"No allogeneic blood transfusion" protocol for the surgical correction of craniosynostoses. II. Clinical application

The authors describe the results obtained in 13 consecutive cases of craniosynostosis operated on according to a protocol devised at avoiding allogeneic blood transfusion. The protocol is based on pre- and postoperative treatment with erythropoietin, preoperative autologous blood donation, preoperative normovolemic hemodilution and intraoperative blood salvage. Nine subjects were affected by simple forms of craniosynostosis, whereas the remaining 4 presented with oxycephaly or craniofacial syndromes. Five of the 13 children were under 7 months and a further 3, under 10 months of age at the time of the surgical operation. Seven children weighed less than 10 kg. Allogeneic blood transfusion was avoided in 11 of the 13 children considered. Two failures - defined as the necessity to reinfuse the patient with an allogeneic blood transfusion - were recorded, 1 of them resulting from an unexpected hemorrhage during surgery. The results obtained indicate that this protocol designed to avoid allogeneic blood transfusion can be safely applied in the great majority of children with craniosynostosis, even when the surgical correction is carried out early in life.     

Electrocortical desynchronization after microinfusion of kainic acid into the locus coeruleus in rats

CD-1, a genetically-engineered CHO cell line, was cultivated with a Biosilon microcarrier culture system. We successfully cultivated CD-1 cells to a very high density (over 1 x 10(7) cells/ml). Prourokinase was stably secreted at about 180 IU/10(6) cells/24 h. Experiments showed that CD-1 cells growing on Biosilon microcarriers were able to spontaneously release from the microcarriers, then reattach and proliferate on fresh microcarriers. This makes it very easy to scale up production. The microcarriers could be reused several times without affecting adhesion, proliferation and prourokinase secretion. With CM-PECC membrane radial flow chromatography and MPG chromatography, the prourokinase in conditioned medium could be purified to a specific activity of 1 x 10(5) IU/mg of protein. The purification factor was about 600 fold, and approximately 90% of the biological activity was recovered.     

Structural transformations in surface layers of amorphous ribbons Ni78SixB22−x

The thermal stability of NI₇₈Si_xB_22–x (x = 6, 9, 12, 15) metallic glasses, produced by the single-roll melt spinning method, has been investigated by differential thermal analysis (DTA) and by measuring the temperature dependences of the exoelectron emission (EEE) and contact potential difference (CPD) relative to platinum. It has been found that both CPD and EEE show anomalies at temperatures corresponding to the structural transformations in the surface layer of investigated materials. The surface crystallization occurs at temperature of 150 K lower than the volume crystallization. The activation energy for the surface crystallization is also distinctly lower than that for crystallization in bulk.     

Promoting the integration of technology in teaching: An analysis of the factors that increase the intention to use technologies among Italian teachers

Background: The rapid spread of COVID-19 forced many countries to adopt severe containment measures, transferring all didactic activities into virtual environments. However, the integration of technology in teaching may present difficulties, especially in some countries, such as Italy. Objectives: The present study analyzed how the two main factors of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), namely perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use, combined with online teaching self-efficacy, were associated with the intention to use technology to teach. We posited a moderated moderation model in which perceived usefulness represented the main predictor, with self-efficacy and perceived ease of use as moderators of intention to use technology to teach. Method: The model was tested through multiple regressions, using the PROCESS macro on SPSS 26 with a sample of 178 upper secondary school teachers in Italy. Results and conclusions: Regressions showed that each variable significantly predicted the intention to use technology. In addition, a moderation effect of self-efficacy on the perceived usefulness of using technology was found for medium and high-level of perceived ease of use of technology. Implications: The present study provides targeted implications for distance education policy and practice to promote its adoption (or the blended modality) in Italian upper schools.     

Hydroxyls nests in defective silicalites and strained structures derived upon dehydroxylation: vibrational properties and theoretical modelling

Defective silicalite, an efficient and selective catalyst in the gas phase Beckmann rearrangement reaction, has been characterised by infrared spectroscopy and by molecular modelling techniques. We report a detailed IR study on the effect of outgassing treatments at increasing temperature on silanols bands and on framework modes. The effect of a temperature decrease up to 100 K (during the IR measurement) on the H-bonding interactions has also been investigated. The interaction of silanols with mesitylene, a probe molecule which cannot penetrate the channels, has been studied in order to distinguish between internal and external OH groups. Molecular mechanics and ab initio methods have also been used to model the structure and the vibrational features of a properly designed nest in order to support the assignments of the IR spectrum.     

Probabilistic consensus clustering using evidence accumulation

Machine Learning - Clustering ensemble methods produce a consensus partition of a set of data points by combining the results of a collection of base clustering algorithms. In the evidence...     

Mobile Underwater Sensor Networks for Protection and Security: Field Experience at the UAN11 Experiment

The EU‐funded project UAN (Underwater Acoustic Network) was aimed at conceiving, developing, and testing at sea an innovative and operational concept for integrating underwater and above‐water sensors in a unique communication system to protect offshore and coastline critical infrastructures. This work gives details on the underwater part of the project. It introduces a set of original security features and gives details on the integration of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) as mobile nodes of the network and as surveillance assets, acoustically controlled by the command and control center to respond against intrusions. Field results are given of the final UAN project sea trial, UAN11, held in May 2011 in Norway. During the experimental activities, a UAN composed of four fixed nodes, two AUVs, and one mobile node mounted on the supporting research vessel was operated continuously and integrated into a global protection system. In this article, the communication performance of the network is reported in terms of round‐trip time, packet loss, and average delivery ratio. The major results of the experiment can be thus summarized: the implemented network structure was successful in continuously operating over five days with nodes seamlessly entering and exiting the network; the performance of the network varied greatly with fluctuations in the acoustic channel; the addition of security features induced a minor degradation in network performance with respect to channel variation; the AUVs were successfully controlled from a remote station through acoustic signals routed by the network. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Artificial institutions: a model of institutional reality for open multiagent systems

Software agents’ ability to interact within different open systems, designed by different groups, presupposes an agreement on an unambiguous definition of a set of concepts, used to describe the context of the interaction and the communication language the agents can use. Agents’ interactions ought to allow for reliable expectations on the possible evolution of the system; however, in open systems interacting agents may not conform to predefined specifications. A possible solution is to define interaction environments including a normative component, with suitable rules to regulate the behaviour of agents. To tackle this problem we propose an application-independent metamodel of artificial institutions that can be used to define open multiagent systems. In our view an artificial institution is made up by an ontology that models the social context of the interaction, a set of authorizations to act on the institutional context, a set of linguistic conventions for the performance of institutional actions and a system of norms that are necessary to constrain the agents’ actions.     

The anti-reflective algebra: structural and computational analysis with application to image deblurring and denoising

Anti-reflective (AR) boundary conditions (BC) have been introduced recently in connection with fast deblurring algorithms, both in the case of signals and images. Here we extend such BCs to d dimensions (d ≥ 1) and we study in detail the algebra induced by the AR-BCs, with strongly symmetric point spread functions (PSF), both from a structural and computational point of view. The use of the re-blurring idea and the computational features of the AR-algebra allow us to apply Tikhonov-like techniques within O(n ^d log(n)) arithmetic operations, where n ^d is the number of pixels of the reconstructed object. Extensive numerical experimentation concerning 2D images and strongly symmetric PSFs confirms the effectiveness of our proposal.