inference has been performed within both a classical framework (i.e. by maximum likelihood and least square methods) and a Bayesian setting (i.e. by Markov Chain Monte Carlo techniques).
However, my contribution goes beyond the application of inferential techniques to specific case studies. The stochastic, spatially explicit, between-farm transmission model developed for the transmission of the H7N1 virus has indeed been used to simulate different control strategies and asses their relative effectiveness. The modelling framework presented here for the H1N1 pandemic in Italy constitutes a novel approach that can be applied to a variety of different infections detected by surveillance system in many countries. We have coupled a deterministic compartmental model with a statistical description of the reporting process and have taken into account for the presence of stochasticity in the surveillance system. We thus tackled some statistical challenging issues (such as the estimation of the fraction of H1N1 cases reporting influenza-like-illness symptoms) that had not been addressed before.
Last, we apply different estimation methods usually adopted in epidemiology to real and simulated school outbreaks, in the attempt to explore the suitability of a specific individual-based model at reproducing empirically observed epidemics in specific social contexts
Essays on Boundedly Rational Decision-making: Theory, Applications, and Experiments
No full textWe investigate individual decision-making by adopting Simon's view of bounded rationality
Exploiting Contextual and Social Variability for Software Adaptation
No full textSelf-adaptive software systems are systems that monitor their environment and compensate if there are deviations from their requirements. Self-adaptivity is gaining prominence as an approach to lowering software costs by reducing the need for manual system maintenance. Self-adaptivity is particularly important for distributed systems that involve both software and human/organizational actors because of the volatility as well as uncertainty that permeates their operational environments. We refer to such systems as Socio-Technical System (STS).
The thesis proposes a comprehensive framework for designing self-adaptive software that operates within a socio-technical system. The framework is founded upon the notions of contextual and social variability. A key ingredient of our approach is to rely on high-level abstractions to represent the purpose of the system (requirements model), to explicitly represent the commitments that exist among participating actors in an STS, and also to consider how operational context influences requirements. The proposed framework consists of (i) modelling and analysis techniques for representing and reasoning about contextual and social variability; (ii) a conceptual architecture for self-adaptive STSs; and (iii) a set of algorithms to diagnose a failure and to compute and select a new variant that addresses the failure. To evaluate our proposal, we developed two prototype implementations of our architecture to demonstrate different features of our framework, and successfully applied them to two case studies. In addition, the thesis reports encouraging results on experiments we conducted with our implementations in order to check for scalability