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International audience; During the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, a lockdown was imposed in France during the first wave. An apparent decrease in incidence of cellulitis of odontogenic origin was noticed then. This study aimed to compare the incidence of cellulitis during this extraordinary period with the same period in 2018 and 2019, based on retrospective multicentric data. All maxillofacial surgery departments in French public hospitals were contacted. Responders were asked to include all patients admitted for the surgical drainage of a head and neck abscess of odontogenic origin during the first 2020 lockdown period, and in a similar time frame in 2018 and 2019 (control group), based on screening the French diagnostic and therapeutic classification of medical acts. We report a 44% significant nationwide decrease in the incidence of admissions for cellulitis. There were 187 patients in 2020 for 334 and 333 patients in 2018/2019 respectively. The reasons to explain this finding are hypothetical (organizational reasons leading to earlier management, patients' fear to seek for medical management, usual excess in surgical indications or concomitant decrease of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs delivery). Whatever the explanation, it would be of great interest to find it out in order to improve the prevention of cellulitis.

Summary Background Cavernous venous malformation (CVM) is a common benign vascular lesion of the orbit. It was previously known as “orbital cavernous hemangioma”. Localization within the lacrimal gland is extremely rare. Case presentation We describe the case of a 76-year-old man with an asymptomatic CVM of the left lacrimal gland incidentally discovered on a routine MRI. A curative and diagnostic en bloc surgical resection was performed, allowing for histological diagnosis. Conclusions CVM of the lacrimal gland is extremely rare and usually asymptomatic. Proptosis is the main symptom. On MRI, the lesion appears hypointense with heterogeneous enhancement after Gadolinium injection on T1-weighted imaging and hyperintense on T2 STIR-weighted imaging. Histological examination is mandatory for the diagnosis. Surgical resection is usually performed.

International audience; Intra-osseous cholesterol granuloma (CG) is a rare and benign lesion. Very few cases of CG of the jaws have been described in the literature. CG of the jaws seems to be due to the accumulation of cholesterol of hematogenous origin in odontogenic cysts. We report on one case of CG of the maxilla treated by surgical enucleation in a 46-year-old man who presented an asymptomatic swelling of the maxilla.; Le granulome à cholestérol (GC) intra-osseux est une lésion rare et bénigne. Très peu de cas de GC des mâchoires ont été décrits à ce jour dans la littérature. Les GC des maxillaires semblent être dus à l’accumulation de cholestérol d’origine hématogène dans des kystes odontogènes. Nous rapportons un cas de GC du maxillaire traité par énucléation chirurgicale chez un homme de 46 ans qui présentait une tuméfaction maxillaire asymptomatique.

SUMMARY Normal human immunoglobulin G (IgG) has anti-inflammatory and immuno-regulatory properties, which are exploited in the therapy of selected diseases. A putative mechanisms of action is the direct regulation of endothelial cell function by natural antiendothelial cell antibodies. Endothelium activation is a critical event in atherosclerosis. We have verified the ability of normal human IgG to modulate endothelial responses to the atherogenic stimuli tumour necrosis factor-α (TNFα) and oxidized low-density lipoproteins (oxLDL) in vitro. Confocal microscopy was used to visualize vascular cell adhesion molecule-1 (CD106) expression on endothelial cells, cytoplasmic free calcium ([Ca++]i) modifications and fluorescein-coupled oxLDL internalization. Cytokine secretion was measured by ELISA on cell supernatants. IgG prevented TNFα induced CD106 membrane expression and an increase in [Ca++]i, and inhibited the secretion of interleukin-6 (IL-6) and macrophage-colony-stimulating factor (M-CSF). IgG also inhibited CD106 expression induced by oxLDL and one pathway of their internalization, but were ineffective on oxLDL induced [Ca++]i rise and apoptosis. F(ab)′2 fragments from IgG, but not monoclonal IgG, reproduce IgG effects. These findings point to a regulatory role for specific antibodies included in circulating normal IgG towards proinflammatory responses of endothelial cells in atherogenesis and suggest possible development of new therapeutic strategies.

Poly(-caprolactone)-apatite (PCL-AP) composites are promising devices as long-term biodegradable scaffolds for bone repair. To evaluate the influence of the PCL/AP ratio on in vitro degradation and bioactivity, the PCL-AP scaffolds were immersed in different aqueous media and analysed at different degradation times by vibrational spectroscopy and thermal analysis. The same techniques were used to comparatively characterise the composites incubated with human osteoblasts (HOB), in order to evaluate the cell role in degradation. The samples were synthesised using phase-inversion and a salt-leaching technique. The composites had different PCL/AP ratios: 50/50, 60/40 and 75/25. Pure PCL samples were analysed as control. The in vitro biodegradation was investigated under sterile conditions at 37°C in different media: saline phosphate buffer at pH 7.4 (SPB), 0.01 M NaOH solution, simulated body fluid at pH 7.4 (SBF). The samples were analysed before and after biodegradation for different degradation times (up to 2 months) by Raman spectroscopy, thermogravimetry (TG) and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). HOB were isolated from bone fragments obtained during surgery for total hip replacement and cultivated in -MEM with 10% FBS on the PCL-AP samples for 4 weeks. Thermal analysis of the undegraded samples showed that in the 50/50 sample the PCL component was the most crystalline. Raman analysis confirmed this result as well as the relative composition of the scaffolds. The NaOH degradation medium was found to be the most aggressive towards both pure PCL and composites, confirming the catalytic effect of the OH- ion on degradation. Accordingly, the pure PCL samples degraded in NaOH solution underwent the most pronounced morphology changes: crystallinity increased as well as the intensity of the Raman bands due to crystalline PCL and the crystallisable fraction. These findings indicate that degradation preferentially involved the amorphous domains of the polymer with a consequent chain fragmentation and enrichment in crystalline PCL. Among the PCL-AP composites, the PCL component of the 50/50 sample showed the least degradation extent upon degradation in NaOH solution, as expected on the basis of its initially highest crystallinity. In the SPB medium, a certain degree of chain fragmentation was revealed. Upon immersion in SBF solution all the composites showed deposition of an apatitic phase; gravimetric measurements coupled to Raman and TG analyses indicated that the 50/50 sample was the most bioactive. The thermal analysis of the cell-incubated samples indicated a significant degradation of the polymeric component present in the composites, especially in the 75/25 sample, while the pure PCL samples appeared the least degraded. Raman spectroscopy coupled to thermal analysis proved a valid method to characterise the samples under study and their behavior in different media and after osteoblast-incubation.

This study was aimed at evaluating the physico-chemical properties of a porous poly(ε-caprolactone)/carbonated-apatite (PCL/CAp 30/70 w/w) composite to be used as scaffold for bone tissue engineering. The in vitro degradation mechanism of this matrix in different media was evaluated as well as its bioactivity in a simulated body fluid (SBF) buffered at pH 7.4 (37 °C, 28 days). For this purpose, we used vibrational IR and Raman spectroscopy coupled to thermogravimetry (TG) and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The samples were analyzed before and after immersion in the above mentioned solution as well as in 0.01 M NaOH solution (pH=12), saline phosphate buffer at pH 7.4 (SPB) and esterase/SPB. A control PCL sample was analyzed before the addition of the apatitic component. As regards the untreated samples, the method of synthesis utilized for preparing the composite was found to lower the crystallinity degree. The CAp component revealed to be constituted of a B-type CAp with a 3% carbonate content. After immersion in SBF solution, vibrational analysis coupled to TG revealed the deposition of a significant amount of an apatite component on the surface of the PCL/CAp composite as well as in its interior, showing a good in vitro mineralization.

This article describes the application of radio flexibility for designing public protection and disaster relief (PPDR) wireless networks (NETs) in support of PPDR special needs, primary among which is information-transport resilience. It focuses further on the central role of mobile ad hoc NETs as the ground-segment element of the total architecture since the eventual solution must support rapid, robust, secure, scalable, and connectivityoriented communications. Research challenges associated with the provision of the necessary diversity at all communication layers as a means to such robustness are identified. Security aspects are addressed through a signature scheme based on identity key cryptography. Finally, a use case based on flexible multihop mobile ad hoc network (MANET) path establishment for harsh environments is presented. © 2005-2012 IEEE.

In a retrospective analysis on 128 patients from the trials COSS-80, -82, -85 and -86 initial x-ray pictures were evaluated for tumor diameters in three planes and the prognostic meaning on survival was assessed. In a subset of patients (n = 27) the measured values were compared to values obtained by CT-Scan and a good correlation (r = 0.69) was found. Several parameters for tumor size were defined: absolute tumor length (ATL), relative tumor length (RTL, proportion of tumor to the length of the involved bone), absolute tumor volume (ATV, calculated by the ellipsoid formula) and relative tumor volume (RTL, tumor volume referred to the body surface area) and univariate and multivariate survival analysis were performed. Univariate analysis of metastasis free survival (MFS) revealed a high prognostic significance of the ATL, the ATV and the RTV. The RTL in this patient group demonstrated a tendency only toward an inferior prognosis in larger tumors. None of the patients with a ATV 90% tumor necrosis) in 84 patients. ATL and RTL do not enter the model, while the response proves its significance as a valid prognostic factor with a p-value of 0.0004. Adding the ATV as the measure of tumor size to the model it enters as the first term (p = 0.0000) followed by the response (p = 0.0002).(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is an intelligence gathering discipline that involves collecting information from open sources and analyzing it to produce usable intelligence. The revolution in information technology is making open sources more accessible, ubiquitous, and valuable, making open intelligence at less cost than ever before. The explosion in OSINT is transforming the intelligence world with the emergence of open versions of the specialistic arts of human intelligence (HUMINT), overhead imagery intelligence (IMINT), and signals intelligence (SIGINT). The international Intelligence Communities have seen open sources grow increasingly easier and cheaper to acquire in recent years. But up to 80% of electronic data is textual and most valuable information is often hidden and encoded in pages which are neither structured, nor classified. The process of accessing all these raw data, heterogeneous in terms of source and language, and transforming them into information is therefore strongly linked to automatic textual analysis and synthesis, which are greatly related to the ability to master the problems of multilinguality. This paper describes a multilingual indexing, searching and clustering system, designed to manage huge sets of data collected from different and geographically distributed information sources, which provides language independent search and dynamic classification features. The Joint Intelligence and EW Training Centre (CIFIGE) is a military institute, which has adopted this system in order to train the military and civilian personnel of Defence in the OSINT discipline . Keywords

Bone is a common site of osteolytic and richly vascularized metastases of renal cell carcinoma (RCC) and Interferon (IFN)-alpha based therapies have been considered for the treatment of patients affected by this disease. The effects of IFN-alpha on metastatic RCC patients have been related to its immunomodulatory, and cytotoxic activity on tumor cells, but there could be an effect also on tumor induced osteoclast differentiation and bone angiogenesis. When osteoclasts obtained from human peripheral blood mononuclear cells, cultured in the presence of receptor activator of nuclear factor-kappaB (RANKL) and macrophage-colony stimulating factor (M-CSF), were treated with IFN-alpha, the expression of bone tartrate resistant acid phosphatase (TRACP) type 5b was reduced, as well as calcium-phosphate resorption activity and expression of pro-osteoclatic transcription factor c-Fos. IFN-alpha modulation of angiogenesis was studied by analysis of proliferation, survival, and migration of a bone endothelial cell line (BBE), and by the analysis of pro-angiogenic factor expression in RCC cell lines. IFN-alpha inhibited bone endothelial cell proliferation and the expression of FGF-2, while the vascular endothelial growth (VEGF) did not show any significant variation. Moreover, IFN-alpha inhibited the migration induced by the RCC through the impairment of fibroblast growth factor-2 (FGF-2) secretion. These data demonstrate multiple activities of IFN-alpha on renal cancer-induced bone disease, in addition to its recognized role as a cytotoxic and immunomodulatory agent, because they indicate its ability to reduce bone resorption and to impair tumor-associated angiogenesis, and they also suggest the use of IFN-alpha to treat skeletal metastases of other carcinomas.

The diffusion of innovation culture is an essential condition to guarantee entrepreneurial progress and improvement to the social fabric. Innovation processes in enterprises need constant Research and Development. The majority of Italian Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) experience difficulties in keeping in touch with innovations in the research world, which hinders competitiveness growth in actual global markets. FirenzeTecnologia together with Synthema-TEMIS-Focuseek has developed an integrated platform named SPI-RIT (“Services for Enterprises Research and Technological Innovation”), which is directly oriented to facilitate structured and life-long relationships between the regional industrial world and scientific one. SPI-RIT collects heterogeneous and distributed data, integrating focused crawling, multilingual natural language processing indexing and searching, unsupervised clustering. SPI-RIT advocates and encourages integration between research and industry; promotes the industrial use of research results; increases the technological development of enterprises to support their competitiveness, relying upon a network of contacts with institutions, research institutes and consulting organisations.

Polycaprolactone (PCL), a semi-crystalline linear resorbable aliphatic polyester, is a good candidate as a scaffold for bone tissue engineering, due to its biocompatibility and biodegradability. However, the poor mechanical properties of PCL impair its use as scaffold for hard tissue regeneration, unless mechanical reinforcement is provided. To enhance mechanical properties and promote osteoconductivity, hydroxyapatite (HA) particles were added to the PCL matrix: three PCL-based composites with different volume ratio of HA (13%,20% and 32%) were studied. Mechanical properties and structure were analyzed along with biocompatibility and osteoconductivity. The addition of HA particles (in particular in the range of 20% and 32%) led to a significant improvement in mechanical performance (e.g. elastic modulus) of scaffold. Saos-2 cells and osteoblasts from human trabecular bone (hOB) retrieved during total hip replacement surgery were seeded onto 3D PCL-samples for 1-4 weeks. Following the assessment of cell viability, proliferation, morphology and ALP release, HA-loaded PCL were found to improve osteoconduction compared to the PCL alone. Our results indicated that PCL represents a potential candidate as an efficient substrate for bone substitution through an accurate balance between structural/mechanical properties of polymer and biological activities.

Per la sostituzione dei difetti ossei un approccio realistico prevede l'uso di supporti tridimensionali biodegradabili con capacità osteoconduttivi. Fra questi sono particolamente interessanti i compositi polimerici ( polimero/idrossiapatite), dotati di porosità adeguate e suscettibili di ulteriori rivestimenti osteinduttivi (sequenze RGD). Sono state valutate le interazioni con osteoblasti e cellule mesenchimali.

The relationship between tumor stage and time to diagnosis was investigated in a consecutive series of 618 patients with Ewing's sarcoma. This tumor is diagnosed late, with a mean interval between initial symptoms and biopsy of 4 months. The interval between the clinical onset and the final diagnosis was not associated with tumor stage. On the contrary, patients with metastatic Ewing's sarcoma were generally diagnosed at an earlier time than patients with localized disease, possibly reflecting inherent biological differences in aggressiveness among sub-groups of Ewing's sarcoma.

The multidrug resistance (MDR) phenotype that is mediated by an overexpression of P-glycoprotein, has been suggested to be related also to an increased activity of protein kinase C (PKC) and to changes in phospholipid pattern. By electron microscope quantitative immunocytochemistry, we investigated whether PKC and other elements of the polyphosphoinositide signal transduction system are affected in an MDR variant of the human osteosarcoma cell line Saos-2. These cells, which are characterized by an increased expression of P-glycoprotein not only at the plasma membrane but also at the nuclear level, showed increased intranuclear amounts of phosphatidylinositol 4,5-bisphosphate and of phospholipase C beta 1, while both the amount and activity of both nuclear and cellular PKC were not modified with respect to sensitive cells. These results suggest that, in this model, the changes observed in the elements of nuclear signal transduction could be related to previously reported modifications of the MDR phenotype, but that P-glycoprotein phosphorylation is not dependent from increased PKC activity.

The authors present two cases of primary hyper-parathyroidism initially diagnosed as aneurysmal cyst. The aspects of differential diagnosis are discussed, and the importance of evaluating all of the diagnostic elements in order to formulate a correct diagnosis is emphasized.

The effect of intra-arterial versus intravenous infusion of cisplatinum on the histological response of osteosarcoma of the limbs was evaluated based on the results of three studies in which CDP was preoperatively associated with MTX and ADM (1st study), and with MTX, ADM, and IFO (2nd and 3rd studies). In the chemotherapeutic protocol that involved 3 drugs the percentage of "good histological responses to chemotherapy" (defined as tumor necrosis90%) was significantly higher in the 40 patients who were administered CDP by intra-arterial infusion as compared to that observed in the 39 patients treated with CDP by intravenous route (78% versus 46%: P .004). In the two sequential studies where 4 drugs were used, the percentage of good histological responses was essentially the same for patients treated with CDP administered intravenously, and for those treated with CDP administered intra-arterially (78% versus 84%). Regardless of the route of infusion used to administer cisplatinum the percentage of "good" histological responses was significantly higher in the 109 patients treated with the 4-drug protocol as compared to the 79 patients treated with the 3-drug protocol (82% vs 62%; P .04). This difference may essentially be attributed to the higher percentage of good responses observed in the 4-drug protocol in patients treated with CDP administered intravenously (78% vs 46% for patients treated i.v. with the 3-drug protocol; P .006). For the patients instead treated with CDP administered intra-arterially the percentage of good responses was essentially the same with the 4-drug protocol and with the 3-drug protocol (84% vs 78%; P ns). These data lead us to conclude that in the neoadjuvant treatment of osteosarcoma of the limbs a preoperative 4-drug protocol (MTX, CDP, ADM, IFO) is more effective than a 3-drug protocol (MTX, CDP, ADM), and that in a 4-drug preoperative chemotherapy protocol intra-arterial infusion of CDP does not offer particular advantages as compared to intravenous infusion.

In osteosarcoma, resistance to chemotherapy and metastatic spread are the most important mechanisms responsible for the failure of current multimodal therapeutic programs. We have shown previously that overexpression of the MDR1 gene product P-glycoprotein is the most important predictor of an adverse clinical course in patients with osteosarcoma. treated with chemotherapy. In this study, we analyzed the relationship between P-glycoprotein expression and local aggressiveness and systemic dissemination of multidrug-resistant (MDR) human osteosarcoma cells. Compared to parental sensitive cells, MDR cells showed a decreased tumorigenicity,and metastatic ability in athymic mice, together with a reduced migratory and invasive ability and a lower homotypic adhesion ability in vitro, suggesting that P-glycoprotein overexpression is associated with a less malignant phenotype. These experimental observations were confirmed by clinical data. In fact, the time of appearance of lung metastases in a series of osteosarcoma patients treated with chemotherapy was significantly shorter in the group of cases with no expression of P-glycoprotein in the primary lesion compared to the group with P-glycoprotein overexpression. Moreover, the incidence of P-glycoprotein overexpression was found to be higher among patients with localized disease at the clinical onset than in patients with evidence of metastasis at the time of diagnosis. These data indicate that, in osteosarcoma, the MDR phenotype is not associated with a more aggressive behavior both in vitro and in clinical settings, suggesting that the previously shown association of the MDR phenotype with a worse outcome in osteosarcoma is not related to a higher metastatic ability of cells with P-glycoprotein overexpression but is more likely due to their lack of responsiveness to cytotoxic drugs.

During the period September 1983 to December 1991, 47 patients with nonmetastatic malignant fibrous histiocytoma (MFH) of the limbs were treated using 3 different protocols of neoadjuvant chemotherapy activated at successive intervals. Surgery consisted of limb salvage in 41 cases and amputation in 6. After a mean follow-up of 6.5 years 33 patients (70%) had been continuously disease-free and 14 had undergone relapses. In the latter group the first sign of recurrence was metastasis in 12 cases and local recurrence in 2 cases. These results are distinctly better than those obtained in 20 patients treated during the same period using surgery alone (24% of disease-free survival and 30% local recurrence), and compared to those obtained in an earlier study in which surgery was associated with postoperative chemotherapy alone (59% of disease-free survival and 25% of local recidivation). The authors conclude that, as already observed in the case of osteosarcoma, neoadjuvant chemotherapy can significantly improve prognosis even in patients with bone MFH localised in the limbs. Moreover, given that, contrary to adjuvant chemotherapy, associated chemotherapy is effective not only in controlling the microscopic disease but also reducing the incidence of local recurrence, it enables amputation to be avoided in the majority of patients.

The authors describe a case of gout localized in the knee, the clinical and radiographic signs of which may lead to numerous diagnostic interpretations. Other affections with which differential diagnosis is difficult are reported, and principal diagnostic tests are described.

In a retrospective analysis on 128 patients from the trials COSS-80, -82, -85 and -86 initial x-ray pictures were evaluated for tumor diameters in three planes and the prognostic meaning on survival was assessed. In a subset of patients (n = 27) the measured values were compared to values obtained by CT-Scan and a good correlation (r = 0.69) was found. Several parameters for tumor size were defined: absolute tumor length (ATL), relative tumor length (RTL, proportion of tumor to the length of the involved bone), absolute tumor volume (ATV, calculated by the ellipsoid formula) and relative tumor volume (RTL, tumor volume referred to the body surface area) and univariate and multivariate survival analysis were performed. Univariate analysis of metastasis free survival (MFS) revealed a high prognostic significance of the ATL, the ATV and the RTV. The RTL in this patient group demonstrated a tendency only toward an inferior prognosis in larger tumors. None of the patients with a ATV70 ml (n = 19) and only one of 33 patients with an ATV100 ml relapsed. Cox regression analysis was performed including the variables age, sex, site and response (90% tumor necrosis) in 84 patients. ATL and RTL do not enter the model, while the response proves its significance as a valid prognostic factor with a p-value of 0.0004. Adding the ATV as the measure of tumor size to the model it enters as the first term (p = 0.0000) followed by the response (p = 0.0002).(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Tissue reaction to an epoxy resin-carbon fibre composite was tested "in vivo" and "in vitro" in order to evaluate this material as an alternative to metal alloys for clinical use in orthopaedic surgery. While the "in vitro" tests suggest a mild toxic effect of the composite on cells, good biocompatibility "in vivo" was observed when debris are not generated. The mechanical tests compared the composite and stainless steel plates, confirming the expected values for static strength and elastic modulus, revealing, however, the formation of long needles of carbon fibre following breakage of the plate.

The treatment of tabetic arthropathy of the hip by prosthetic replacement has been recorded in the literature in 5 cases, of which only 4 were followed up. The authors present 4 more cases in which follow-up showed that the operation was definitely contraindicated in this condition. All the cases developed recurrent subluxation and/or loosening of the prosthesis.

When confronted by a soft tissue neoplasm it is necessary to ask, before operation, whether it is malignant or benign. In this study of 6 cases of lipoma and 8 cases of liposarcoma of the limbs, the authors show that with the aid of computerised tomography the differential diagnosis can be made with certainty, based on densitometric evaluation.