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PurposeTraceability of food is of paramount importance to the increasingly sustainability-conscious consumers. Several tracking and tracing systems have been developed in the AgriFood sector in order to prove to the consumers the origins and processing of food products. Critical challenges in realizing food's traceability include cooperating with multiple actors on common data sharing standards and data models.Design/methodology/approachThis research applies a design science approach to showcase traceability that includes preharvest activities and conditions in a case study. The authors demonstrate how existing data sharing standards can be applied in combination with new data models suitable for capturing transparency information about plant production.FindingsTogether with existing studies on farm-to-fork transparency, our results demonstrate how to realize transparency from field to fork and enable producers to show a complete bill of sustainability.Originality/valueThe existing standards and data models address transparency challenges in AgriFood chains from the moment of harvest up to retail (farm-to-fork) relatively well, but not what happens before harvest. In order to address sustainability concerns, there is a need to collect data about production activities related to product quality and sustainability before harvesting and share it downstream the supply chain. The ability to gather data on sustainability practices such as reducing pesticide, herbicide, fertilizer and water use are crucial requirements for producers to market their produce as quality and sustainable products.

Utilization of the ASD as a gateway to reach the left heart in tricuspid valve surgery may facilitate the use of a mini right thoracotomy and single atriotomy approach, avoiding the need for bi‐atrial incisions and/or median sternotomy.

Flow Cytometry is an analytical technique for the precise quantification of cellular phenotype. Intraoperative Flow Cytometry (iFC) utilizes flow cytometry for DNA content/ploidy and cell cycle distribution analysis during surgery for cancer cell characterization and evaluation of tumor margins. Various types of cancers, including intracranial, head and neck, breast and liver malignancies have been evaluated with iFC. In the current study we present an intraoperative Flow Cytometry protocol for colorectal cancer cell detection and potential resection margin evaluation.This study includes 106 colorectal cancer patients in which samples from cancer and normal colon epithelium were prospectively collected intraoperatively and comparatively assessed with iFC. Patients' demographics, tumor data and cytometry parameters were assessed.We have demonstrated that a cut-off value of 10.5% for tumor-index (fraction of cells in S and G2/M cell cycle phases) predicts with ∼91% accuracy (82.2% sensitivity and 99.9% specificity) the presence of cancer cells. Evaluation of tumor margins by iFC in the subpopulation of rectal cancer patients with or without neoadjuvant therapy, revealed an accuracy of 79% and 88%, respectively.Our data support that regarding colorectal cancer, iFC is a useful adjunct method for tumor cell identification and probably margin evaluation, which could be utilized in rectal cancer treatment in the era of organ sparing procedures.

Smart farming based on Internet of Things (IoT) technologies enables crop farmers to collect real-time data related to irrigation and plant protection processes, aiming to increase production volume and improve product quality, predict diseases, while optimizing resources and farming processes. Digital Ecosystem Utilisation (in short CYSLOP) is a use case of the Internet of Food and Farm 2020 (IoF2020) project that aims to demonstrate IoT solutions in vegetable farms in Cyprus and Slovenia. More particularly, this chapter is focused on the pilots taking place in Cyprus. The use case objectives are (i) to drive IoT uptake in countries where IoF2020 was not initially present, (ii) to prove the sustainability of those IoT interventions cost-wise and environmentally wise, and (iii) to unveil their potential for postfarm and/or consumer-oriented applications. In this chapter, however, the writers concentrate on (a) studying the current state of the art in IoT in agriculture, their applications and implications, (b) analyzing the prospects and problems of smart farming through a case study of installation of IoT devices in Cyprus, under the IoF2020 project, (c) discussing business models associated with smart farming proposed solutions, and (d) presenting technical approaches to expand multivendor IoT offerings, regionally. The selected pilot areas are located in the mountainous Limassol district where the cultivations under study are aronia, goji berries, and raspberries (four plots), and in coastal Ammochostos district with two plots of open-field strawberries and cherry tomatoes (under hydroponic cultivation). The expected environmental, economic, and social impacts involve efficiency improvement in terms of pesticide and water use reduction between 5% and 10%, respective cost reduction of 10%, reduction of farm visits by 20%, and more than 20 newly deployed IoT devices. Lastly, by incorporating innovative traceability technology, this use case is among the first to integrate information from the entire food value chain (from farm to fork) to a marketplace, offering elaborate value propositions to users. The aim of this work is to guide the reader through the multidisciplinary approach needed for a successful IoT agrifood project execution, to unveil the complex technical, business, and support relationships that these inherit, and to pave a way to make it a sustainable and replicable case for the digital transformation of the local sector.

This article presents a unified computing, caching, and communication (3C) solution for the upcoming 5G environment that will allow service, content, and function providers to deploy their services/ content/functions near the end users (EUs); to allow network providers to virtually deploy their connectivity services over commodity hardware; and to enable end users to renounce their role as passive 5G stakeholders and become active ones by offering their 3C resources to the 5G ecosystem. In this direction, we foresee the exploitation of a peer-topeer- like middleware/app solution that upon installation will enhance the end user devices with the ability to form virtual fogs capable of providing their 3C resources to the 5G ecosystem. Additionally, we propose the introduction of heterogeneous nodes (e.g., FPGAs and GPUs) at the networks edge, which will boost the processing capabilities without paying a premium in power consumption. This will enable efficient and thorough filtering of the information that makes it all the way up to the cloud. In summary, this article proposes an architecture that exploits and advances the edge and extreme edge 3C paradigms toward enabling the 5G ecosystem to meet its own criterion for low end-to-end latencies and, as such, enable it to provide and sustain high QoS/QoE levels.

Currently there is an active debate about how the existing cloud paradigm can cope with the volume, variety, and velocity of the data generated by end devices (e.g., Internet of Things sensors). It is expected that there will be over 50 billion of these devices by 2020, which will create more than two Exabytes worth of data each day. Additionally, the vast number of edge devices create a huge ocean of digital resources close to the data source, which, however, remain so far unexploited to their full extent. EXEGESIS proposes to harness these unutilized resources via a three-layer architecture that encompasses the mist, fog, and cloud. The mist network is located at the very bottom, where interconnected objects (Internet of Things devices, small servers, etc.) create neighborhoods of objects. This arrangement is enhanced by a virtual fog layer, which allows for dynamic, ad hoc interconnections among the various neighborhoods. At the top layer resides the cloud with its abundant resources that can also be included in one or more virtual fog neighborhoods. Thus, this article complements and leverages existing cloud architectures, enabling them to interact with this new edge-centric ecosystem of devices/resources, and benefit from the fact that critical data are available where they can add the most value.

Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is the most malignant primary brain tumor with dismal prognosis. This tumor is characterized by extensive heterogeneity, thus is difficult to treat and every established or new treatment faces significant hazard of resistance. Temozolomide (TMZ), an oral alkylating agent, is the first-line treatment for GBM, but resistance to TMZ is a major problem. Herewith, we investigated the combined effect of TMZ, difluoromethylornithine (DFMO), an inhibitor of ornithine decarboxylase, and radiation in GBM cell lines.We used the U87G, U251MG and T98G GBM cell lines. A linac 6MV accelerator (Varian Medical Systems) was used for cell irradiation. Viability and proliferation of the cells were examined with trypan blue exclusion assay, crystal violet and xCELLigence system. Cell cycle and activation of caspase-8 were evaluated with flow cytometry.The combination treatment resulted in a consistent higher suppression of proliferation in all cell lines treated and induced a significant higher cell cycle arrest in G2/M phase in U251MG and T98G cell lines. In U251MG cells caspase-8 was increased with each treatment alone, however the combination treatment had lower level of caspase-8 induction, suggesting a co-existence of another mechanism of cell death apart from apoptosis. In T98G cells the combination treatment increased the activation of caspase-8.Combination treatment with DFMO, TMZ and radiation significantly reduced cell viability in all cell lines tested. Given that both TMZ and DFMO can be administered orally and are related to minimal toxicities, this combination treatment may be a novel treatment strategy for GBM that deserves further investigation.

The advent of new web technologies and the explosion of available information online led to an information overload. During this information revolution blogs have become considerably mainstream as a media of providing news. Although there are several arguments about their validity and credibility the large amount of blogs currently available require the usage of advanced techniques for the collection, analysis, mining and efficient querying of the available information. To this direction we present BlogSearch, a novel platform allowing aggregating, indexing and searching blog articles. The information is modelled using a novel RDF/S Ontology named Blogs Ontology and published as Linked Open Data. In addition, two sets of APIs are provided for inserting, updating and searching information whereas the platform provides also graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for searching and inserting information. To the best of our knowledge our platform is the only one currently available publishing blog articles as Linked Open Data and simultaneously providing APIs and GUIs for aggregating, inserting and searching articles.

Peer to Peer (P2P) systems, have been identified as one of the main contributors to the exponential growth of internet traffic. File sharing applications such as BitTorrent clients, are the most popular among P2P systems and tend to consume great amounts of network resources, stretching infrastructure capabilities to their limits. This causes interdomain links to be overloaded with traffic, created from content traversing the network, which is most of the times redundant. Cloud computing has been an empowering force towards alleviating this issue and many research approaches have been proposed. With cloud orchestration frameworks and Software Defined Networks (SDN) as our empowering technologies, we propose a cross-layered edge-caching mechanism to alleviate content and service providers of link-saturation problems, caused by identical content requested and downloaded by multiple users in the same network vicinity. The proposed mechanism identifies and classifies P2P data-in-transit, caches it locally and successively acts as a peer by sharing it with all other requesting users. This way, redundant traffic in the backhaul link is minimized, since requests for content cached by the mechanism, will be served by the target edge-node and not from the content provider. To validate the performance and overall efficacy of the proposed mechanism, simulation experiments were conducted under a controlled-conditions environment. Results indicated that the proposed mechanism can reduce redundant network traffic up to 22%.

The “Internet of Things”(IoT) is becoming an increasingly growing topic of conversation worldwide that it promises to offer a revolutionary fully connected “smart”world. IoT represents a vision, in which the Internet extends into the real world involving everyday objects equipped with sensors, processing, and communications capabilities that will allow them to interconnect to each other over the Internet to accomplish some objective. This chapter reports on the current status of research on the IoT by examining the literature, identifying trends, exploring issues, challenges, and opportunities associated with IoT.