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Currently, Parkinson's Disease (PD) is diagnosed primarily based on symptoms by experts clinicians. Neuroimaging exams represent an important tool to confirm the clinical diagnosis. Among them, Brain Parenchyma Sonography (BPS) is used to evaluate the hyperechogenicity of Substantia Nigra (SN), found in more than 90% of PD patients. In this article, we exploit a new dataset of BPS images to investigate an automatic segmentation approach for SN that can increase the accuracy of the exam and its practicability in clinical routine. This study achieves state-of-the-art performance in SN segmentation of BPS images. Indeed, it is found that the modified U-Net network scores a Dice coefficient of 0.859 ± 0.037. The results presented in this study demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of SN automatic segmentation in BPS medical images, to the point that this study can be considered as the first stage of the development of an end-to-end CAD (Computer Aided Detection) system. Furthermore, the used dataset, which will be further enriched in the future, has proven to be very effective in supporting the training of CNNs and may pave the way for future studies in the field of CAD applied to PD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence exists that the gut microbiota contributes to the alterations of lipid metabolism associated with high-fat diet (HFD). Moreover, the gut microbiota has been found to modulate the metabolism and absorption of dietary lipids, thereby affecting the formation of lipoproteins occurring at the intestinal level as well as systemically, though the pathophysiological implication of altered microbiota composition in HFD and its role in the development of atherosclerotic vascular disease (ATVD) remain to be better clarified. Recently, evidence has been collected indicating that supplementation with natural polyphenols and fibres accounts for an improvement of HFD-associated intestinal dysbiosis, thereby leading to improved lipidaemic profile. This study aimed to investigate the protective effect of a bergamot polyphenolic extract (BPE) containing 48% polyphenols enriched with albedo and pulp-derived micronized fibres (BMF) in the gut microbiota of HFD-induced dyslipidaemia. In particular, rats that received an HFD over a period of four consecutive weeks showed a significant increase in plasma cholesterol, triglycerides and plasma glucose compared to a normal-fat diet (NFD) group. This effect was accompanied by body weight increase and alteration of lipoprotein size and concentration, followed by high levels of MDA, a biomarker of lipid peroxidation. Treatment with a combination of BPE plus BMF (50/50%) resulted in a significant reduction in alterations of the metabolic parameters found in HFD-fed rats, an effect associated with increased size of lipoproteins. Furthermore, the effect of BPE plus BMF treatment on metabolic balance and lipoprotein size re-arrangement was associated with reduced gut-derived lipopolysaccharide (LPS) levels, an effect subsequent to improved gut microbiota as expressed by modulation of the Gram-negative bacteria Proteobacteria, as well as Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes. This study suggests that nutraceutical supplementation of HFD-fed rats with BPE and BMP or with their combination product leads to restored gut microbiota, an effect associated with lipoprotein size re-arrangement and better lipidaemic and metabolic profiles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As highlighted by the UN 2030 Agenda, sustainable development is a complex and multidimensional issue that can be effectively implemented and reached at the local level. This implies the evaluation of differences and disparities between territories in order to define local priorities and support cohesion policy objectives. This need has been addressed by the Italian "National Strategy for Inner Areas", which aims to support the growth of territories with a continuous economic and population decline. However, Inner Areas are identified by a set of indicators related to the low accessibility to Services of General Interest, neglecting other important factors that contribute to this condition. This paper proposes a critical analysis of this measurement and of the related "territorialization" of Inner Areas, by introducing a more comprehensive assessment model based on the concept of Territorial Capital (TC), which highlights a more nuanced understanding of complexities and diversities related to the potential development of a territory. In particular, the proposed model evaluates eight TC dimensions (human, social, cognitive, infrastructural, productive, relational, environmental and settlement capital), which cover a broad spectrum of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In order to accurately demonstrate the differences between the results of the two evaluation methods, this paper presents the results of a case study application concerning all 377 municipalities, which compose the Autonomous Region of Sardinia (Italy). The findings of this study confirm the potential of an approach based on the Territorial Capital for place-based policymaking. TC, in fact, can become relevant for defining local priorities and supporting complex decisions, allowing governments to better design and tailor interventions for the effective and efficient management of available resources. Furthermore, these results pose new questions for future research developments in the field of sustainable and equitable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents an application that estimates all possible paths within an urban environment and proposes the optimal one according to objective criteria and individualized options. The application grounds its functionality on a Cellular Automaton (CA) that models the area of interest and provides the rule that activates the processing of input data. The model incorporates the term walkability as a discrete magnitude that integrates qualitative features of pedestrian mobility. The proposed application fosters sustainable forms of movement at a local level that undoubtedly improves the human physical status and upgrades civilian living conditions. In the context of this paper, we provide a thorough description of the operational principles of the model, and we test its validity by applying it in Xanthi, a medium size city located in northeastern Greece. Finally, we describe variants of the initial scenario to demonstrate the sensibility of the model in external assessments as well as its resilience in biasing manipulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present an agent-based model of a simple endogenous-money economy. The model simulates agents representing individual persons who can work, consume, invent new products and related production technologies, apply for a loan from the bank and start up a business. Through the interaction of persons with the firms, we simulate the production of goods, consumption and labour market. In order to achieve a significant level of realism of the simulations, the firms are modelled as'adaptive agents using an effective reinforcement learning approach in continuous space. This setting allows us to explore how an endogenous-money economy can be built up from scratch, as an emergent property of actions and interactions among heterogeneous agents once money is injected into a non-monetary self-production (or barter) economy. In the paper, we first empirically investigate the learning capability of the firm agents. Then, we discuss the results of some computational experiments under different significant scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a methodology and a planning and design support software tool for evaluating walkability and pedestrian accessibility of places which are relevant for people’s capabilities, and thus an important component of quality of life in cities. A multicriteria evaluation model, at the core of the decision support system, is used to assign walkability scores to points in urban space. Walkability scores are obtained through algorithms which process spatial data and run the evaluation model in order to derive potential pedestrian routes along the street network, taking into account the quality of urban space on several attributes relevant for walkability. One of its notable characteristics is a certain reversal of perspective in evaluating walkability: the walkability score of a place does not reflect how that place isper sewalkable, but instead how and where to can one walk from there, that is to say, what is the walkability the place is endowed with. This evaluation incorporates three intertwined elements: the number of destinations/opportunities reachable by foot, their walking distances, and the quality of the paths to these destinations. In this article, we furthermore demonstrate possible uses of the support system by reporting and discussing the results of a case-study assessment of a project for the Lisbon’sSegunda Circular(Second Ring Road). The software tool is made freely available for download. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The objective of this computational study was to investigate to which extent theavailabilityand theway of useof historical maps may affect the quality of the calibration process of cellular automata (CA) urban models. The numerical experiments are based on a constrained CA applied to a case study. Since the model depends on a large number of parameters, we optimize the CA using cooperative coevolutionary particle swarms, which is an approach known for its ability to operate effectively in search spaces with a high number of dimensions. To cope with the relevant computational cost related to the high number of CA simulations required by our study, we use a parallelized CA model that takes advantage of the computing power of graphics processing units. The study has shown that the accuracy of simulations can be significantly influenced by both the number and position in time of the historical maps involved in the calibration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The deactivation pattern of a "model" Ni/MgO catalyst in the pre-reforming of n-hexane with steam (T, 450 °C; P, 5-15 bar) is reviewed. The influence of the steam-to-carbon ratio (S/C, 1.5-3.5) on the rate of catalyst fouling by coking is ascertained. Catalyst fouling leads to an exponential decay in activity, denoting 1st-order dependence of the coking process on active sites availability. Hydrogen hinders the coking process, though slight activity decay is due to sintering of the active Ni phase. Deactivation by thiophene causes a sharp, almost linear, drop to nearly zero activity within only 6 h; this deactivation is likely due to dissociative adsorption of thiophene with subsequent strong, irreversible chemical adsorption of S-atoms on active Ni sites, i.e., irreversible poisoning. Modeling of activity decay curves (α, at/a0) by proper kinetic equations allows assessing the effects of temperature, pressure, S/C, H2 and thiophene feed on the deactivation pattern of the model Ni/MgO catalyst by coking, sintering, and poisoning phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose an operational approach to incorporate complex urban geography into urban land-use cellular automata (CA) models. The local interactions in the standard urban CA models are habitually based on the 'as the crow flies' spatial distances among cells. This is hardly a plausible assumption if the local interactions and influences among places are to depend on their mutual proximity in terms of accessibility to humans, shaped among others by the network of transportation and pedestrian networks. Very little operational efforts have been undertaken in CA-based urban modelling to investigate and provide a more coherent treatment of such irregular proximities. In this paper, as a contribution in that direction, we lay down a possible CA modelling approach, discuss a few toy examples and present an application on the city of Heraklion in Crete. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The accuracy of most Cellular Automata (CA) models for simulating wildfires is limited by the fact that spread directions are constrained to the few angles imposed by the regular lattice of cells. To mitigate such problem, this paper proposes a new CA in which a local randomization of the spread directions is introduced. The suggested technique, inspired by a method already used for simulating lava flows, is empirically investigated under homogeneous conditions and by comparison with the wildfire simulator FARSITE. According to the presented results, the adopted randomization can significantly improve the accuracy of fire spread simulations based on a standard center-to-center ignition scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over a period of 24 months of operation, we optimised a physicochemical plant for the decontamination of surface treatment industrial wastewater. This article presents the abatements obtained in the levels of chemical pollution after the various optimisations validated in the laboratory and then transposed to the industrial site. The optimisation of the plant reduced the effluent organic load, nitrite and zinc levels by about 70%, 85% and 80%, respectively. To evaluate the utility of each optimisation proposal, standard bioassays based on lettuce seed germination were carried out on the final effluent. Decreasing concentrations of pollutants in the effluent led to a reduction of its impact on seed germination. The bioassays confirmed the environmental benefits obtained from the optimisation of the treatment plant. The biological tests proposed seem to be good indicators of the contaminant concentrations present in wastewater. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cell-based methods for simulating wildfires can be computationally more efficient than techniques based on the fire perimeter expansion. In spite of this, their success has been limited by the distortions that plague the simulated shapes. This article presents a novel algorithm for wildfire simulation through Cellular Automata (CA), which is able to effectively mitigate the problem of distorted fire shapes. Such a result is obtained allowing spread directions that are not constrained to the few angles imposed by the lattice of cells and the neighborhood size. The characteristics of the proposed algorithm are empirically investigated under homogeneous conditions through some comparisons with the outcomes of a typical CA-based simulator. Also, using two significant heterogeneous landscapes, a comparison with the vector-based simulator FARSITE is discussed. According to the results of this study, the proposed approach performs significantly better, in terms of accuracy, than the CA taken as reference. In addition, at a far less computational cost, it provides burned regions that are equivalent, for practical purposes, to those given by FARSITE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper presents the latest developments of the deterministic Macroscopic Cellular Automata model SCIARA for simulating lava flows. A Bingham-like rheology has been introduced for the first time as part of the Minimization Algorithm of the Differences, which is applied for computing lava outflows from the generic cell towards its neighbours. The hexagonal cellular space adopted in the previous releases of the model for mitigating the anisotropic flow direction problem has been replaced by a–Moore neighbourhood–square one, nevertheless by producing an even better solution for the anisotropic effect. Furthermore, many improvements have been introduced concerning the important modelling aspect of lava cooling. The model has been tested with encouraging results by considering both a real case of study, the 2006 lava flows at Mt Etna (Italy), and an ideal surface, namely a 5°inclined plane, in order to evaluate the magnitude of the anisotropic effect. As a matter of fact, notwithstanding a preliminary calibration, the model demonstrated to be more accurate than its predecessors, providing the best results ever obtained on the simulation of the considered real case of study. Eventually, experiments performed on the inclined plane have pointed out how this release of SCIARA does not present the typical anisotropic problem of deterministic Cellular Automata models for fluids on ideal surfaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: A class of MnCeO x catalysts has been synthesized via the new redox-precipitation route in alternative to the conventional co-precipitation technique. The effects of preparation method, composition and calcination temperature on catalyst texture, dispersion and reduction pattern properties have been addressed. Redox-precipitated systems exhibit high surface area (SA, 120–170m2/g), large pore volume (PV, 0.4–0.5cm3/g) and a “narrow” pore size distribution (PSD) in a wide range of the Mn/Ce ratio (1/3–3/1). A quasi-molecular dispersion markedly improves oxide-support interactions and reducibility of the active phase. Redox-precipitated systems show a superior performance in the catalytic wet oxidation of phenol with oxygen (CWAO) at 373K in terms of substrate and total organic carbon (TOC) elimination and mineralization (i.e., CO2 formation) selectivity. Carbon mass-balance from TG-DSC data of used catalysts and CO2 selectivity values signal that the CWAO of phenol proceeds via a L–H reaction path, the oxidation of C-containing species being the rate limiting step (r.l.s.). Then, an optimum average pore diameter (APD, 10–15nm) enhances the rate of the adsorption step, while a straight relation between CO2 selectivity and reducibility prove that dispersion and redox properties of the active phase control the mineralization activity of the MnCeO x system. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

A hybrid technique based on Cellular Automata and Genetic Algorithms has been used for modeling lava flows on Mt Etna volcano (Italy). In particular, a Parallel Master-Slave Genetic Algorithm has been applied to evolve a two dimensional Cellular Automatamodel for "aa"-type lava flows, typical of the considered study area. Specifically, the 2001 Etnean Nicolosi case study has been considered for model calibration, while a subsequent validation phase has been performed by considering further events occurred in the same area. Results have confirmed both the goodness of the cellular automata simulation model and of the genetic algorithm employed for its calibration. An application concerning hazard evaluation has been subsequently performed on a vast area of the volcano, regarding different types of vulnerability assessments. Results have pointed out the validity of the methodology and its usefulness for Civil Defence purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]