Search

In response to the important environmental impacts produced by the road transport network during all its life cycle stages, a set of measurements to include sustainable principles have been identified between 1997–2021, analysed and mapped by applying SciMAT and VOSviewer. The results have shown the predominance of issues which analyse the life cycle assessment of road infrastructures in its both environmental and economic dimension as a way to mitigate their effects on climate change, including the reduction of resources and energy consumption, or of energy consumption and greenhouse gases emissions during the construction and operation stages, respectively. However, the incorporation of the social life cycle assessment dimension, their adaptation to climate change, and the use of smart roads are still in an early stage. Therefore, efforts to include these issues are necessary to address their design according to the resilience concept and ensuring a cleaner and more competitive and climate-neutral Europe.

Malignant pleural mesothelioma is an aggressive malignancy with poor prognosis. Unilateral pleural effusion is frequently the initial clinical sign requiring therapeutic thoracentesis, which also offers a diagnostic opportunity. Detection of soluble biomarkers can support diagnosis, but few show good diagnostic accuracy. Here, we studied the expression levels and discriminative power of two putative biomarkers, prosaposin and extracellular sulfatase SULF-1, identified by proteomic and transcriptomic analysis, respectively. Pleural effusions from a total of 44 patients (23 with mesothelioma, 8 with lung cancer, and 13 with non-malignant disease) were analyzed for prosaposin and SULF-1 by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. Pleural effusions from mesothelioma patients had significantly higher levels of prosaposin and SULF-1 than those from non-malignant disease patients. Receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) analysis showed that both biomarkers have good discriminating power as pointed out by an AUC value of 0.853 (p = 0.0005) and 0.898 (p < 0.0001) for prosaposin and SULF-1, respectively. Combining data ensued a model predicting improvement of the diagnostic performance (AUC = 0.916, p < 0.0001). In contrast, prosaposin couldn’t discriminate mesothelioma patients from lung cancer patients while ROC analysis of SULF-1 data produced an AUC value of 0.821 (p = 0.0077) but with low sensitivity. In conclusion, prosaposin and SULF-1 levels determined in pleural effusion may be promising biomarkers for differential diagnosis between mesothelioma and non-malignant pleural disease. Instead, more patients need to be enrolled before granting the possible usefulness of these soluble proteins in differentiating mesothelioma pleural effusions from those linked to lung cancer.

The trade-off between awareness and interruption is a crucial aspect in network fault notifiers: Low severity alarms should not distract operators from other primary tasks, however it might be crucial that operators promptly react to critical notifications. A notification system should hence determine when a particular interruption is appropriate and how it should be presented. In this direction, this paper presents a multistep design path beginning from the objective of designing a proof-of-concept for a glanceable alarm notification component for telecommunication network management systems based on a peripheral display approach. In particular the goal was a notifier guided by severity-based strategies and offering the information expressiveness of a one-notification-at-the-time perspective while enriching it with overview capabilities to guarantee (possibly subliminal) long-term local and global content comprehension and prompt reaction only when the interruption from the foreground task is dictated by the fault severity. A first design macro-phase led to the simple yet effective GLANCE (GLanceable Alarm Notification for a User Centered Experience) model, based on a visual coding technique oriented to comprehension and reaction, and a transition strategy oriented to interruptions and reaction. A second design macro-phase studied the application of GLANCE to a personal customizable multichannel notification tool and to a service-oriented fault monitor for digital terrestrial television broadcasting networks.