Search results for "temi"

Monoclonal gammopathy of ocular significance (MGOS) – a short survey of corneal manifestations and treatment outcomes

2021

Monoclonal gammopathy of ocular significance (MGOS) is a rare subset of monoclonal gammopathy of clinical significance occurring secondary to plasma cell disorders and causing ocular manifestations. We identified 23 patients with paraproteinemic keratopathy (PPK) in the setting of monoclonal gammopathy of unknown significance (MGUS, 10), smoldering multiple myeloma (SMM, 3) or multiple myeloma (MM, 10). Many of these patients with PPK (11/23) presented decreased vision. All patients with MM and 40% of those with other diagnoses such as SMM and MGUS received systemic therapy with or without autologous stem cell transplantation. Four eyes of four patients were treated by penetrating keratopla…

INVESTIGATING PERCEPTUAL AND BIOLOGICAL FEEDBACKS IN HUMAN ROBOT INTERACTION

The Human Robot Interaction (HRI) is a new discipline that has attracted more attention in the last years due to the increasing presence of robots in people’s everyday life. It is a field of study dedicated to understanding, designing, and evaluating robotic systems for use by or with humans. Interaction, by definition, requires communication between robots and humans. A social robot is an autonomous or semi-autonomous robot capable of interacting and communicating with humans or other autonomous physical agents following social behaviours and rules related to its specific role. In order to interact effectively with the human being, a robot must be able to decode the complex system of human…

Fidelity and influencing factors in the Systemic Practice Model of children's social care in Finland

2020

Given that multiple countries have recently adopted social work practice models in children’s services, it is striking that only a few studies have systematically analysed both the level of fidelity and potential implementation barriers and facilitators. The aim of this study is to provide an in-depth analysis of how and why the Reclaiming Social Work (RSW) model works in different settings. The study context was the implementation in Finland of an adaptation of the model, the Systemic Practice Model (SPM). This mixed-methods study evaluates 1) fidelity to the SPM and 2) the possible influencing factors. The results reveal high variability in the extent of fidelity in 23 implementation site…

Evaluating the effectiveness of the systemic practice model of children’s social care – A pilot study on child- and family-level outcomes

2023

The Systemic Practice Model (SPM) is a Finnish adaptation of the Reclaiming Social Work (RSW) model, which incorporates systemic ideas and practice into children’s social care. This study is the first attempt to evaluate the effectiveness of the RSW model outside England. The study employed a quasi-experimental repeated measures design. Questionnaires assessing child- and family-level outcomes and the quantity (i.e., number of meetings) and quality (i.e., service user feedback) of the practice were administered to social workers, children and parents twice over a six-month follow-up period. Outcome data comprise 112 cases (SPM cases n = 56, service-as-usual cases n = 56) from 18 child prote…

MultiSlice human organ extraction based on GVF

2008

Segmentation techniques based on active contours algorithm are widely used in medical imaging. Unfortunately, they require a lot of parameters to be used and this can rep- resent an issue for those physicians with not much informatics skills. This paper proposes a software tool which allows to segment multiple slice can differ organ extraction setting a small number of parameters. Moreover, the tool offers the functionality to perform a multiple segmentation the same time, so that an entire volume composed by hundreds slices can be segmented.

A metrics suite for evaluating agent-oriented architectures

2010

The Multi-agent Systems (MASs) paradigm continues to consolidate itself as a new branch of software engineering. Traditional software engineering strongly recommends to apply metrics in software developments. However, several research groups of experts in agent-oriented software engineering agree that classical software metrics and object-oriented metrics cannot directly measure the quality of MAS architectures. For this reason, this work proposes a suite of metrics to measure certain quality attributes of MAS architectures, considering agents and their organization. Most of these metrics are inspired by object-oriented metrics but they are adapted to agent-oriented concepts. Proposed metri…

Feasibility analysis and study of a grid-connected hybrid electric system: Application in the building sector

2016

This paper represents the feasibility study and analysis of a grid-connected hybrid (PV-Wind) system with battery, realized within the project DE.DU.ENER.T and installed in the research centre CRTEn located in the northern Tunisia in the city of Borj-Cedria. The main objective of this work is to exploit renewable sources of electrical energy production to electrify the desired building. So, to minimize electricity consumption costs, reduce the adverse effects of pollutants products from the diesel power systems and sometimes happen to sell the surplus of energy produced. The HOMER (Hybrid Optimization Model of Electric Renewable) software is used to estimate system size and its performance …

Lightweight Alloys Recycling and Processing through Innovative Friction Based Direct Technologies

In the last decades, the use of lightweight alloys has been spreading in almost any industrial field thanks to the relevant weight reduction allowed by the use of such materials. On the other hand, aluminium alloys are characterized by high-energy demands primary production cycles that are responsible for a relevant share of the global CO2 emissions. In order to limit and reverse such phenomenon, putting in place strategies to keep the material in the circle over multiple life cycles is mandatory and the concepts of circular economy, closed loop society and industrial symbiosis are progressively gathering more and more pace. Nevertheless, metal scraps are often mainly composed of chips resu…

Fundamental investigation on the mechanical behavior of weld seams

The solid state welding processes allow joints free from defects with reduced residual stresses and low distortion. However, such processes are generally characterized by a complex mechanical junction because of the particular material flow. Therefore, the design and optimization of the processes in which the solid bonding phenomenon occurs are difficult and requires a large number of tests. The purpose of this research is the description on the mechanical behavior of welded seams obtained through the friction stir welding (FSW) and linear friction welding (LFW) processes by analyzing the same phenomenon that occurs in both metallurgical processes, named the solid bonding phenomenon. The ai…

Network-Based Computational Techniques to Determine the Risk Drivers of Bank Failures During a Systemic Banking Crisis

2018

This paper employs a computational model of solvency and liquidity contagion assessing the vulnerability of banks to systemic risk. We find that the main risk drivers relate to the financial connections a bank has and the market concentration, apart from the size of the bank triggering the contagion, while balance sheets play only a minor role. We also find that market concentration might facilitate banks to withstand liquidity shocks better while exposing them to larger solvency chocks. Our results are validated through an out-of-sample forecasting that shows that both type I and type II prediction errors are reduced if we include network characteristics in our prediction model.