Search

BackgroundSince the outbreak, in 2019, of COVID-19, the world has experienced marked changes in daily habits, partly reflecting the exceptional social restrictions and health measures adopted to contain the disease. All these measures significantly affected not only peoples’s daily lives and psychological well-being but also the possibility for the healthcare system to function properly. In this setting, brain tumour patients were at risk due to their higher physical and mental fragility and their need for regular care. The aim of the present study was to assess, using a self-reported online questionnaire, the patients’s perceptions regarding their disease experience.Materials and methodsWe developed an online anonymous self-report survey to assess patients’s disease experience during the pandemic. We investigated the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on patients’s cancer care schedules, their psychological distress and emotions felt during the pandemic, their levels of worry about COVID-19, and their oncological conditions.Results107 patients answered our survey, most of them suffering from a glioma. Less than one-third of the sample had their appointments cancelled, delayed or converted into online visits due to the pandemic. Of the patients who answered the survey, 95% declared they were satisfied with their Institute’s oncological management. The feelings reported most often were peacefulness or anxiety/worry; the majority of the sample reported high levels of loneliness, which tended to increase with age, whilst the psychological distress was correlated with age and with having a recurrence of the disease. Half of the sample declared severe worry about their oncological condition, in particular subjects with a recurrence or who were receiving adjuvant therapies. Patients with recurrence tended to worry more about the possibility of contracting COVID-19, and its effects.ConclusionOur findings illustrate how fragile and in need of care patients with a brain tumour may be, especially those with more severe clinical conditions. These data may help boost healthcare professionals’s knowledge about brain tumour patients’s needs and fears, so as to be able to offer them a better hospital experience and improve their clinical management, while possibly also reducing the psychological burden on patients and their families.

We discuss C-MP and C-MAPF, generalizations of the classical Motion Planning (MP) and Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) problems on a directed graph G. Namely, we enforce an upper bound on the number of agents that occupy each member of a family of vertex subsets. For instance, this constraint allows maintaining a safety distance between agents. We prove that finding a feasible solution of C-MP and C-MAPF is NP-hard, and we propose a reduction method to convert them to standard MP and MAPF. This reduction method consists in finding a subset of nodes W and a reduced graph G/W, such that a solution of MAPF on G/W provides a solution of C-MAPF on G. Moreover, we study the problem of finding W of maximum cardinality, which is strongly NP-hard.

On an assigned graph, the problem of Multi-Agent Pathfinding (MAPF) consists in finding paths for multiple agents, avoiding collisions. Finding the minimum-length solution is known to be NP-hard, and computation times grows exponentially with the number of agents. However, in industrial applications, it is important to find feasible, suboptimal solutions, in a time that grows polynomially with the number of agents. Such algorithms exist for undirected and biconnected directed graphs. Our main contribution is to generalize these algorithms to the more general case of strongly connected directed graphs. In particular, given a MAPF problem with at least two holes, we present an algorithm that checks the problem feasibility in linear time with respect to the number of nodes, and provides a feasible solution in polynomial time.

The phenomenological method, characterized by the suspension of judgment (epoché), has helped analyzing the subjective experience of patients affected by mental disorders. Psychiatry, dealing with the human being itself in its complexity and unicity, is placed between the biological positivistic attempt, for which the symptoms of mental illness are a mere consequence of brain dysfunctions and the phenomenological-existential approach, inclined to consider the symptoms as meaningful phenomena of the person’s subjective experience. Eugène Minkowski, Ludwig Binswanger, Arthur Tatossian, Kimura Bin, Henri Maldiney and Hubertus Tellenbach are fundamental authors in the phenomenological psychopathology of depression; they described the alterations of the lived time, space, body and others experienced by the depressed. Starting from the main theoretical contributions of the authors, we will focus on the psychopathology and discuss the key themes of clinical depression: guilt, poverty and hypochondriasis. Finally we will focus on the typus melancholicus construct.

In this paper, we propose a branch-and-bound algorithm for solving nonconvex quadratic programming problems with box constraints (BoxQP). Our approach combines existing tools, such as semidefinite programming (SDP) bounds strengthened through valid inequalities with a new class of optimality-based linear cuts which leads to variable fixing. The most important effect of fixing the value of some variables is the size reduction along the branch-and-bound tree, allowing to compute bounds by solving SDPs of smaller dimension. Extensive computational experiments over large dimensional (up to $n=200$) test instances show that our method is the state-of-the-art solver on large-scale BoxQPs. Furthermore, we test the proposed approach on the class of binary QP problems, where it exhibits competitive performance with state-of-the-art solvers.

The purpose of this work is to introduce and characterize the Bounded Acceleration Shortest Path (BASP) problem, a generalization of the Shortest Path (SP) problem. This problem is associated to a graph: the nodes represent positions of a mobile vehicle and the arcs are associated to pre-assigned geometric paths that connect these positions. BASP consists in finding the minimum-time path between two nodes. Differently from SP, we require that the vehicle satisfy bounds on maximum and minimum acceleration and speed, that depend on the vehicle position on the currently traveled arc. We prove that BASP is NP-hard and define solution algorithm that achieves polynomial time-complexity under some additional hypotheses on problem data., 39 pages

In the Celis-Dennis-Tapia (CDT) problem a quadratic function is minimized over a region defined by two strictly convex quadratic constraints. In this paper we re-derive a necessary and optimality condition for the exactness of the dual Lagrangian bound (equivalent to the Shor relaxation bound in this case). Starting from such condition we propose to strengthen the dual Lagrangian bound by adding one or two linear cuts to the Lagrangian relaxation. Such cuts are obtained from supporting hyperplanes of one of the two constraints. Thus, they are redundant for the original problem but they are not for the Lagrangian relaxation. The computational experiments show that the new bounds are effective and require limited computing times. In particular, one of the proposed bounds is able to solve all but one of the 212 hard instances of the CDT problem presented in [Burer, Anstreicher, 2013].

The problem of planar registration consists in finding the transformation that better aligns two point sets. In our setting, the search domain is the set of planar rigid transformations and the objective function is the sum of the distances between each point of the transformed source set and the destination set. We consider a Branch and Bound (BnB) method for finding the globally optimal solution. The algorithm recursively splits the search domain into boxes and computes an upper and a lower bound for the minimum value of the restricted problem. The main contribution of this work is the introduction of a novel lower bound, the relaxation bound, which corresponds to the solution of a concave relaxation of the objective function based on the linearization of the distance. In the BnB we also employ the so called cheap bound, equal to to the sum of the minimum distances between each point of source point set, transformed according to current box, and all the candidate points in the destination point set. We prove, both theoretically and practically, that the novel relaxation bound dominates the cheap bound over small boxes. More precisely, from the theoretical point of view, we prove that the relaxation bound is a second-order approximation of the minimum value, i.e., its distance from the minimum value decreases quadratically with respect to the diameter of the box (see Theorem 1), while the cheap bound is a first-order one (see Proposition 3). From the practical point of view, we show through different computational experiments that the addition of the relaxation bound considerably enhances the performance of the BnB algorithm, compensating the higher cost of its computation with respect to the cheap bound with a strong reduction of the number of BnB nodes to be explored., Comment: 40 pages, 13 figures, 2 tables

The potential superior benefits of adaptive deep brain stimulation (aDBS) approaches compared to classical, constantparameters DBS were already proven by scientific evidence from different research groups. aDBS provides better symptoms control in Parkinson’s disease patients by adapting the stimulation parameters to the patient’s clinical state estimated through the analysis of subthalamic neuronal oscillations (ie, local field potentials) in the beta band (13-30 Hz).

In this paper, we address a class of specially structured problems that include speed planning, for mobile robots and robotic manipulators, and dynamic programming. We develop two new numerical procedures, that apply to the general case and to the linear subcase. With numerical experiments, we show that the proposed algorithms outperform generic commercial solvers., Comment: 27 pages, 9 figures, 1 table

We consider the speed planning problem for a robotic manipulator. In particular, we present an algorithm for finding the time-optimal speed law along an assigned path that satisfies velocity and acceleration constraints and respects the maximum forces and torques allowed by the actuators. The addressed optimization problem is a finite dimensional reformulation of the continuous-time speed optimization problem, obtained by discretizing the speed profile with N points. The proposed algorithm has linear complexity with respect to N and to the number of degrees of freedom. Such complexity is the best possible for this problem. Numerical tests show that the proposed algorithm is significantly faster than algorithms already existing in literature.

This thesis seeks to better understand how a combination of different project management approaches could lead organisations to cope with project closure in more effective ways. More specifically, a coexistence of Waterfall and Agile project management is examined and presented as positive contribution to insurance and investment organisations for more effective transitions from project management to business-as-usual. A comprehensive framework combines within the theoretical chapters the hybrid approach between Agile and traditional project management for successfully closing projects. It represents the lens through which the empirical material can be analysed.The empirical work is based on a single-holistic case study of Intesa Sanpaolo Life dac, incorporating seven semi-structured interviews with the most authoritative individuals of this company in relation to the topic of this paper. This case study provides a deep insight on project closure management which is addressed by investigating challenges and highlighting effective practices of the company in question. Throughout the analysis of the data gathered, the authors managed to highlight findings which provide managerial and theoretical contributions.The originality and the value of this research is given by the fact that this work expects to enrich project-based organisations which use a combination between Agile and traditional project management and struggle to get a proper project closure and transit to the operation phase. Consequently, this represents a completely new point of view in the literature related to project management, which sees project closure as the most understudied phase of the project life-cycle.

The highly distributed cooperation that characterizes several domain, like healthcare, collaborative design and cultural resources management, often raise coordination conflicts and collaborative problems. These problems require a suitable technological support that can make the members of the groups involved in these collaborative practices aware of the crucial information that is generated in the other groups. In this paper, we propose a framework for the design of such technological supports and illustrate its application by means of an articulated healthcare scenario. Our framework allows users to: manage the creation and execution of rules that are specific and “local” to specific groups; manage the exchange of rules, and hence of “procedural knowledge”, across and among different groups; conceive predefined procedures that are considered as “carriers” of contextual information rather than models of prescriptive behavior; become mutually aware of interdependent task articulation as a basic support of inter-group collaboration; get facilitated access to the relevant information that supports their collaborative activities.

This paper describes an integrated approach to the valorization of cultural heritage and its application in the context of the “Milano Antica” (Ancient Milan) project, whose aim is the development of an integrated access to information on the archaeological heritage of the city of Milan in its historical period called “Ancient City” (V century B.C. - VI century A.D.). The scenario is characterized by distinct research and preservation activities, abundant and heterogenous results, materials, information and documents. To face the challenges related to the realization of a uniform access point to the relevant information we adopted the CIDOC CRM, a standard and open conceptual and computational model for the description of Cultural Heritage.

The paper shows how the CASMAS modeling language, and its associated pervasive computing architecture, can be used to facilitate continuity of care by providing members of patientcentered communities of care with a support to cooperation and knowledge sharing through the usage of electronic documents and digital devices. We consider a scenario of clearly fragmented care to show how proper mechanisms can be defined to facilitate a better integration of practices and information across heterogeneous care networks. The scenario is declined in terms of architectural components and cooperation-oriented mechanisms that make the support reactive to the evolution of the context where these communities operate., {"references":["Conceptualizing, implementing, and evaluating extended\ncare pathways. Technical report, National Chronic Care\nConsortium, Bloomington, MN, USA, 1995.","J. H. E. Andriessen. Archetypes of knowledge communities.\nIn P. van den Besselaar, G. D. Michelis, J. Preece,\nand C. Simone, editors, Communities and Technologies\n2005, pages 191-214, Milan, Italy, 2005.","J. E. Bardram and H. B. Christensen. Pervasive computing\nsupport for hospitals: An overview of the activitybased\ncomputing project. IEEE Pervasive Computing,\n06(1):44-51, 2007.","J. Bravo, R. Hervas, S. Nava, and G. Chavira. Supporting\ninformal meetings in hospitals. In Pervasive Health\nConference and Workshops, 2006, pages 1-4, 2006.","F. Cabitza, M. Locatelli, M. Sarini, and C. Simone.\nCASMAS: Supporting collaboration in pervasive environments.\nIn PerCom2006, pages 286-295, Pisa, Italy,\nMarch 2006.","F. Cabitza, M. Locatelli, and C. Simone. A communitycentered\narchitecture for the deployment of ubiquitous\ntelemedicine systems. In Healthinf 2008.","F. Cabitza, M. P. Locatelli, and C. Simone. Cooperation\nand ubiquitous computing: an architecture towards their\nintegration. In P. Hassanaly, T. Herrmann, G. Kunau,\nand M. Zacklad, editors, Cooperative Systems Design -\nSeamless Integration of Artifacts and Conversations -\nEnhanced Concepts of Infrastructure for Communication,\npages 86-101. IOS Press, 2006.","F. Cabitza and C. Simone. \". . . and do it the usual way\":\nfostering awareness of work conventions in documentmediated\ncollaboration. In ECSCW-07, Limerick, Ireland,\n24-28 September, 2007.","S. Consolvo, P. Roessler, B. E. Shelton, A. LaMarca,\nB. Schilit, and S. Bly. Technology for care networks of\nelders. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 03(2):22-29, 2004.\n[10] J. L. Haggerty, R. J. Reid, G. K. Freeman, B. H. Starfield,\nC. E. Adair, and R. McKendry. Continuity of care: a\nmultidisciplinary review. BMJ, 327(7425):1219-1221,\n2003.\n[11] S. Helal. Programming pervasive spaces. IEEE Pervasive\nComputing, 04(1):84-87, 2005.\n[12] F. Kensing. It-augmented shared care. In CSCW-04,\nChicago, USA, November 2004.\n[13] T. Kindberg, N. Bryan-Kinns, and R. Makwana. Supporting\nthe shared care of diabetic patients. In GROUP\n-99, pages 91-100, New York, NY, USA, 1999.\n[14] G. Kortuem and Z. Segall. Wearable communities:\nAugmenting social networks with wearable computers.\nIEEE Pervasive Computing, 2(1):71-78, 2003.\n[15] M. P. Locatelli and C. Simone. Supporting care networks\nthrough an ubiquitous collaborative environment. In\nC. Nugent and J. Augusto, editors, Smart Homes and\nBeyond, volume 19, pages 204-211. Assistive Technology\nResearch, IOS Press, 2006.\n[16] E. D. Mynatt, A.-S. Melenhorst, A. D. Fisk, and W. A.\nRogers. Aware technologies for aging in place: Understanding\nuser needs and attitudes. IEEE Pervasive\nComputing, 03(2):36-41, 2004.\n[17] J. Ovretvei. Integrated care: Models and issues. Health\nCare and Informatics Review Online, 2(5), March 1998.\n[18] F. Paganelli, E. Spinicci, A. Mamelli, R. Bernazzani,\nand P. Barone. Ermhan: A multi-channel context-aware\nplatform to support mobile caregivers in continuous care\nnetworks. In Pervasive Services, IEEE International\nConference, pages 355-360, 2007."]}

Collaborative Ubiquitous Environments (CUEs) are environments supporting collaboration among persons in a ubiquitous computing setting. This paper shows how results of the research in the Multi-Agent System (MAS) area, and in particular on MAS environments, can be used to model, design and engineer CUEs, with specific reference to the management of context-awareness information. The CUE reference scenario will be introduced, then the Multilayered Multi-Agent Situated System model will be briefly described and applied to represent and to manage several types of awareness information (both physical and logical contextual information). Finally, the paper introduces a prototypal framework based on DJess supporting the definition and management of MMASS based CUEs. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

In this paper, we present an ubiquitous and pervasive computing architecture, CASMAS, aimed at supporting cooperation among the members of a community and their devices. We also show how CASMAS can be augmented by the WOAD framework, which was developed independently to model and express coordination mechanisms in document-mediated communities. We take the distributed hypertension monitoring case as an exemplifying and sufficiently complex scenario to show the feasibility and advantages of the our semantically informed modular approach. The scenario is then declined in terms of architectural components and cooperation-oriented mechanisms that are shared between the devices and entities of the designed community of care.

All personal computer application are provided with an undo functionality, which can implement any of the models available in literature. Users are generally aware of what the undo function is expected to do, depending on the application in use. Ubiquitous computing systems are beginning to be understood and deployed in real life situations, but little attention has been paid to what users expect themselves to be able to do and undo in such systems. In this paper, we present the results of a survey we made to evaluate the perception of undo mechanisms with respect to a simple ubiquitous-computing environment. Our study shows that users already have a complex vision of undo encompassing advanced features such as context awareness and compensation. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

Coordination artifacts play a primary role in cooperation and, in particular, active artifacts allow for the development of flexible cooperative software systems. Their role with respect to ubiquitous-computing environments can be defined, exploited, and assessed according to different perspectives. This paper presents a notion of active artifact that relies on the seminal definition given in CSCW literature by Schmidt and Simone, and it is applied to a model for systems supporting ubiquitous-computing collaborative environments (CASMAS). A technique to configure and interact with such environments, i.e., the composition of devices' functionalities according to their high-level features, and services provided, is presented. A scenario is used as an in-depth example along the paper. The architecture of a system implementing the scenario using our reference middleware is presented

The paper discusses the relations between Ubiquitous Computing (UC) and cooperation pointing to two reference scenarios. UC technologies are still in a early stage: however, it is possible to envisage an evolution that makes smart objects pervasive in work settings. Under the hypothesis that these objects are likely to have very a specialized functionality, the smart environment has to possess distributed inferential capabilities to complement them toward an adaptive support to both individual and collaborative behaviors. CASMAS is a model informing an architecture to design collaborative UC environments: it combines inference capabilities with the management of contextual information that is modulated according to the structure of physical and logical spaces.

This paper proposes CASMAS: an agent-based model to design an environment of collaborative applications by taking into account the notion of community. Within this model, communities are characterized by declarative rules that express and shape the participative behavior of the community members. The degree of participation of each member can dynamically change according to her physical location and her position in the logical space of the applications used within the community. The paper shows how this approach can facilitate the design of collaborative applications that are community-aware, that is augmented with mechanisms by which to manage different levels of participation of the community members.

Implanting deep brain stimulation (DBS) electrodes in patients with Parkinson’s disease often results in the appearance of a non-infectious, delayed-onset edema that disappears over time. However, the time window between the DBS electrode and DBS stimulating device implant is often used to record local field potentials (LFPs) which are used both to better understand basal ganglia pathophysiology and to improve DBS therapy. In this work, we investigated whether the presence of post-surgery edema correlates with the quality of LFP recordings in eight patients with advanced Parkinson’s disease implanted with subthalamic DBS electrodes. The magnetic resonance scans of the brain after 8.5 ± 1.5 days from the implantation surgery were segmented and the peri-electrode edema volume was calculated for both brain hemispheres. We found a correlation (ρ = −0.81, p < 0.0218, Spearman’s correlation coefficient) between left side local field potentials of the low beta band (11–20 Hz) and the edema volume of the same side. No other significant differences between the hemispheres were found. Despite the limited sample size, our results suggest that the effect on LFPs may be related to the edema localization, thus indicating a mechanism involving brain networks instead of a simple change in the electrode-tissue interface.

Background Pituitary tumors are a heterogeneous group of lesions that are usually benign. Therefore, a proper understanding of the anatomy, physiology, and pathology is mandatory to achieve favorable outcomes. Accordingly, diagnostic tests and treatment guidelines should be determined and implemented. Thus, we decided to perform a multicenter study among Italian neurosurgical centers performing pituitary surgery to provide an actual depiction from the neurosurgical standpoint. Methods On behalf of the SINch (Societa Italiana di Neurochirurgia), a survey was undertaken with the participants to explore the activities in the field of pituitary surgery within 41 public institutions. Results Of the 41 centers, 37 participated in the present study. The total number of neurosurgical procedures performed in 2016 was 1479. Most of the procedures were performed using the transsphenoidal approach (1320 transsphenoidal [1204 endoscopic, 53 microscopic, 53 endoscope-assisted microscopic] vs. 159 transcranial). A multidisciplinary tumor board is convened regularly in 32 of 37 centers, and a research laboratory is present in 18 centers. Conclusions Diagnosing pituitary/hypothalamus disorders and treating them is the result of teamwork, composed of several diverse experts. Regarding neurosurgery, our findings have confirmed the central role of the transsphenoidal approach, with preference toward the endoscopic technique. Better outcomes can be expected at centers with a multidisciplinary team and a full, or part of a, residency program, with a greater surgical caseload.

Although deep brain stimulation (DBS) surgery rarely leads to complications, when it does they can be serious (Fenoy and Simpson, 2014). In a recent study about DBS surgery complications in movement disorders, postoperative imaging demonstrated that asymptomatic intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) occurs in 0.5% of patients, asymptomatic intraventricular hemorrhage in 3.4%, symptomatic ICH in 1.1%, and ischemic infarction in 0.4% (Fenoy and Simpson, 2014). Local field potentials (LFPs) are oscillatory bioelectrical signals arising from large neuronal ensembles around an electrode inserted into the central nervous system. LFP originating from deep human brain structures can be recorded through the electrodes used for DBS in various pathological conditions. For instance, in Parkinson’s disease (PD) LFP beta activity (13–30 Hz) is typically recorded in the off-medication state and when DBS is turned off. Levodopa treatment and DBS (Giannicola et al., 2010) both suppress beta activity and the degree of suppression correlates with motor improvement. Though recordings from the subthalamic nucleus (STN) are mainly used for experimental purposes they could be useful for monitoring DBS surgery: Chen and colleagues (Chen et al., 2006) showed that intra-operative LFP recordings help identifying the STN by disclosing specific beta activity. We report the case of a patient in whom LFP recordings disclosed abnormal STN activity before complications related to DBS became clinically and neuroradiologically evident.

New adaptive systems for deep brain stimulation (DBS) could in the near future optimize stimulation settings online so as to achieve better control over the clinical fluctuations in Parkinson's disease (PD). Local field potentials (LFPs) recorded from the subthalamic nucleus (STN) in PD patients show that levodopa and DBS modulate STN oscillations. Because previous research has shown that levodopa and DBS variably influence beta LFP activity (8-20 Hz), we designed this study to find out how they affect low-frequency (LF) oscillations (2-7 Hz). STN LFPs were recorded in 19 patients with PD during DBS, after levodopa medication, and during DBS and levodopa intake combined. We investigated the relationship between LF modulations, DBS duration and levodopa intake. We also studied whether LF power depended on disease severity, the patient's clinical condition and whether LF modulations were related to electrode impedances. LF power increased during DBS, after levodopa intake and under both experimental conditions combined. The LF power increase correlated with the levodopa-induced clinical improvement and the higher the electrode impedance, the greater was the LF power change. These data suggest that the LF band could be useful as a control neurosignal for developing novel adaptive DBS systems for patients with PD.