79,596 research outputs found
Surgery Versus ATMPs: An Example From Ophthalmology
No full textAdvanced therapy medicinal products (ATMPs) are the new frontier of medicine. Advanced therapy medicinal products are set out to satisfy unmet medical needs and provide new innovative, cutting-edge therapies for serious or life-threatening diseases, thus providing new therapeutic options for people with few or no possibility of treatment. They are divided into four groups including gene therapy medicinal products, cell-based therapy medicinal products, tissue-engineered products, and combined ATMPs, which in Europe refer to products that incorporate one or more medical devices with any of the previously mentioned ATMPs as part of the advanced medicine product (AIFA, 2017; Ten Ham et al., 2018). Advanced therapy medicinal products can potentially have long-term benefits, thus bringing a long-lasting positive impact on patient health. Advanced therapy medicinal product therapies are often administered just once or twice, which gives patients the possibility to heal quickly compared to traditional therapies. They also provide a long-term saving opportunity, both in terms of costs of treatments and procedures that are no longer necessary and in terms of quality of life and productivity. The resolution of the patient’s illness has a monetary impact on the patient, the patient’s caretakers, and especially on the society (Alliance for Regenerative Medicine, 2019). The aim of this paper was to provide an overview on the use of ATMPs approved in Europe, with a focus on blindness and visual impairment and the related economic burden. In this case study, the effective cost of a blind patient in different European countries was compared after treatment with ATMPs or traditional therapies, focusing on visual impairment caused by corneal opacity. Our evaluation includes an overview of the global economic impact of the two types of therapies on the society. We estimated direct healthcare costs, direct non-healthcare costs, and labor productivity losses, to include costs on healthcare, services, patients, their families and for the society in general. We could conclude that the costs of the two therapeutic approaches are comparable
Effect of treatment with a mineral water rich in calcium bicarbonate plus L. Reuteri on gastric emptying in dyspepsia
No full textEffect of treatment with a mineral water rich in calcium bicarbonate plus L. Reuteri on orocaecal transit in patients suffering from chronic constipation
No full textDenoise to Protect: A Method to Robustify Visual Recommenders from Adversaries
No full textWhile the integration of product images enhances the recommendation performance of visual-based recommender systems (VRSs), this can make the model vulnerable to adversaries that can produce noised images capable to alter the recommendation behavior. Recently, stronger and stronger adversarial attacks have emerged to raise awareness of these risks; however, effective defense methods are still an urgent open challenge. In this work, we propose "Adversarial Image Denoiser" (AiD), a novel defense method that cleans up the item images by malicious perturbations. In particular, we design a training strategy whose denoising objective is to minimize both the visual differences between clean and adversarial images and preserve the ranking performance in authentic settings. We perform experiments to evaluate the efficacy of AiD using three state-of-the-art adversarial attacks mounted against standard VRSs. Code and datasets at https://github.com/sisinflab/Denoise-to-protect-VRS
Potential antioxidant effect of essential oil of Ocinum basilicum in liver of Dicentrarchus labrax
No full textEndocarditis sustained by Streptococcus viridans with normal levels of procalcitonin: an unexpected finding
No full textOBJECTIVE: Procalcytonin is a useful marker of bacterial infections. Several studies have reported elevated serum levels of PCT in patients with infective endocarditis (IE) and/or other infections sustained by cocci. We report a rare case of IE attributed to Streptococcus viridans in whom levels of PCT were normal.CASE REPORT: A 67 years-old male was admitted to the Emergency Department for a 25day history of recurring night fever. Upon admission, patient underwent blood test, including PCT, showing normal levels, except for a slight increased creatinine concentration (1.6 mg/dl). CBC showed WBC levels of 10.24 x 109/l with neutrophil concentration of 8.64 x 109/l. Three blood culture were performed, and all of them were positive for Streptococcus viridans (S. oralis). Dosage of PCT was then repeated two times within the next 2 days after the admission, with negative results. An echocardiogram was performed, showing a lesion of the left anterior aortic leaflet. This finding was confirmed by a transoesophageal echocardiogram. The patient was then treated with G penicillin (6 million of Units quid) for 3 weeks; during the course of antibiotic therapy fever disappeared and blood cultures become negative.CONCLUSIONS: In the literature there are just few data about the association between PCT levels and endocarditis and sepsis but there are not etiological differentiations particularly for those sustained by Streptococcus viridans. Only one study suggests that a Streptococcus viridans' infection could reduce PCT accuracy in diagnosis oh endocarditis. So, our observation although come from a single case, could merits, further investigation
A regression framework to interpret the robustness of recommender systems against shilling attacks
No full textCollaborative filtering recommender systems (CF-RSs) employ user-item feedback, e.g., ratings, purchases, or reviews, to harmonize similarities among customers and produce personalized lists of products. Being based on the benevolence of other customers, CF-RSs are vulnerable to Shilling Attacks, i.e., fake profiles injected on the platform by adversaries to hack the recommendation outcomes toward a corrupt behavior. While mainly works on shilling attacks have been conducted to propose novel methods, compare recommendation models and outputs with and without defenses, we have found a lack of study on the impact of dataset properties on the CF-RSs robustness. In this work, we present a regression model to test whether dataset characteristics can impact the robustness of CF-RSs under shilling attacks to interpret their efficacy depending on these characteristics. Obtained results can help the system designer understand the cause of CF-RSs performance variations in attack scenarios
V-Elliot: Design, evaluate and tune visual recommender systems
No full textThe paper introduces Visual-Elliot (V-Elliot), a reproducibility framework for Visual Recommendation systems (VRSs) based on Elliot. framework provides the widest set of VRSs compared to other recommendation frameworks in the literature (i.e., 6 state-of-the-art models which have been commonly employed as baselines in recent works). The framework pipeline spans from the dataset preprocessing and item visual features loading to easily train and test complex combinations of visual models and evaluation settings. V-Elliot provides an extended set of features to ease the design, testing, and integration of novel VRSs into V-Elliot. The framework exploits of dataset filtering/splitting functions, 40 evaluation metrics, five hyper-parameter optimization methods, more than 50 recommendation algorithms, and two statistical hypothesis tests. The files of this demonstration are available at: github.com/sisinflab/elliot
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