Search

The AERS datasets is one of the few remaining, large publicly available medical data sets that until now have not been published as Linked Data. It is uniquely positioned amidst othermedical datasets. This paper describes the Hubble prototype system for clinical decision support that demonstrates the speed, ease and flexibility of producing and using a Linked Data version of the AERS dataset for clinical practice and research.

Mounting evidence supports the hypothesis that functional foods containing physiologically-active components may be healthful. Longitudinal cohort studies have shown that some food classes and dietary patterns are beneficial in primary prevention, and this has led to the identification of putative functional foods. This field, however, is at its very beginning, and additional research is necessary to substantiate the potential health benefit of foods for which the diet-health relationships are not yet scientifically validated. It appears essential, however, that before health claims are made for particular foods, in vivo randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials of clinical end-points are necessary to establish clinical efficacy. Since there is need for research work aimed at devising personalized diet based on genetic make-up, it seems more than reasonable the latter be modeled, at present, on the Mediterranean diet, given the large body of evidence of its healthful effects. The Mediterranean diet is a nutritional model whose origins go back to the traditional diet adopted in European countries bordering the Mediterranean sea, namely central and southern Italy, Greece and Spain; these populations have a lower incidence of cardiovascular diseases than the North American ones, whose diet is characterized by high intake of animal fat. The meeting in Naples and this document both aim to focus on the changes in time in these two different models of dietary habits and their fall out on public health.

12449

SEEMP is a European Project that promotes increased partnership between labour market actors and the development of closer relations between private and public Employment Services, making optimal use of the various actors’ specific characteristics, thus providing job-seekers and employers with better services. The need for a flexible collaboration gives rise to the issue of interoperability in both data exchange and share of services. SEEMP proposes a solution that relies on the concepts of services and semantics in order to provide a meaningful service-based communication among labour market actors requiring a minimal shared commitment.

Social semantic data are becoming a reality, but apparently their streaming nature has been ignored so far. Streams, being unboun- ded sequences of time-varying data elements, should not be treated as persistent data to be stored “forever” and queried on demand, but rather as transient data to be consumed on the fly by queries which are regis- tered once and for all and keep analyzing such streams, producing an- swers triggered by the streaming data and not by explicit invocation. In this paper, we propose an approach to continuous queries and real- time analysis of social semantic data with C-SPARQL, an extension of SPARQL for querying RDF streams. published

Employment Services are an important topic in the agenda of local governments and in the EU due to their social implications, such as sustainability, workforce mobility, workers’ re-qualification paths, training for fresh graduates and students. Many administrations started their own E-Government projects whose imitations emerge as the demand of workers mobility increases. The SEEMP system presented in this paper overcomes this issue in different ways: starting bilateral communications with near-border similar offices, building a federation of the local employment services, and merging isolate trials. The SEEMP approach relies on a distributed semantic service oriented infrastructure able to federate local projects, in order to create geographically aggregated services for employment by leveraging existing local ones. The social and technical aspects of the SEEMP project are presented, showing how the SEEMP system is integrated with National level systems.

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the incidence of hypertension and the rate of decline in renal function in a sample of 47 Olivetti Heart Study (OHS) participants whose blood pressure (BP) salt-sensitivity and renal tubular sodium handling had been assessed in 1987-88. METHODS: During the 2002-04 OHS follow-up examination, medical history, physical examination and blood and urine sampling were performed in 36 of the 47 participants to the baseline study (age 60 +/- 6 years; average follow-up = 15.1 +/- 0.6 years). The renal length was measured in 23 participants by kidney ultrasonography. Based on the baseline salt-sensitivity evaluation, the subjects were classified into a lower salt-sensitivity (LSS, n = 20) and a higher salt-sensitivity group (HSS, n = 16). RESULTS: In comparison with the LSS group, HSS participants had a significantly higher incidence of hypertension (87.5 versus 50.0%, P = 0.02), a higher glomerular filtration rate (median, first to fourth quartile: 81.9, 72.3-95.2 versus 72.3, 59.9-81.2 ml/min; P = 0.03) and greater kidney length (median, first to fourth quartile: 68.2, 63.3-72.1 versus 61.9, 58.7-62.7 mm/m of height; P = 0.003). The incidence of hypertension remained significantly higher in HSS individuals after adjustment for age, intercurrent changes in body mass index and baseline blood pressure on low sodium diet (P = 0.04). CONCLUSION: Our findings indicate that individuals with higher BP salt-sensitivity have a higher rate of incident hypertension and suggest an altered renal tubular sodium handling involving a trend to increased glomerular filtration rate and blood pressure over time as a possible mechanism.

Data streams occur in a variety of modern applications. Specialized Stream Database Management Systems proved to be an optimal solution for on the y analysis of data streams, but they cannot perform complex reasoning tasks that requires to combine the streaming data with less time variant knowledge. At the same time, while reasoners are year after year scaling up in the classical, time invariant domain of ontological knowledge, reasoning upon rapidly changing information has been neglected or forgotten. We hereby propose stream reasoning - an unexplored, yet high impact, research area - as the new multi-disciplinary approach which will provide the abstractions, foundations, methods, and tools required to integrate data streams and reasoning systems. In particular the focus of this paper is to sketch the research chapters of Stream Reasoning.

Search Computing defines a new class of applications, which enable end users to perform exploratory search processes over multi-domain data sources available on the Web. These applications exploit suitable software frameworks and models that make it possible for expert users to configure the data sources to be searched and the interfaces for query submission and result visualization. We describe some usage scenarios and the reference architecture for Search Computing systems.

Muscle injuries are the most common trauma in team and individual sports. The muscles most frequently affected are those of the lower limb, and in particular hamstrings, adductors, rectus femoris and calf muscles. Although several scientific studies have tried to propose different rehabilitation protocols, still too often the real rehabilitation process is not based on scientific knowledge, especially in non-elite athletes. Moreover, the growing use of physical and instrumental therapies has made it increasingly difficult to understand what can be truly effective. Therefore, the aim of the present paper is to review proposed therapeutic algorithms for muscle injuries, proposing a concise and practical summary. Following a three-phase rehabilitation protocol, this review aims to describe the conservative treatment of indirect structural muscle injuries, which are the more routinely found and more challenging type. For each phase, until return to training and return to sport are completed, the functional goal, the most appropriate practitioner, and the best possible treatment according to current evidence are expressed. Finally, the last section is focused on the specific exercise rehabilitation for the four main muscle groups with a structured explanatory timetable.

Neuromotor training can improve motor performance in athletes and patients. However, few data are available about their effect on reaction time (RT). We investigated the influence of video observation/motor imagery (VO/MI) on simple RT to visual and auditory stimuli. The experimental group comprised 21 cadets who performed VO/MI training over 4 weeks. Nineteen cadets completed a sham intervention as control. The main outcome measure was RT to auditory and visual stimuli for the upper and lower limbs. The RT to auditory stimuli improved significantly post-intervention in both groups (control vs. experimental mean change for upper limbs: &minus, 40 ms vs. &minus, 40 ms, p = 0.0008, for lower limbs: &minus, 50 ms vs. &minus, 30 ms, p = 0.0174). A trend towards reduced RT to visual stimuli was observed (for upper limbs: &minus, 30 ms vs. &minus, 20 ms, p = 0.0876, 20 ms, p = 0.0675). The interaction term was not significant. Only the specific VO/MI training produced a linear correlation between the improvement in the RT to auditory and visual stimuli for the upper (r = 0.703) and lower limbs (r = 0.473). In conclusion, VO/MI training does not improve RT when compared to control, but it may be useful in individuals who need to simultaneously develop a fast response to different types of stimuli.

The increasing interest towards biocompatible nanotechnologies in medicine, combined with electric fields stimulation, is leading to the development of electro-sensitive smart systems for drug delivery applications. Common examples of electro-sensitive materials include phospholipids that can be used to design nano-sized vesicles suitable for external electric actuation. To this regard, recently the use of pulsed electric fields to trigger release across phospholipid membranes has been numerically studied, for a deeper understanding of the phenomena at the molecular scale. Aim of this work is to give an experimental validation of the feasibility of controlling drug release from liposomes mediated by nanosecond pulsed electric fields.

Objective Isolated hypogonadotropic hypogonadism (IHH) is a rare disorder with pubertal delay, normal (normoosmic-IHH, nIHH) or defective sense of smell (Kallmann syndrome, KS). Other reproductive and non-reproductive anomalies might be present although information on their frequency are scanty, particularly according to the age of presentation. Design Observational cohort study carried out between January 2008 and June 2016 within a national network of academic or general hospitals. Methods We performed a detailed phenotyping of 503 IHH patients with: (1) manifestations of hypogonadism with low sex steroid hormone and low/normal gonadotropins; (2) absence of expansive hypothalamic/pituitary lesions or multiple pituitary hormone defects. Cohort was divided on IHH onset (PPO, pre-pubertal onset or AO, adult onset) and olfactory function: PPO-nIHH (n = 275), KS (n = 184), AO-nIHH (n = 36) and AO-doIHH (AO-IHH with defective olfaction, n = 8). Results 90% of patients were classified as PPO and 10% as AO. Typical midline and olfactory defects, bimanual synkinesis and familiarity for pubertal delay were also found among the AO-IHH. Mean age at diagnosis was significantly earlier and more frequently associated with congenital hypogonadism stigmata in patients with Kallmann’s syndrome (KS). Synkinesis, renal and male genital tract anomalies were enriched in KS. Overweight/obesity are significantly associated with AO-IHH rather than PPO-IHH. Conclusions Patients with KS are more prone to develop a severe and complex phenotype than nIHH. The presence of typical extra-gonadal defects and familiarity for PPO-IHH among the AO-IHH patients indicates a common predisposition with variable clinical expression. Overall, these findings improve the understanding of IHH and may have a positive impact on the management of patients and their families.

Several nanotechnologies rely on the use of magnetic field for therapeutic purposes, as cancer treatment, inflammation, and diseases of the nervous system. The liposomal drug delivery system is a novel technique that allows a controlled release of drugs encapsulated in a nano-carrier (i.e. liposomes), by the application of an external (electric, magnetic, thermal) stimulus to guarantee a local effect on the region where the disease has developed. Another interesting application of magnetic field is the transcranial magnetic stimulation, which is used to the study and treatment of a wide variety of neurologic and psychiatric conditions. In this paper, an analytical analysis and a numeric modelling approach is reported for the design of a versatile magnetic exposure system, suitable for different applications: in vitro magnetoliposomes (vesicles containing super-paramagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles) drug delivery, and in vitro studies to understand the action of magnetic stimulation on neurons. The simulation shows that the system is able to generate intensities of the order of mT, in a frequency range up to 20 kHz, without causing secondary effects such as a local thermal increase.

In this paper we face off the relationship value management which is a theme in the relationship marketing literature gaining increasing attention in the last decade. The main aim of this study is to evaluate job quality and in particular employees’ satisfaction of non-profit enterprises by using, among different exploratory data analysis tools, ordered multiple correspondence analysis which is a part of corporate data mining. We focus attention on Ordered Multiple Correspondence Analysis (OMCA), recently proposed in statistical literature, to monitor (dis) satisfaction in different times or spaces. In particular we present a new strategy based on OMCA which allows to deal with ordered variables (Likert items) taking into account other qualitative information of job (kind of job contract, type of incentives, etc.) af-fecting the overall satisfaction of employees.

We have conducted a comparative study between a population of Italian young adults who practise the Cosplay and a group of 'non-cosplayers', exploring several topics such as interpersonal relationships, on-line activity, sexual life and bodily experience in order to contribute to the nationwide understanding of this phenomenon which is still at its beginning. The cosplayers of the studied sample are aged between 15 and 23, with an average of 19.8 years. They are mainly female and are composed of "average" subjects whose principal activity is, as observed, to tailor their own costumes as well as to share their practice within the group. Comparing the two examined groups, the cosplayers reveal a more considerable complexity with regard to their sexual life and their interpersonal relationships experienced, the latter, mainly through virtual platforms. Moreover there's a significant difference between these two groups on how they protect their body. This aspect has been investigated by the test Body Investment Scale (Orbach, Mikulincer, 1998)., Mediterranean Journal of Clinical Psychology, Vol 3, No 2 (2015)