An Online Multilingual Medical Vocabulary/Thesaurus/Dictionary (MED-VTD) for Facilitating Understanding of Medical Texts

Medical texts (e.g., reports and medicine leaflets) are usually written by professionals (physicians, medical researchers, etc.) who use their own language and communication style. On the other hand, they are often read by health consumers or other medical professionals who do not have the same vocabularies and can have difficulties in text comprehension. Thus, to help a generic user in understanding a medical text, it would be desirable to have an online medical vocabulary/thesaurus/dictionary that he/she can easily look for finding the plain equivalent of any medical (technical) term and a definition of the term with the same kind of language. In this work, we present an online multilingu…

Esplorazione cognitiva di un programma di e-learning

Environmental factors as possible causes of DNA fragmentation in human sperms

Literature data demonstrated that some environmental factors could have a key role in the remarkable and continuous decline of sperm quality observed in the last fifty years. Specifically, in the Taranto area, data about the detrimental effects of environmental pollution are alarming because of the high level of poisons released in the atmosphere. Pollution coming from the plant causes health and fertility risks, mainly due to the exposure to the dioxin. Our study analyzed sperm samples from three patients groups: i) workers of local steel factories; ii) Taranto residents; iii) Controls. Results demonstrate that patients from the “factory workers” group, constantly exposed to environmental …

A new feature selection strategy for K-mers sequence representation

DNA sequence decomposition into k-mers (substrings of length k) and their frequency counting, defines a mapping of a sequence into a numerical space by a numerical feature vector of fixed length. This simple process allows to compute sequence comparison in an alignment free way, using common similarities and distance functions on the numerical codomain of the mapping. The most common used decomposition uses all the substrings of length k making the codomain of exponential dimension. This obviously can affect the time complexity of the similarity computation, and in general of the machine learning algorithm used for the purpose of sequence classification. Moreover, the presence of possible n…

Pollution exposure and high DNA fragmentation index in human sperms: a case-control study

Study question: Could pollution exposure play a key role on sperm quality, in terms of DNA fragmentation index (DFI)? Summary answer: Patients exposed to high level of pollution show an higher percentage of sperm DNA fragmentation index in contrast with patient from control group. What is known already: Taranto area is characterized by a number of steel factories and petrochemical industries. Data about the detrimental effects of environmental pollution are alarming. Pollution coming from the industrial plants causes health and fertility risks, mainly due to the exposure to several pollutant (PM10, heavy metals, etc). Toxic substances can affect DNA directly or indirectly, through oxidative…

Studying Nucleosomes Positioning by a Multi-Layer Model

Eukaryotic DNA is packaged into a highly compact and dynamic structure called chromatin. While this packaging allows the cell to organize a large and complex genome in the nucleus, it can also block the access of transcription factors and other proteins to DNA. Nucleosomes are the fundamental repeating units of eukaryotic chromatin. Nucleosome position can be regulated in vivo by multi-subunit chromatin remodeling complexes, and their position can influence gene expression in eukaryotic cells. Alterations in chromatin structure, and hence in nucleosome organization, can result in a variety of diseases, including cancer, highlighting the need to achieve a better understanding of the molecula…

Integrated fuzzy classification

An Integrated Environment for Dynamic Processes in distributed Image Analysis System

Distributed systems, sharing same network, are composed by multiple high-performance microcomputers. To improve the performance of such system is necessary to distribute the occurred processes following a suitable approach. To do that, a set of parameters and two composed objects (Tablet and Bonnet: in brief, an extended task and an asynchronous worker respectively) have been defined to satisfy the distribution the tasks. These objects allow to arrange the distribution of processes and data, on the processors, in static and dynamic way. An high level interactive iconic environment, with a set of visual tools, has been developed to improve the management of the resource and to execute the ac…

Il Futuro Prossimo delle Scienze Cognitive

Finding the best web medical content for different learner categories

In the age of Internet where any kind of information can be easily found online, it is becoming increasingly evident that more and more people use the World Wide Web to seek health and medical information for understanding and learning. Different users have diverse needs, even when searching for the same topic. This is certainly true in healthcare, where a patient, a physician or a health executive might look for information on the same topic but have different necessities and bring different levels of reading ability and prior knowledge together with a different vocabulary. Generic search engines (like Google, Bing or Yahoo) work on the whole web but make generic searches often overloading…

Targeted sequencing of BRAF by MinION in archival Formalin-Fixed Paraffin-Embedded specimens allows to discriminate between Hairy Cell Leukemia and Hair Cell Leukemia Variant

Targeted sequencing of BRAF by MinION in archival Formalin-Fixed Paraffin-Embedded specimens allows to discriminate between Hairy Cell Leukemia and Hair Cell Leukemia Variant

HUMAN SPERM CELL AS EARLY BIOINDICATOR OF MALE HEALTH AND REPRODUCTION

Environmental factors could have a key role in the remarkable and continuous decline of sperm quality observed in the last fifty years. This study addressed the gap of knowledge on the effect of air pollutants on sperm DNA fragmentation, comparing the seminal parameters from men living in locations with different levels of air pollution. The detrimental effects of environmental pollution in the Taranto area are alarming: the high level of pollutants released from the steel plants in the atmosphere can cause health and fertility issues. Our study analyzed sperm samples from three groups of patients: i) workers of Taranto steel plants; ii) Taranto residents; iii) Palermo residents, assumed as…

Singularities for Prandtl's equations.

We used a mixed spectral/finite-difference numerical method to investigate the possibility of a finite time blow-up of the solutions of Prandtl's equations for the case of the impulsively started cylinder. Our toll is the complex singularity tracking method. We show that a cubic root singularity seems to develop, in a time that can be made arbitrarily short, from a class of data uniformely bounded in H^1.

Facilitating text understanding for e-learning users

Web information on different disciplines (mainly technical ones) is mainly created by the different experts (engineers, scientists, physicians, lawyers, etc.) who use their own 'technical' language. On the other hand, this information is often read by general users who do not have the same skills and vocabularies of the experts and have difficulties to understand and learn it. In order to allow e-learners to use any document available on the web and understand it, it is desirable to have a system that takes a text written with technical terms and automatically translates it in a plain language and provides additional information with the same kind of language. In this work we present the me…

Comparison of different cooperation strategies in the prey-predator problem

The paper describes two cooperating strategies among several homogeneous agents to reach a given target. In our case we used the prey-predators paradigm in which a set of agents (predators) have the purpose to reach a target (prey). The problem is addressed as an optimization problem that has been faced with two different algorithms (a genetic algorithm and a particle swam optimization algorithm). The two approaches are evaluated by using a simulator for each strategy and the results show that the strategies are very different in terms of prey-predator successes. Genetic algorithm can be used by the prey to solve at the best the problem to reach the lair, otherwise the Particle Swarm Optimi…

Nationwide interobserver variation in the diagnosis of follicular lymphoma: a report from the pathologists of GISL (Gruppo Italiano Studio Linfomi)

Interobserver variability may occur in FL diagnosis, even when the diagnosis is performed by expert haematopathologists. Very limited informations are currently available on the reliability of FL diagnosis performed in laboratories on a national scale, where the lymphoma diagnosis is not always carried on by expert haematopathologists. In this study, the reproducibility of the FL diagnosis and related grading system was tested by a group of pathologists members of the Gruppo Italiano Studio Linfomi (GISL).

Planthology: an Application System for Plant Diseases Management

The goals of modern agriculture are obtaining high yields that meet the increasing nutritional requirements of the World population. This is extremely difficult for three kind of reasons: i) the lands dedicated to agricultural use are strongly reduced in industrialized Countries; ii) farmers prefer an homogeneous product, because it is easier to manage, with consequent reduction of biodiversity, iii) globalization and climate change have led to the introduction of new pathogens and pest in environments other than original ones, resulting in serious production losses. The consequences of these problems, followed by not timely intervention leads to conditions that make not possible to obtain …

Mitochondrial Proteomics: An Approach to Identify Cellular Stress Induced By Amyloid-Beta Peptide

Mitochondria are dynamic ATP-generating organelle which contribute to many cellular functions including bioenergetic processes. intracellular calcium regulation, alteration of reduction-oxidation potential of cells, free radical scavenging, and activation of caspase-mediated celi death. Many lines of evidence suggest that mitochondria have a central role in ageing-related neurodegenerative diseases. Mitochondrial functions can be negatively affected by Amyloid Beta-peptide (ABeta), an important component in Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathogenesis, and ABeta can interact with mitochondria and cause mitochondrial dysfunction. One of the most accepted hypotheses for AD onset implicates that mito…

Deep Learning Architectures for DNA Sequence Classification

DNA sequence classification is a key task in a generic computational framework for biomedical data analysis, and in recent years several machine learning technique have been adopted to successful accomplish with this task. Anyway, the main difficulty behind the problem remains the feature selection process. Sequences do not have explicit features, and the commonly used representations introduce the main drawback of the high dimensionality. For sure, machine learning method devoted to supervised classification tasks are strongly dependent on the feature extraction step, and in order to build a good representation it is necessary to recognize and measure meaningful details of the items to cla…

Genome-wide characterization of chromatin binding and nucleosome spacing activity of the nucleosome remodelling ATPase ISWI.

The evolutionarily conserved ATP-dependent nucleosome remodelling factor ISWI can space nucleosomes affecting a variety of nuclear processes. In Drosophila, loss of ISWI leads to global transcriptional defects and to dramatic alterations in higher-order chromatin structure, especially on the male X chromosome. In order to understand if chromatin condensation and gene expression defects, observed in ISWI mutants, are directly correlated with ISWI nucleosome spacing activity, we conducted a genome-wide survey of ISWI binding and nucleosome positioning in wild-type and ISWI mutant chromatin. Our analysis revealed that ISWI binds both genic and intergenic regions. Remarkably, we found that ISWI…

U-MedSearch: A Meta Search Engine of Medical Content for Different Users and Learning Needs

More and more people use Internet to look for medical information for understanding and learning but different users, such as experts (e.g., physicians) and consumers (e.g., patients), have different needs and bring different levels of reading ability and prior knowledge. Generic and specific search engines and specialized health sites either do not exploit the whole web or overload users with information of different nature. On the contrary, it is important for a user to immediately find the information on the topic being explored that has the 'right' amount of information and level of complexity. This paper presents a meta search engine of medical information on the web, U-MedSearch, that…

Alignment free Dissimilarities for sequence classification

One way to represent a DNA sequence is to break it down into substrings of length L, called L-tuples, and count the occurence of each L-tuple in the sequence. This representation defines a mapping of a sequence into a numerical space by a numerical feature vector of fixed length, that allows to measure sequence similarity in an alignment free way simply using disssimilarity functions between vectors. This work presents a benchmark study of 4 alignment free disssimilarity functions between sequences, computed on their L-tuples representation, for the purpose of sequence classification. In our experiments, we have tested the classes of geometric-based, correlation-based and information-based …

Multiresolution approach for image processing

Multiresolution approaches provide a powerful tool for image process- ing. In this report,we propose an overview of different types of multiresolu- tion. We show this methodology is composed of two main complementary steps, the bottom-up and the top-down strategies. We also present some important existing applications like filtering and features extraction. Fi- nally, a brief comparison of the different techniques is given and some new interesting possible use of this tool are exhibited.