Search

Oocyte donation (OD) has greatly improved over the last three decades, becoming a preferred practice of assisted reproductive technology (ART) for infertile women wishing for motherhood. Through OD, indeed, it has become possible to overcome the physiological limitation due to the ovarian reserve (OR) exhaustion as well as the poor gamete reliability which parallels the increasing age of women. However, despite the great scientific contribution related to the success of OD in the field of infertility, this practice seems to be associated with a higher rate of major risky events during pregnancy as recurrent miscarriage, infections and placental diseases including gestational hypertension, pre-eclampsia and post-partum hemorrhage, as well as several maternal-fetal complications due to gametes manipulation and immune system interaction. Here, we will revisit this questioned topic since a number of studies in the medical literature focus on the successful aspects of the OD procedure in terms of pregnancy rate without, however, neglecting the risks and complications potentially linked to external manipulation or heterologous implantation.

The explosion of artificial intelligence methods has paved the way for more sophisticated smart mobility solutions. In this work, we present a multi-camera video content analysis (VCA) system that exploits a single-shot multibox detector (SSD) network to detect vehicles, riders, and pedestrians and triggers alerts to drivers of public transportation vehicles approaching the surveilled area. The evaluation of the VCA system will address both detection and alert generation performance by combining visual and quantitative approaches. Starting from a SSD model trained for a single camera, we added a second one, under a different field of view (FOV) to improve the accuracy and reliability of the system. Due to real-time constraints, the complexity of the VCA system must be limited, thus calling for a simple multi-view fusion method. According to the experimental test-bed, the use of two cameras achieves a better balance between precision (68%) and recall (84%) with respect to the use of a single camera (i.e., 62% precision and 86% recall). In addition, a system evaluation in temporal terms is provided, showing that missed alerts (false negatives) and wrong alerts (false positives) are typically transitory events. Therefore, adding spatial and temporal redundancy increases the overall reliability of the VCA system.

Malignant melanoma is a fatal disease that affects all skin sites. Among these, vulvar melanoma (VM) is a rare gynecological condition that accounts for 5% of all vulvar neoplasms. VM primarily affects older Caucasian women and its relationship to sun exposure is undefined. Diagnosis is defined by biopsy but many clinical, dermatoscopic, and confocal microscopic features can guide doctors. The molecular profile is characterized by the KIT mutation, revealed by all of the technologies that are used (classical sequencing, next-generation sequencing, and immunohistochemical staining). BRAF and NRAS mutations are also common in VM. All of these mutations are possible therapeutic targets. Today, surgery remains the first treatment choice for primary VM. The role of neoadjuvant and adjuvant therapy is scarce and the treatment of relapses is widely debated.

The advancement in the domain of IoT accelerated the development of new communication technologies such as the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol. Although MQTT servers/brokers are considered the main component of all MQTT-based IoT applications, their openness makes them vulnerable to potential cyber-attacks such as DoS, DDoS, or buffer overflow. As a result of this, an efficient intrusion detection system for MQTT-based applications is still a missing piece of the IoT security context. Unfortunately, existing IDSs do not provide IoT communication protocol support such as MQTT or CoAP to validate crafted or malformed packets for protecting the protocol implementation vulnerabilities of IoT devices. In this paper, we have designed and developed an MQTT parsing engine that can be integrated with network-based IDS as an initial layer for extensive checking against IoT protocol vulnerabilities and improper usage through a rigorous validation of packet fields during the packet-parsing stage. In addition, we evaluate the performance of the proposed solution across different reported vulnerabilities. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution for detecting and preventing the exploitation of vulnerabilities on IoT protocols.

The application of machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques in the medical world is growing, with a range of purposes: from the identification and prediction of possible diseases to patient monitoring and clinical decision support systems. Furthermore, the widespread use of remote monitoring medical devices, under the umbrella of the "Internet of Medical Things" (IoMT), has simplified the retrieval of patient information as they allow continuous monitoring and direct access to data by healthcare providers. However, due to possible issues in real-world settings, such as loss of connectivity, irregular use, misuse, or poor adherence to a monitoring program, the data collected might not be sufficient to implement accurate algorithms. For this reason, data augmentation techniques can be used to create synthetic datasets sufficiently large to train machine learning models. In this work, we apply the concept of generative adversarial networks (GANs) to perform a data augmentation from patient data obtained through IoMT sensors for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) monitoring. We also apply an explainable AI algorithm to demonstrate the accuracy of the synthetic data by comparing it to the real data recorded by the sensors. The results obtained demonstrate how synthetic datasets created through a well-structured GAN are comparable with a real dataset, as validated by a novel approach based on machine learning.

IoT networks are increasingly popular nowadays to monitor critical environments of different nature, significantly increasing the amount of data exchanged. Due to the huge number of connected IoT devices, security of such networks and devices is therefore a critical issue. Detection systems assume a crucial role in the cyber-security field: based on innovative algorithms such as machine learning, they are able to identify or predict cyber-attacks, hence to protect the underlying system. Nevertheless, specific datasets are required to train detection models. In this work we present MQTTset, a dataset focused on the MQTT protocol, widely adopted in IoT networks. We present the creation of the dataset, also validating it through the definition of a hypothetical detection system, by combining the legitimate dataset with cyber-attacks against the MQTT network. Obtained results demonstrate how MQTTset can be used to train machine learning models to implement detection systems able to protect IoT contexts.

Cooperative Cyber-Physical Systems (Co-CPSs) can be enabled using wireless communication technologies, which in principle should address reliability and safety challenges. Safety for Co-CPS enabled by wireless communication technologies is a crucial aspect and requires new dedicated design approaches. In this paper, we provide an overview of five Co-CPS use cases, as introduced in our SafeCOP EU project, and analyze their safety design requirements. Next, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the main existing wireless communication technologies giving details about the protocols developed within particular standardization bodies. We also investigate to what extent they address the non-functional requirements in terms of safety, security and real time, in the different application domains of each use case. Finally, we discuss general recommendations about the use of different wireless communication technologies showing their potentials in the selected real-world use cases. The discussion is provided under consideration in the 5G standardization process within 3GPP, whose current efforts are inline to current gaps in wireless communications protocols for Co-CPSs including many future use cases.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), where a multiplicity of sensors observe a physical phenomenon and transmit their measurements to one or more sinks, pertain to the class of multi-terminal source and channel coding problems of Information Theory. In this category, "real-time" coding is often encountered for WSNs, referring to the problem of finding the minimum distortion (according to a given measure), under transmission power constraints, attainable by encoding and decoding functions, with stringent limits on delay and complexity. On the other hand, the Decision Theory approach seeks to determine the optimal coding/decoding strategies or some of their structural properties. Since encoder(s) and decoder(s) possess different information, though sharing a common goal, the setting here is that of Team Decision Theory. A more pragmatic vision rooted in Signal Processing consists of fixing the form of the coding strategies (e.g., to linear functions) and, consequently, finding the corresponding optimal decoding strategies and the achievable distortion, generally by applying parametric optimization techniques. All approaches have a long history of past investigations and recent results. The goal of the present paper is to provide the taxonomy of the various formulations, a survey of the vast related literature, examples from the authors' own research, and some highlights on the inter-play of the different theories.