1,721,109 research outputs found
Molecular targets in malignant pleural mesothelioma treatment
No full textMalignant mesothelioma is an aggressive tumour of the serosal surfaces with poor prognosis and increasing incidence due to widespread previous asbestos exposure. Relative chemotherapeutic and radiotherapeutic resistance makes malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM) difficult to manage, even though encouraging results were achieved with multimodality treatment. Better knowledge of angiogenesis and molecular pathways involved in MPM seems to be the right way to define new targets for systemic treatment. Neoangiogenesis may be considered as a critical step in the development of mesothelioma. Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) and platelet derived growth factor (PDGF) are autocrine growth factors in MPM and epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) appears highly expressed in this tumour. Tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) targeting growth factors like vandetanib, dasatinib, and angiogenesis inhibitors like bevacizumab, are among the most promising agents under evaluation in clinical trials. Mesothelioma is a malignancy which owes its chemoresistance to an apoptotic defect. Thus the introduction of new biologic drugs like vorinostat, bortezomib, everolimus and temsirolimus, in the treatment of MPM finds a strong rationale. This review focuses on the current target therapies and evaluates future biologic approaches for the systemic management of MPM. © 2009 Bentham Science Publishers Ltd
Un approccio socio-costruttivista mediato dalle tecnologie per l’inclusione sociale ed interculturale
No full textQuesto articolo introduce una prospettiva di utilizzo delle tecnologie educative nel contesto di un progetto europeo (P.IN.OK.I.O: Pupils for Innovation as a Key to Intercultural and Social Inclusion) mirante all'inclusione sociale ed interculturale attraverso la letteratura per l'infanzia.
Tale progetto prevedeva un complesso meccanismo di sviluppo di strumenti per la didattica con uso di tecnologie come mezzo per il migliore accesso e manipolazione dei simboli e metafore presenti nelle opere letterarie infantili: movie per la creazione di storie, blog per attivare una narrativa di classe, podcast per la condivisione delle storie di classe. I supposti che hanno portato a questo schema di utilizzo delle tecnologie partivano dal socio-costruttivismo, considerando che la partecipazione dei bambini in processi di apprendimento volti a generare inclusione sociale ed interculturale, si fonda sulla la decostruzione di significati (contenuto della fiaba) potenziata dall'uso delle tecnologie come strumento e ambiente per la costruzione di oggetti digitali basati sulle “storie di classe” (attività nella zona di sviluppo prossimale)
An overview of neoadjuvant chemotherapy in the multimodality treatment of malignant pleural mesothelioma
No full textMalignant Pleural Mesothelioma (MPM) is an aggressive tumour with poor prognosis and increasing incidence in industrialized countries because of the previous widespread exposure to asbestos fibres and to the long lag period from time of exposure and the diagnosis of the disease. MPM shows high refractoriety to systemic treatment, single-modality treatment was generally ineffective and did not achieve higher results than supportive care. The incidence of local and distant recurrences after surgery remains high and that was the reason for many centres to perform combined treatments. In the attempt of reducing the incidence of local recurrences, a multimodality approach with surgery followed by adjuvant radiotherapy was explored. Extrapleural pneumonectomy (EPP) allows higher doses of radiotherapy to the whole hemithorax by avoiding pulmonary toxicity and the results of this approach is a significant reduction of loco-regional relapses; although, extrathoracic metastasis represent a major problem in the management of the disease because of the impact on overall survival. The success with surgical resection after neoadjuvant chemotherapy in stage IIIA lung cancer has been the impetus for several groups to apply this strategy in MPM aiming at reducing the incidence of distant relapse after surgery. Platinum-based chemotherapy plus gemcitabine or pemetrexed for 3-4 cycles followed by surgery and postoperative high-dose radiotherapy showed the best results in terms of overall and progression free survival. This review will focus on the main clinical studies and overview the results of different chemotherapy regimens in the neoadjuvant treatment of MPM. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd
Acoustic individuality of free-ranging red deer (Cervus elaphus, L.) stags.
No full textdescription of acoustic individual features in the red deer Cervus elaphu
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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