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Recognizing the factors that have the greatest significant effect on the probability of a crash occurring is an essential part of road safety research. Many traffic crashes occur on rural roads with two-lane two-way. The purpose of this study was to explore the effect that the geometric design characteristics of rural two-lane roads had on the frequency of resulting crashes in developing country of Iran with the case study of Karaj-Chalus Road. The width of the pavement, the width of the shoulders, the curve, access to the secondary roads, the overtaking lane, the condition of the lighting, and the roadside features are all explanatory variables. Poisson and negative binomial regressions were utilized to model the crash frequencies. According to the findings, Poisson regression performed better than the other one. This was demonstrated by the fact that the Akaike's information criterion value of goodness-of-fit for Poisson and NB was, respectively, 211.783 and 272.494. In addition, the results of the regression showed that lane width and shoulder width were the most influential factors. Both of these components had p values that were less than 0.05 in the confidence range for 95 percent, indicating that they were meaningful. Additionally, their elasticity estimates were −0.65 and −0.53, respectively. In the end, the case-studied segments were ranked in order of priority according to the road safety index.

As the advancement of driverless technology, together with information and communication technology moved at a fast pace, autonomous vehicles have attracted great attention from both industries and academic sectors during the past decades. It is evident that this emerging technology has great potential to improve the pedestrian safety on roads, mitigate traffic congestion, increase fuel efficiency, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, there is limited systematic research into the applications and public perceptions of autonomous vehicles in road transportation. The purpose of this systematic literature review is to synthesise and analyse existing research on the applications, implications, and public perceptions of autonomous vehicles in road transportation system. It is found that autonomous vehicles are the future of road transportation and that the negative perception of humans is rapidly changing towards autonomous vehicles. Moreover, to fully deploy autonomous vehicles in a road transportation system, the existing road transportation infrastructure needs significant improvement. This systematic literature review contributes to the comprehensive knowledge of autonomous vehicles and will assist transportation researchers and urban planners to understand the fundamental and conceptual framework of autonomous vehicle technologies in road transportation systems.

•Government interventions is needed to implement applicable and sustainable road designs in road intersections.•Turbo-roundabout is significance in reducing traffic related accidents and ensuring pedestrian safety.•Triggering stop and go in roundabouts can lead to higher fuel consumptions for motorists and harmful greenhouse gas emissions for environmental sustainability.

Idiopathic hypereosinophilic syndrome (HES) is a rare, chronic hematological disease mainly characterized by unexplained prolonged eosinophilia, with frequent evidence of secondary organ damage. Treatment with steroids, chemotherapy, interferon-alpha (IFN-α), or imatinib-mesylate may improve the prognosis.Here we describe the case of a young male patient with a six-year history of HES and severe heart involvement who, after unsuccessful treatment attempts with steroids, hydroxyurea and IFN-α, had a prompt, clinical and hematological complete remission following administration of imatinib. As his cardiac function also markedly improved, he was considered for heart transplant. However, seven years after the onset of the disease and four months after the termination of imatinib treatment the patient died of a cerebral hemorrhage that occurred during an episode of acute respiratory sepsis. Imatinib has been previously reported to be effective in some hematological conditions with no evidence of the BCR/ABL transcript. The mechanisms that are probably involved in the response to imatinib in HES are also discussed.

We describe the case of an 8-year-old girl with common precursor B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia who presented with severe pancytopenia during maintenance therapy with methotrexate and 6-mercaptopurine. The bone marrow smear showed moderate hypocellularity and trilinear dysplastic changes consistent with a diagnosis of drug toxicity, with no evidence of lymphoblasts. Flow cytometric immunophenotyping was negative for leukemic cells. Blood cell counts normalized after treatment with folinic acid. Maintenance therapy was gradually restarted and she remained well at follow-up visits. Myelotoxicity from methotrexate and 6-mercaptopurine may represent an unpredictable incident during an otherwise uneventful maintenance therapy, and may occur independently of other organ toxicities.

BMT from HLA haploidentical family members (hBMT), using either T-cell depleted or T-cell replete grafts, is increasingly employed in patients who urgently need (but lack) a donor. After the promising results in hBMT obtained by the Baltimore group (Luznik et al., Biol Blood Marrow Transplant 2008, Blood 2010) introducing post-transplant high-dose cyclophosphamide (PT-CY) following a non-myeloablative conditioning regimen, the Genoa group (Raiola et al., Biol Blood Marrow Transplant 2013) has shown, in the haploidentical setting that a myeloablative conditioning (MAC) with PT-CY (on day +3 and +5), cyclosporine from day zero and mycophenolate mofetil (MMF) from day +1, is associated with a high rate of engraftment, acceptable TRM and GVHD, and induces durable remission with low incidence of relapse in a high proportion of patients with high-risk hematologic malignancies. We now report a series of 13 heavly pretreated high-risk leukemia patients who underwent a MAC protocol consisted of TBF regimen: Thiotepa (10 mg/kg), Busulfan (9,6 mg/kg) and Fludarabine (150 mg/mq). As graft versus host disease (GVHD) prophylaxis, 2 patients received a 5 drugs combination (ATG-Fresenius, CSA, MTX, MMF and Basiliximab) and stem cells source was G-CSF-primed haploidentical bone marrow (hBM) cells (Di Bartolomeo et al., Blood 2013). In 11 patients stem cells source was non-primed unmanipulated hBM cells, and GVHD prophylaxis consisted of PT-CY (50mg/kg) iv on day +3 and +4, CSA 2.5 mg/kg/day and MMF 45 mg/kg/day from day +4.From 2008 to 2013, 11 adult patients (M/F=8/3; median age 40 years, range 23 to 62) and 2 pediatric patients (M/F=1/1, age 4 and 7 years) with high risk ALL (1 pediatric; 2 adult), AML (1 pediatric; 8 adults) and one Richter evolution of CLL, underwent T replete hBMT. At time of transplant 10 patients were in CR (CR1=9, CR2=1), 1 in a good PR and 2 had refractory disease. Grafts contained a median of 5.68 x 108/kg nucleated BM cells (range 0.7-62.1), 2.14x106/kg CD34+ cells (range 0.55-7.09) and 34.7x106/kg CD3+ cells (range 16-93.4). 12 patients are evaluable for engraftment. This occurred in 100% for neutrophils and 93% for platelets, with a median time to neutrophil recovery (> 0.5 x 109/L) of 22.5 days (range, 13-40) and to platelet recovery (> 20.0 x 109/L) of 27.5 days (range, 17-49). All patients had full donor chimerism by day +30. Non relapse mortality (NRM) was 23%: 2 pt died for sepsis (one before engraftment), 1 for aGVHD. 4 patients had grade I and 3 grade II aGvHD, respectively. Only one patient had a grade III, and another had grade IV fatal GVHD. 3 patients had only limited chronic GvHD. Up to now, only 3 patients have relapsed and of these 2 have died. 8 patients (61.5%) are currently surviving, 7 of them are disease-free with median follow-up time of 165 days (range 32-896 days) from transplant.Our preliminary results confirm that haplo-BMT following a MAC regimen, is a feasible treatment in pediatric and adult patients, and that PT-CY is highly effective as GVHD prophylaxis, producing a high rate of stable engraftment with encouraging non relapse mortality and relapse-free survival.No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

BMT from HLA haploidentical family members (hBMT), using either T-cell depleted or T-cell replete grafts, is increasingly employed in patients who urgently need (but lack) a donor. After the promising results in hBMT obtained by the Baltimore group (Luznik et al., Biol Blood Marrow Transplant 2008, Blood 2010) introducing post-transplant high-dose cyclophosphamide (PT-CY) following a non-myeloablative conditioning regimen, the Genoa group (Raiola et al., Biol Blood Marrow Transplant 2013) has shown, in the haploidentical setting that a myeloablative conditioning (MAC) with PT-CY (on day +3 and +5), cyclosporine from day zero and mycophenolate mofetil (MMF) from day +1, is associated with a high rate of engraftment, acceptable TRM and GVHD, and induces durable remission with low incidence of relapse in a high proportion of patients with high-risk hematologic malignancies. We now report a series of 13 heavly pretreated high-risk leukemia patients who underwent a MAC protocol consisted of TBF regimen: Thiotepa (10 mg/kg), Busulfan (9,6 mg/kg) and Fludarabine (150 mg/mq). As graft versus host disease (GVHD) prophylaxis, 2 patients received a 5 drugs combination (ATG-Fresenius, CSA, MTX, MMF and Basiliximab) and stem cells source was G-CSF-primed haploidentical bone marrow (hBM) cells (Di Bartolomeo et al., Blood 2013). In 11 patients stem cells source was non-primed unmanipulated hBM cells, and GVHD prophylaxis consisted of PT-CY (50mg/kg) iv on day +3 and +4, CSA 2.5 mg/kg/day and MMF 45 mg/kg/day from day +4.