1,721,084 research outputs found
Il rinnovamento delle competenze nell’amministrazione digitale
No full textThe adequacy of competencies held by bureaucratic structure of public bodies has long been an issue on which the debate – not only the legal one – focused on, being a variable which directly affects administrative capacity. The tendency is to emphasize, despite the variety of positions, the prevalence of the legal-administrative culture in the training and professional composition of public personnel, affects not always in a positive way the capability of public bodies to address the challenges raised by the transformation of PA in the perspective of technological and digital innovation. The essay tries to point out how the Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan, and specifically the urgency – underlying it – to achieve, among others, the development and the acquisition of (new)competencies (of a digital nature) for public employees, leads to achieve goals concerned by a long-term debate on the role played by people in determining the face of the Public Administration, the effectiveness of public policies, and therefore in promoting a real digitalization and modernization of P
Unicompartmental osteoarthritis: High survival rate with a combined mechanical and biological salvage approach as alternative to metal resurfacing: Results at minimum 10 years of follow‐up
Full text linkPurpose: The aim of this study was to prospectively evaluate the long-term clinical results and failure rate of patients treated with complex salvage procedures using a combined mechanical and biological approach to address unicompartmental knee osteoarthritis (OA) and postpone the need for joint replacement. Methods: Thirty-nine patients (40.3 ± 10.9 years old) affected by unicompartmental OA (Kellgren–Lawrence 3) in stable joints underwent a personalized surgical treatment depending on the specific requirements of the affected compartment, including high tibial osteotomy, osteochondral scaffold, meniscal scaffold and meniscal allograft transplantation. Patients were evaluated with the International Knee Documentation Committee (IKDC), Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) and Tegner scores before surgery, at 3 years and a minimum of 10 years of follow-up. Results: A significant improvement was observed over time in all scores but worsened at the final follow-up. The IKDC subjective score improved from 46.9 ± 16.2 to 79.8 ± 16.4 at 3 years (p < 0.0005) and then decreased to 64.5 ± 21.4 (p = 0.001) at 12 years. A similar trend was confirmed for VAS and Tegner scores. Only two patients subsequently underwent knee arthroplasty, and nine more patients were considered clinical failure, for a cumulative surgical and clinical failure rate of 28.2% at the final follow-up. Conclusion: A personalized, joint-preserving, combined mechanical and biological approach, addressing alignment as well as meniscal and cartilage lesions, is safe and effective, providing a clinical benefit and delaying the need for arthroplasty in young patients affected by unicompartmental knee OA. At the final evaluation, the clinical improvement decreased, but more than two-thirds of the patients still benefited from this treatment at a long-term follow-up. Level of Evidence: Level IV case series
Chitosan based scaffold applied in patellar cartilage lesions showed positive clinical and MRI results at minimum 2 years of follow up
No full textPurpose New scaffold-based cartilage regeneration techniques have been developed to improve the results of microfractures also in complex locations like the patello-femoral joint. The aim of this study was to analyse the results obtained in patellar lesions treated with a bioscaffold, a mixture composed by a chitosan solution, a buffer, and the patient's whole blood which forms a stable clot into the lesion. Methods Fifteen patients with ICRS grade 3-4 cartilage lesions of the patellar surface were treated with a chitosan bioscaffold. Fourteen patients were clinically and radiologically evaluated prospectively for a minimum follow-up of 2 years with IKDC, KOOS, Tegner score, and MRI. The mean age of patients at the time of surgery was 31.8 +/- 11.9 and nine patients presented degenerative aetiology, four patients with previous trauma, and 1 patient with osteochondritis dissecans. Results The IKDC subjective score improved from 46.2 +/- 19.3 preoperatively to 69.5 +/- 20.3 (p < 0.05) and 74.1 +/- 23.2 (p < 0.05) at 12 and 24 months, respectively. Also KOOS Pain, KOOS Sport/Rec and KOOS QOL showed a significant improvement from baseline to 12 months and to the final follow-up. MRI evaluation showed a complete filling of the cartilage defect at the final follow-up in 70% of the lesions, obtaining a total MOCART 2.0 score of 71.5 +/- 13.6 at 24 months after surgery. Conclusion Chondral patellar lesions represent a complex pathology, with lower results compared to other sites. This bioscaffold represents a safe surgical treatment providing a significant clinical improvement at 24 months in the treatment of patellar cartilage lesions
Arthroscopic mosaicplasty: Long-term outcome and joint degeneration progression.
Full text linkBACKGROUND:
This study aims to document the long-term results in a group of patients treated with arthroscopic mosaicplasty for knee cartilage lesions, both in terms of clinical outcome and joint degeneration progression, evaluated by radiographs.
METHODS:
26 patients (19 men and 7 women, mean age 29years, mean BMI 23) treated arthroscopically with mosaicplasty for cartilage defects of the femoral condyles (mean/median/mode size 1.9 standard deviation, SD 0.6cm2) were prospectively evaluated at 12years follow-up. The clinical outcome was analyzed with IKDC and Tegner scores. Range of motion, transpatellar and suprapatellar circumferences were also measured. Radiographs with weight-bearing antero-posterior and Rosenberg projections were used for radiological evaluation in 18 patients, applying both Kellgren-Lawrence score and a direct joint line measurement to assess osteoarthritis.
RESULTS:
A significant improvement in all clinical scores was obtained from the basal evaluation to the 12-year follow-up (IKDC subjective score from 36.8 standard deviation, SD 13.0 to 77.3 standard deviation, SD 20.6, P<0.0005; Tegner score from 2.9 standard deviation, SD 1.3 to 5.2 standard deviation, SD 2.5, P<0.0005), and better results in patients with a higher pre-injury activity level and those requiring fewer plugs. The radiographic evaluation showed significantly poorer Kellgren-Lawrence scores and a reduction of the joint line in the treated compartments. Knees with 3-4 plugs presented a significantly higher joint degeneration level with respect to those implanted with 1-2 plugs.
CONCLUSIONS:
Mosaicplasty is an effective surgical option for small lesions of the femoral condyles. Although joint degeneration progression was present at 12years, this did not affect significantly the clinical outcome which was satisfactory at long-term follow-up
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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