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Laure Stella Ghoma Linguissi1,2 Tani Sagna3,4, Serge Théophile Soubeiga1,4, Luc Christian Gwom,5 Céline Nguefeu Nkenfou6,5, Dorcas Obiri-Yeboah,7 Abdoul Karim Ouattara1,4, Virginio Pietra,4 Jacques Simpore1,41Laboratoire de Biologie Moléculaire et de Génétique, Université Ouaga I Pr Joseph Ki-Zerbo, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso; 2Institut National de Recherche en Sciences de la Santé (IRSSA), Brazzaville, Republic of Congo; 3Institut de Recherche en Sciences de la Santé (IRSS), Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso; 4Centre de Recherche Biomoleculaire Pietro Annigoni (CERBA), Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso; 5“Chantal Biya” International Reference Centre for Research on HIV/Aids Prevention and Management (CBIRC), Yaoundé, Cameroon; 6Higher Teachers’ Training College, University of Yaoundé I, Yaoundé, Cameroon; 7Department of Microbiology and Immunology, School of Medical Sciences, University of Cape Coast, Cape Coast, GhanaBackground: Burkina-Faso’s HIV/AIDS program is one of the most successful in Africa, with a declining HIV prevalence and treatment outcomes that rival those of developed countries. Prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) guidelines in Burkina-Faso, initiated in the year 2000, were revised in 2004, 2006 and 2010. The guideline document has since undergone several stages of improvement, largely based on recommendations from WHO, with adaptations by local experts in the field. Option B+ adopted since August 2014 in Burkina-Faso has enabled maintenance of mothers on longer treatment and increasing their survival and that of their children. Through this review, we describe the achievements and challenges of HIV PMTCT programs in Burkina-Faso.Aims of study: This study had the following objectives: 1) describing the historical perspective of PMTCT implementation in Burkina-Faso; 2) presenting the effectiveness of interventions at improving PMTCT service delivery and promoting retention of mothers and babies in care; and 3) determining the impact of male partner involvement on PMTCT in Burkina-Faso.Methodology: A literature search was conducted in PubMed and Google. Search terms included the following keywords: “HIV testing”; “prevention”; “mother”; “child”; “male partner”; “counseling”; “involvement”; “participation”; and the grouped terms “PMTCT and partners”; “VCT”; “barriers and/or factors”; “Male involvement in PMTCT”; and “Burkina-Faso”. Data collection took place from May to October 2015. The search was limited to articles published between January 2002 and December 2015. UNICEF and UNAIDS web sites were also used to find relevant abstracts and documents.Results: Studies have revealed that with PMTCT, HIV transmission rate moved from 10.4% in 2006 to 0% in 2015. The PMTCT program remains the best way to care for HIV-infected pregnant women and their babies. The current PMTCT policy is based on evidence that male partner involvement is associated with women’s completion of PMTCT.Conclusion: This study shows that the reduction in mother to child transmission of HIV in Burkina-Faso over the years is mainly due to the improvement of PMTCT programs. Efforts still need to be made about the involvement of male partners.Keywords: HIV/AIDS, PTMTCT, HAART, Burkina Faso

The development of autonomous vehicles, both terrestrial and aerial ones (unmanned aerial system (UAS)), is causing the need of properly formulating appropriate solutions for ensuring a safe interaction between them, human beings and the infrastructures and environment in their operating area. To such aim, the knowledge of the positions of different platforms moving in the considered area is fundamental. GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) is by far the most used positioning technique in order to determine positions all over the world. Nevertheless, there are several conditions in which its use is unfortunately impossible or unreliable. Hence, different techniques, based on the use of sensors either mounted on the moving platforms or on an ad-hoc infrastructure, shall be used in order to determine the absolute and relative positions of the involved platforms. To this aim, this work proposes the use of vision, in particular from UAS imagery, static LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) and UWB (Ultra Wide-Band) transceivers, with initial encouraging results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to examine innovative solutions to enhance the tourist experience and visitor localization within the Bossea Cave, one of the most important karstic caves in Italy, located in the municipality of Frabosa Soprana. The lack of advanced technological tools for managing cave structures and modernizing visitor tours creates a significant opportunity for the integration of new technologies. The researchers propose a low-cost and modular hardware infrastructure, consisting of a series of single-board computers distributed throughout the cave, acting as local web servers to provide visitors with customizable multimedia content, accessible through a web application on their personal devices via a local Wi-Fi network. This infrastructure also enables visitor localization based on their connection point within the cave, with the additional goal of testing the ultra-wideband (UWB) wireless technology in this complex and humid environment. The UWB technology offers high-precision localization, even in indoor environments and caves, where GNSS signals are not available. Overall, the study provides a promising solution to enhance the visitor experience and offers opportunities for cave management and research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The safety and usability of infrastructures such as bridges, roads, and buildings must be monitored throughout their useful life. Traditional inspection methods are time-consuming and expensive, and innovative solutions using LiDAR-based techniques have developed. This study presents a semi-automatic method for detecting deteriorations on structural elements of a bridge using an integrated dataset of point clouds and radiometric information. The method involves using a Terrestrial Laser Scanner (TLS) to obtain high-resolution georeferenced point clouds of the bridge beams, which are then filtered to identify four classes of deteriorations. Six Machine Learning Classifiers are tested and compared using Overall Accuracy and F1-score metrics. The Random Forest emerged as the best-performing. It was then optimised by reducing the input features through an importance analysis and the accuracies measured. The results show promise and can be explored further on a larger dataset. The study aims to generalise the methodology to transfer it to actual cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the availability of GNSS on consumer devices enabled personal navigation for most of the World population in most of the outdoor conditions, the problem of precise pedestrian positioning is still quite challenging when indoors or, more in general, in GNSS-challenging working conditions. Furthermore, the covid-19 pandemic also raised of pedestrian tracking, in any environment, but in particular indoors, where GNSS typically does not ensure sufficient accuracy for checking people distance. Motivated by the mentioned needs, this paper investigates the potential of UWB and LiDAR for pedestrian positioning and tracking. The two methods are compared in an outdoor case study, nevertheless, both are usable indoors as well. The obtained results show that the positioning performance of the LiDAR-based approach overcomes the UWB one, when the pedestrians are not obstructed by other objects in the LiDAR view. Nevertheless, the presence of obstructions causes gaps in the LiDAR-based tracking: instead, the combination of LiDAR and UWB can be used in order to reduce outages in the LiDAR-based solution, whereas the latter, when available, usually improves the UWB-based results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development and availability on consumer devices of the global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) have dramatically changed the everyday-life of most of the human population, enabling real time navigation on almost any smart device produced in the last years. However, such strong dependence on the availability of the GNSS limits the further spread of location based services to the areas where GNSS is not available or reliable. Motivated by these considerations, several research groups recently considered the problem of developing alternative positioning systems able to compensate the unavailability of GNSS in certain areas. Similarly, this paper also investigates the performance of certain alternative methods, which aim at partially substitute GNSS. In particular, the positioning performance of an affordable Ultra Wide-Band system is compared with that of a vision approach, based on the use of visual information acquired by an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) flying over the area of interest. In accordance with the results obtained in our dataset, the drone-based vision system usually allow to obtain better positioning results when the pedestrians are visible in the drone video frames (median 2D positioning error less than 25 cm). Nevertheless, the combination of such strategies shall also be investigated in order to obtain a more robust positioning system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile Mapping Systems (MMS) are multi-sensor technologies based on SLAM procedure, which provides accurate 3D measurement and mapping of the environment as also trajectory estimation for autonomous navigation. The major limits of these algorithms are the navigation and mapping inconsistence over the time and the georeferencing of the products. These issues are particularly relevant for pose estimation regardless the environment like in seamless navigation. This paper is a preliminary analysis on a proposed multi-sensor platform integrated for indoor/outdoor seamless positioning system. In particular the work is devoted to analyze the performances of the MMS in term of positioning accuracy and to evaluate its improvement with the integration of GNSS and UWB technology. The results show that, if the GNSS and UWB signal are not degraded, using the correct weight to their observations in the Stencil estimation algorithm, is possible to obtain an improvement in the accuracy of the MMS navigation solution as also in the global consistency of the final point cloud. This improvement is measured in about 7 cm for planimetric coordinate and 34 cm along the elevation with respect to the use of the Stencil system alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

(TLS, Terrestrial Laser Scanning), and large scale mapping derived by UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) survey. This paper refers an example of 3D survey and reality based modelling applied on landscape and architectural assets. The choice of methods for documentation, in terms of survey techniques, depends primarily on issues and features of the area. The achieved experience, allow to consider that the easy handling of TLS has enabled the use in limited spaces among buildings and collapsed roofs, but the topographic measure of GCPs (Ground Control Points), neither by total station nor by GPS/RTK technique, was easily feasible. Even more than proving the ability of the integration of TLS and UAV photogrammetry to achieve a multisource and multi-scale whole model of a village, the experience has been a test to experiment the registration of terrestrial clouds with the support of control points derived by UAV survey and finally, a comparison among different strategies of clouds registration is reported. Analysing for each approach a number of parameters (number of clouds registration, number of needed points, processing time, overall accuracy) the further comparisons have been achieved. The test revealed that it is possible to decrease the large number of terrestrial control points when their determination by topographical measures is difficult, and it is possible to combine the techniques not only for the integration of the final 3Dmodel, but also to solve and make the initial stage of the drafting process more effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]