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The characteristics of a hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) detector are presented here for monitoring in space solar flares and the evolution of large energetic proton events up to hundreds of MeV. The a-Si:H presents an excellent radiation hardness and finds application in harsh radiation environments for medical purposes, for particle beam characterization and in space weather science and applications. The critical flux detection threshold for solar X rays, soft gamma rays, electrons and protons is discussed in detail., Comment: 32 pages, 13 figures, submitted to Experimental Astronomy

The automatic assignment of a severity score to the CT scans of patients affected by COVID-19 pneumonia could reduce the workload in radiology departments. This study aims at exploiting Artificial intelligence (AI) for the identification, segmentation and quantification of COVID-19 pulmonary lesions. We investigated the effects of using multiple datasets, heterogeneously populated and annotated according to different criteria. We developed an automated analysis pipeline, the LungQuant system, based on a cascade of two U-nets. The first one (U-net_1) is devoted to the identification of the lung parenchyma, the second one (U-net_2) acts on a bounding box enclosing the segmented lungs to identify the areas affected by COVID-19 lesions. Different public datasets were used to train the U-nets and to evaluate their segmentation performances, which have been quantified in terms of the Dice index. The accuracy in predicting the CT-Severity Score (CT-SS) of the LungQuant system has been also evaluated. Both Dice and accuracy showed a dependency on the quality of annotations of the available data samples. On an independent and publicly available benchmark dataset, the Dice values measured between the masks predicted by LungQuant system and the reference ones were 0.95$\pm$0.01 and 0.66$\pm$0.13 for the segmentation of lungs and COVID-19 lesions, respectively. The accuracy of 90% in the identification of the CT-SS on this benchmark dataset was achieved. We analysed the impact of using data samples with different annotation criteria in training an AI-based quantification system for pulmonary involvement in COVID-19 pneumonia. In terms of the Dice index, the U-net segmentation quality strongly depends on the quality of the lesion annotations. Nevertheless, the CT-SS can be accurately predicted on independent validation sets, demonstrating the satisfactory generalization ability of the LungQuant.

A proof of principle proton Computed Tomography (pCT) apparatus, based on a silicon microstrip tracker and a YAG:Ce calorimeter, has been manufactured. Tests with a 175 MeV proton beam at The Svedberg Laboratory (TSL, Uppsala, Sweden) aiming at collecting data for reconstructing a tomographic image have been carried out. Algebraic iterative reconstruction methods, together with the most likely path formalism, have been used to obtain non-homogeneous phantom images to eventually extract density and spatial resolutions. The heavy computation load required by the algebraic algorithms has been approached fully exploiting the high calculation parallelism of Graphics Processing Units. The dose delivered to the phantom during the tomographic data-taking has been estimated as well as spatial and density resolutions dependence on dose. An upgraded pCT apparatus with an extended field-of-view able to reconstruct objects of the size of a human head, thus suitable to be used in pre-clinical tests, is now at an advanced construction stage. Using this new apparatus radiographies of an anthropomorphic phantom have been taken at the proton experimental beam line of the 'Trento Proton Therapy Center' (Trento, Italy).

The aim of the NA48 experiment at the CERN SPS is to measure direct CP violation in neutral kaon decays thus determining the parameter $\epsilon'/\epsilon$ with an accuracy of $2\times 10^{-4}$. The advantages of NA48 with respect to previous experiments are high statistics and reduced systematic effects. The principle of the experiment and the performance of the detector components are presented., Comment: To appear in the procs of the 6th Conf. on the Intersection of Particle and Nuclear Physics, Big Sky, Montana (CIPANP97); 7 pages including 3 figures

The aim of the NA48 experiment at the CERN SPS is to measure direct CP violation in neutral kaon decays thus determining the parameter $\epsilon'/\epsilon$ with an accuracy of $2\times 10^{-4}$. The advantages of NA48 with respect to previous experiments are high statistics and reduced systematic effects. The principle of the experiment and the performance of the detector components are presented., Comment: To appear in the procs of the 6th Conf. on the Intersection of Particle and Nuclear Physics, Big Sky, Montana (CIPANP97); 7 pages including 3 figures