0000000000205723
AUTHOR
Tommaso Piazza
Significance of the effective remnant liver volume in major hepatectomies
The aim of this study is to identify the minimum safe amount of effective remnant liver volume (ERLV) in patients undergoing a major hepatectomy. Thirty-eight consecutive major hepatectomies (resection of ≥3 Couinaud segments) performed between July 1999 and March 2004 in which a frozen section liver biopsy was obtained were included. No patient had chronic viral hepatitis, cirrhosis, or cholestasis. The total liver volume (TLV) was calculated using the Vauthey formula, and the postsurgical liver volume (PSLV) was derived by subtracting the estimated volume of liver resected from the TLV. The PSLV minus the percentage of macrovesicular steatosis as nonfunctional liver was defined as the ef…
Design, development and validation of a system for automatic help to medical text understanding
Abstract Objective The paper presents a web-based application, SIMPLE, that facilitates medical text comprehension by identifying the health-related terms of a medical text and providing the corresponding consumer terms and explanations. Background The comprehension of a medical text is often a difficult task for laypeople because it requires semantic abilities that can differ from a person to another, depending on his/her health-literacy level. Some systems have been developed for facilitating the comprehension of medical texts through text simplification, either syntactical or lexical. The ones dealing with lexical simplification usually replace the original text and do not provide additi…
Service quality benchmarking via a novel approach based on fuzzy ELECTRE III and IPA: an empirical case involving the Italian public healthcare context.
A novel fuzzy-based approach which combines ELECTRE III along with the Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) is proposed in the present work to comparatively evaluate the service quality in the public healthcare context. Specifically, ELECTRE III is firstly considered to compare the service performance of examined hospitals in a noncompensatory manner. Afterwards, IPA is employed to support the service quality management to point out improvement needs and their priorities. The proposed approach also incorporates features of the Fuzzy Set Theory so as to address the possible uncertainty, subjectivity and vagueness of involved experts in evaluating the service quality. The model is applied to…
Project Selection by Constrained Fuzzy AHP
The selection of a project among a set of possible alternatives is a difficult task decision makers have to face. Difficulties in selecting a project arise because of the different goals involved and because of the large number of attributes to consider. Our approach is based upon a fuzzy extension of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). This paper focuses on the constraints that have to be considered within fuzzy AHP in order to take in account all the available information. This study demonstrates that by considering all the information deriving from the constraints better results in terms of certainty and reliability can be achieved.
A Quality Risk Management Model Approach for Cell Therapy Manufacturing
International regulatory authorities view risk management as an essential production need for the development of innovative, somatic cell-based therapies in regenerative medicine. The available risk management guidelines, however, provide little guidance on specific risk analysis approaches and procedures applicable in clinical cell therapy manufacturing. This raises a number of problems. Cell manufacturing is a poorly automated process, prone to operator-introduced variations, and affected by heterogeneity of the processed organs/tissues and lot-dependent variability of reagent (e.g., collagenase) efficiency. In this study, the principal challenges faced in a cell-based product manufacturi…
Comparison of two different techniques of reperfusion in adult orthotopic liver transplantation
: The aim of this study was to determine the impact of two reperfusion techniques on the peri-operative hemodynamic changes and early post-operative graft function of adult patients undergoing orthotopic liver transplantation. Material and methods: From June 2003 to May 2004, 50 consecutive liver transplants were performed and divided into two groups: group A, 25 patients, portal vein flush with 500 cm3 of Ringer's lactate without vena caval venting. Group B, 25 patients, vena caval venting with no portal vein flush. Donor and recipient characteristics were similar in both groups. Sixty-four different parameters were analyzed, and Pearson's χ2 test and t-test were used for statistical analy…