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Ipoacusia e infezione congenita da citomegalovirus: i risultati di uno studio retrospettivo di 11 anni basato sui dati di laboratorio.Il citomegalovirus è la più comune causa di infezione congenita nei paesi industrializzati, con una prevalenza stimata intorno allo 0.3-2% dei nati vivi. Di questi, il 10-15% presenta sequele tardive tra cui deficit visivi, uditivi, ritardo mentale. La infezione congenita da citomegalovirus, ad oggi, è ancora ritenuta la principale causa di ipoacusia neurosensoriale infantile su base non genetica. Sebbene tale correlazione sia stata descritta più di 50 anni fa, la storia naturale del coinvolgimento dell’orecchio interno non è stata ancora completamente definita. La ipoacusia neurosensoriale è la sequela più frequente ed in una percentuale variabile, a seconda delle casistiche fino al 30%, la soglia è caratterizzata da fluttuazioni o deterioramento progressivo. Lo scopo di questo studio è stato quello di valutare la prevalenza della ipoacusia nei casi di infezione congenita da CMV della provincia di Modena, partendo dal data base del laboratorio di Microbiologia e Virologia, centro di riferimento per la intera provincia. Inoltre, ci si è proposti di valutare la entità della ipoacusia come sequela tardiva. Sono stati arruolati tutti i bambini sottoposti ad esame delle urine per sospetta infezione da CMV o mediante ricerca del DNA virale su Guthrie Card, nel periodo compreso tra gennaio 2004 e dicembre 2014. Mediante il contributo dei pediatri di famiglia e del servizio di Audiologia di Modena sono state accolte le informazioni cliniche sulla eventuale presenza alla nascita o insorgenza successiva di ipoacusia, escludendo dallo studio i casi in cui ciò non è stato possibile. I risultati hanno dimostrato una prevalenza annuale di infezione congenita da citomegalovirus stabile nel tempo nonostante l’aumento progressivo dei nati sottoposti al test. La prevalenza della ipoacusia nei casi di infezione congenita è in linea con la letteratura mentre non sono emersi, nel lungo periodo, casi con ipoacusia media/severa bilaterale ad insorgenza tardiva. La introduzione dello screening audiologico neonatale nella nostra regione (2012) ha permesso una diagnosi precoce della ipoacusia in quanto i nati con esito fail alle TEOAE venivano sottoposti anche al test per la ricerca del virus nelle urine. Pur con tutti i limiti di uno studio basato su revisione di casistica, possiamo concludere che permane la necessità di studi epidemiologici europei che consentano di definire meglio la relazione tra infezione congenita da CMV e patologia dell’orecchio interno in quanto l’impatto dei fattori ambientali e genetici non è ancora del tutto chiarito. La sinergia tra screening audiologico neonatale ed esecuzione del test per la ricerca del virus nelle urine si è dimostrata molto proficua.Congenital cytomegalovirus infection is considered the main cause of infantile non-genetic neurosensory hearing loss. Although this correlation was described more than 50 years ago, the natural history of internal ear involvement has not yet been fully defined. Hearing loss is the most frequent sequela and is seen in a variable percentage up to 30%; the hearing threshold is characterised by fluctuations or progressive deterioration. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the prevalence of hearing loss in cases of congenital CMV infection from Modena county, starting from the database of the microbiology and virology reference laboratory. All children undergoing urine testing for suspected CMV infection or viral DNA testing on Guthrie Card in the period between January 2004 and December 2014 were enrolled in the study. Family paediatricians were contacted and asked about clinical information on the possible presence at birth or subsequent occurrence of hearing loss, excluding cases where this was not possible. The results showed an annual prevalence of congenital cytomegalovirus infection among suspected cases that was stable over time despite the progressive increase in subjects tested. The prevalence of hearing loss was in line with the literature, whereas in long-term follow-up cases of moderate, medium-to-severe hearing loss with late onset were not detected. The introduction of newborn hearing screening in the county has allowed early diagnosis of hearing loss at birth as non-TEOAE-born births underwent a urine virus test. Moreover, despite all the limitations of the study, we can conclude that European epidemiological studies are needed to better define the relationship between congenital CMV infection and internal ear disease as the impact of environmental and genetic factors is still not entirely clarified.

The EXPADES (EXotic PArticle DEtection System) detector array consists of 16 Double Side Silicon Strip Detectors (DSSSD) with active areas of 64 × 64 mm 2 , arranged in 8 ΔE (40/50 μm)–E (300 μm) telescopes. All detector faces are segmented into 32 × 2-mm wide strips, ensuring a 2 × 2 mm 2 pixel configuration. Eight ionization chambers can be alternatively used as ΔE stages or, if needed, as an additional third layer for more complex triple telescopes. The signals from silicon ΔE layers and from ionization chambers are read by standard electronics, while innovative 32-channel ASIC chips are employed for the readout of the E stages. The results of off-line tests with alpha sources and from the first in-beam experiment with a 17 O beam are presented.

Background and purpose: Sporadic amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (sALS) is a disease with a focal clinical onset and contiguous spread. We examined patterns of disease spread following symptoms onset in sALS and whether the pattern of spread predicted survival. Methods: Review of medical records (2003–2009) at London Ontario and Buenos Aires clinic cohorts retrieved 318 patients with sporadic sALS. According to patient self-report, we determined eight spread patterns: rostro-caudal, caudo-rostral, crossed, circular, superior interposed, middle interposed, inferior interposed and isolated. The variables studied were as follows: age, gender, sALS phenotypes, time from onset to diagnosis and time and direction of the spreading to the first region. Survival from symptoms onset was analysed by Kaplan–Meier, Tarone-Ware and Cox proportional hazards methods. Results: The direction of first spread was horizontal in 33%, rostral to caudal in 32% and caudal to rostral in 21%, whereas spread to remote regions was observed in 14% of patients. Survival curves and 3- and 5-year survival rates favoured patients with an isolated and caudo-rostral pattern of spread compared to patients progressing to distant regions without involvement in the intervening region, or superior and inferior interposed patterns (Tarone-Ware P = 0.001, v 2 = 0.002 and v 2 = 0.006, respectively). Factors affecting survival were gender, time to diagnosis, flail arm phenotype and age at diagnosis. Conclusions: We have provided evidence that not all spread in ALS is contiguous and that the nature of symptom progression influences survival. Patients with sALS with interposed patterns had a worse prognosis, whereas patients with caudo-rostral pattern fared better than the rest.

Objective To evaluate the effects of methadone, administered alone or in combination with acepromazine or xylazine, on sedation and on physiologic values in dogs. Study design Randomized cross-over design. Animals Six adult healthy mixed-breed dogs weighing 13.5 ± 4.9 kg. Methods Dogs were injected intramuscularly with physiologic saline (Control), or methadone (0.5mg kg−1) or acepromazine (0.1 mg kg−1) or xylazine (1.0 mg kg−1), or acepromazine (0.05 mg kg−1) plus methadone (0.5 mg kg−1) or xylazine (0.5 mg kg−1) plus methadone (0.5 mg kg−1) in a randomized cross-over design, with at least 1-week intervals. Sedation, pulse rate, indirect systolic arterial pressure, respiratory rate (RR), body temperature and pedal withdrawal reflex were evaluated before and at 15-minute intervals for 90 minutes after treatment. Results Sedation was greater in dogs receiving xylazine alone, xylazine plus methadone and acepromazine plus methadone. Peak sedative effect occurred within 30 minutes of treatment administration. Pulse rate was lower in dogs that received xylazine either alone or with methadone during most of the study. Systolic arterial pressure decreased only in dogs receiving acepromazine alone. When methadone was administered alone, RR was higher than in other treatments during most of the study and a high prevalence of panting was observed. In all treatments body temperature decreased, this effect being more pronounced in dogs receiving methadone alone or in combination with acepromazine. Pedal withdrawal reflex was absent in four dogs receiving methadone plus xylazine but not in any dog in the remaining treatments. Conclusions and clinical relevance Methadone alone produces mild sedation and a high prevalence of panting. Greater sedation was achieved when methadone was used in combination with acepromazine or xylazine. The combination xylazine–methadone appears to result in better analgesia than xylazine administered alone. Both combinations of methadone/sedative were considered effective for premedication in dogs.

We describe the experimental set-up of the Radioactive Ion Beam (RIB) in-flight facility EXOTIC consisting of: (a) two position-sensitive Parallel Plate Avalanche Counters (PPACs), dedicated to the event-by-event tracking of the produced RIBs and to time of flight measurements and (b) the new high-granularity compact telescope array EXPADES (EXotic PArticle DEtection System), designed for nuclear physics and nuclear astrophysics experiments employing low-energy light RIBs. EXPADES consists of eight Δ E – E res telescopes arranged in a cylindrical configuration around the target. Each telescope is made up of two Double Sided Silicon Strip Detectors (DSSSDs) with a thickness of 40/60 μm and 300 μm for the Δ E and Eres layer, respectively. Additionally, eight ionization chambers were constructed to be used as an alternative Δ E stage or, in conjunction with the entire DSSSD array, to build up more complex triple telescopes. New low-noise multi-channel charge-sensitive preamplifiers and spectroscopy amplifiers, associated with constant fraction discriminators, peak-and-hold and Time to Amplitude Converter circuits were developed for the electronic readout of the Δ E stage. Application Specific Integrated Circuit-based electronics was employed for the treatment of the Eres signals. An 8-channel, 12-bit multi-sampling 50 MHz Analog to Digital Converter, a Trigger Supervisor Board for handling the trigger signals of the whole experimental set-up and an ad hoc data acquisition system were also developed. The performance of the PPACs, EXPADES and of the associated electronics was obtained offline with standard α calibration sources and in-beam by measuring the scattering process for the systems 17O+58Ni and 17O+208Pb at incident energies around their respective Coulomb barriers and, successively, during the first experimental runs with the RIBs of the EXOTIC facility.

The Silicon Vertex Trigger (SVT) is a processor developed at CDF experiment to perform online fast and precise track reconstruction. SVT is made of two pipelined processors, the Associative Memory, finding low precision tracks, and the Track Fitter, refining the track quality whith high precision fits. We will describe the architecture and the performances of a next generation track fitter, the GigaFitter, developed to reduce the degradation of the SVT efficiency due to the increasing instantaneous luminosity. The GigaFitter reduces the track parameter reconstruction to a few clock cycles and can perform many fits in parallel, thus allowing high resolution tracking at very high rate. The core of the GigaFitter is implemented in a modern Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA chip, rich in powerful DSP arrays. The FPGA is housed on a mezzanine board which receives the data from a subset of the tracking detector and transfers the fitted tracks to a Pulsar motherboard for the final corrections. Instead of the current 12 boards, one per sector of the detector, the final system will be much more compact, consisting of a single GigaFitter Pulsar board equipped with four mezzanine cards receiving the data from the entire tracking detector. Moreover, the GigaFitter modular structure is adequate to scale for much better performances and is general enough to be easily adapted to future High Energy Physics (HEP) experiments and applications outside HEP.

Real time event reconstruction plays a fundamental role in High Energy Physics experiments. The CDF experiment at the Tevatron collider performs a fast online reconstruction of high-resolution tracks using the Silicon Vertex Trigger (SVT). We will describe the architecture, the performance and the impact on CDF physics program of a next generation online track fitter, the GigaFitter, developed to improve the SVT track reconstruction efficiency as the Tevatron instantaneous luminosity increases. The core of the GigaFitter is implemented in a modern Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA chip, rich in powerful DSP arrays. The higher computation power allows to perform many tasks in parallel, reducing the track parameter reconstruction to a few clock cycles: as a result, the GigaFitter can perform more than one fit per nanosecond. The Gigafitter installation and commissioning were successfully completed in February 2010: 12 Track Fitter boards, one per each azimuthal sector of the silicon detector, have been replaced by a single Gigafitter board receiving the data from the entire tracking detector. Besides being much more compact and robust than the previous system, the Gigafitter increases the SVT track reconstruction efficiency and acceptance and copes more effectively with the high-occupancy events that occur frequently at the high luminosities the Tevatron currently delivers. Moreover, its architecture is general enough to be adapted to different experimental environments: the experience gained with the Gigafitter upgrade will be essential for future SVT-like tracking processor such as FTK at Atlas experiment.

The Silicon-Vertex-Trigger (SVT) is a processor developed at CDF experiment to perform online fast and precise track reconstruction. SVT is made of two pipelined processors: the Associative Memory finds low precision tracks looking for coincidences between hits from the tracking detectors and track candidates (roads) stored in memory; the Track Fitter refines the track quality whith high precision fits. The GigaFitter is a next generation track fitter, developed to reduce the degradation of the SVT efficiency due to the increasing instantaneous luminosity. It reduces the track parameter reconstruction to a few clock cycles and can perform many fits in parallel, thus allowing high resolution tracking at very high rate. The core of the GigaFitter is implemented in a modern Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA chip, rich of powerful DSP arrays. With respect to the current Track Fitter, the GigaFitter is faster and provided of much more memory to store a greater number of roads to be used in the fit; this results in an increased SVT efficiency as more track candidates can be reconstructed. The GigaFitter has been installed in parasitic mode at CDF and has been tested against the current Track Fitter. We will describe the GigaFitter architecture, the parasitic installation at CDF and the performances with respect to the current system.

The silicon-vertex-trigger (SVT) at CDF is made of two pipelined processors: the associative-memory, AM, finding low precision tracks (roads) and the track-fitter, TF, refining the track quality with high-precision fits. We describe a next generation track fitter, the GigaFitter, that performs more than a fit per nanosecond. This device is based on modern FPGA technology, rich of powerful DSP arrays, to reduce the track parameter reconstruction to few clock cycles and to perform many fits in parallel. The reduction to virtually zero of the time necessary for the fit is the goal to be achieved in order to maximize the computing power for high resolution tracking at very high rate. The GigaFitter will enhance the SVT capabilities during the high luminosity CDF final data taking and could be used in future experiments as well.

We discuss the method to classify raw material sports videos for broadcasting. Because the raw material sports videos sometimes do not edited, we cannot use the knowledge on edited videos. We use the color and edge features and evaluate whether we can classify the sports videos with those features. We also introduce “player” and “audience” class apart from each sport class to improve the classification results.

Mass gatherings are special situations for which mass medical care must be preplanned. Acute emergencies occur at public gatherings and medical coverage on site has proven benefit. Responsibility of general plan, management of specific problems, transport planning, communications system, guidelines and protocols, special situations management, ancillary supports, sources of extra help for unforeseen needs are the most important items to consider. In mass gatherings the whole emergency medical service (EMS) planning and management has to depend on the emergency department direction, with its authority on all aspects of patient care in the EMS system. This report concerns the planning of EMS and of medical care in a situation at risk for mass casualties at the Formula I Grand Prix-Championship Racing 'San Marino' of Imola.

CdS/InP heterojunctions are grown by chemical vapor deposition of CdS on InP in an open‐tube H2S/H2 flow system. The importance of H2S admixture for the etching and cleaning of the InP surface is demonstrated. The solar cell has an open‐circuit voltage of 0.78 V, fill factor of 0.75, and a power conversion efficiency of 13.5% for AM2 conditions.

The p-InP/n-CdS heterodiode has reached Air Mass 2 solar conversion efficiencies of 15.0% in single crystal and 5.7% in polycrystalline thin film form. After a brief description of the physical principles of this solar cell we give an account of its preparation and characterization. Key results are included on photocurrent, photovoltage, quantum efficiency, as well as on stability and operation at high temperature.

CdS/InP and CdS/GaAs heterojunctions were prepared by an in situ H2S/H2 etching process and H2 transport of CdS onto the InP and GaAs substrates. The etching involves a reaction of the III‐V compound surface to the corresponding sesquisulfides and simultaneous or subsequent removal by reduction in H2 gas. The etching process changes the junction characteristics considerably. The junction on p‐GaAs shows a pinning of the Fermi level at the interface approximately 0.75 eV above the GaAs valence band. The junction on n‐GaAs is Ohmic.

We report single crystal InP-CdS solar cells having AM2 efficiencies of 15 percent and polycrystalline thin-film cells having AM2 efficiencies of 5.7 percent. Basic studies of the interface reveal that the thin-film efficiency is presently limited at least in part by the quality of the InP within the grains, and not exclusively by interface phenomena intrinsic to a polycrystalline cell. Preliminary accelerated life tests indicate a remarkable insensitivity of these unencapsulated cells to the ambient.

A new method of investigating band gaps in birefringent materials by means of polarization modulation in reflection is described. Measurements at the E0-gap of the I-III-VI2 compounds CuAlS2, CuGaS2, CuInS2 give results similar to those found by other methods.2,5 The energy of the lowest exciton of CuAlSe2 is 2.715 eV at T = 78K.

We have measured in photoluminescence the energy shift of free, weakly and tightly bound excitons in high purity GaAs in magnetic fields up to 12T. In the weak binding limit we find a surprising result: the mass obtained from the magnetic shift is the electron-heavy hole reduced mass in contrast to the results obtained from k · p calculation in zincblende type semiconductors in zero magnetic field. In the tight binding limit the mass deduced from the magnetic shift is the effective electron mass.