Search

Objectives Evaluating anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibody levels is a current priority to drive immunization, as well as to predict when a vaccine booster dose may be required and for which priority groups. The aim of our study was to investigate the kinetics of anti-SARS-CoV-2 Spike S1 protein IgG (anti-S1 IgG) antibodies and neutralizing antibodies (NAbs) in an Italian cohort of healthcare workers (HCWs), following the Pfizer/BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine, over a period of up to six months after the second dose. Methods We enrolled 57 HCWs, without clinical history of COVID-19 infection. Fluoroenzyme-immunoassay was used for the quantitative anti-S1 IgG antibodies at different time points T1 (one month), T3 (three months) and T6 (six months) following the second vaccine shot. Simultaneously, a commercial surrogate virus neutralization test (sVNT) was used for the determination of NAbs, expressed as inhibition percentage (% IH). Results Median values of anti-S1 IgG antibodies decreased from T1 (1,452 BAU/mL) to T6 (104 BAU/mL) with a percent variation of 92.8% while the sVNT showed a percent variation of 34.3% for the same time frame. The decline in anti-S1 IgG antibodies from T1 to T6 was not accompanied by a loss of the neutralizing capacity of antibodies. In fact at T6 a neutralization percentage Conclusions Our findings reveal that the decrease of anti-S1 IgG levels do not correspond in parallel to a decrease of NAbs over time, which highlights the necessity of using both assays to assess vaccination effectiveness.

This study illustrates the early results of on-going research started under a recent project sponsored by the United Kingdom Government Transport Department to investigate the principal factors influencing road accidents as well as develop an internet application for the prediction of road accident-related effects at different scales. In particular, accident modelling, analysis of socio–economic, land use, infrastructural and contextual factors of road safety, as well as decision-making support are the focus of this work. In particular, an application in the United Kingdom of a model framework potentially transferable to other contexts is described. This application resulted in an extensive analysis of road safety factors as well as the development of a simulation web-based platform that uses microeconometric models to estimate the frequency of road accident along with the number and severity of injuries. These models proved considerable accuracy at the national level. In the end, the potential benefit of the simulation platform for road safety decision-making is showcased on a micro-scale with an application to a medium-sized town in South East England.

BackgroundThe aim of the study was to compare coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) severity presentation between oncologic and non-oncologic patients and to evaluate the impact of cancer type and stage on COVID-19 course.MethodsWe performed a multicentre, retrospective study involving 13 COVID-19 Units in Campania region from February to May 2020. We defined as severe COVID-19 presentation the cases that required mechanical ventilation and/or admission to Intensive Care Units (ICU) and/or in case of death.ResultsWe enrolled 371 COVID-19 patients, of whom 34 (9.2%) had a history or a diagnosis of cancer (24 solid, 6 onco-hematological). Oncologic patients were older (pConclusionsSince the higher risk of severe evolution of COVID-19, cancer patients, especially those with an active malignancy, should be candidates for early evaluation of symptoms and early treatment for COVID-19.

This study presents an innovative set of models for accident prediction which are at the core of a web-based platform for road safety simulation and predictions. Specifically, insights into road hazard prediction are given comparing the latest developments of machine learning research to econometric modelling. The paper provides an overview of the above web-platform as well as the description of its built-in models and the early findings of comparing machine learning and econometric methods with respect to crash severity prediction. The original specification of the proposed predictive models embeds, on top of traditional predictors, complex inputs, sporadically or never encountered in previous studies, related to demographics, land use, roadway geometry, traffic control and accident circumstances (special conditions on the road, etc.). The final outcome reveals high accuracy at national level in forecasting the number of casualties from a road crash and its severity. The related models have proved less effective, instead, in those contexts where road collision phenomena turn out exceptional, thus moving away from the national mean behaviour. Finally, the comparison between statistical parametric and machine learning methods, at this early stage is limited to crash severity classification and has pointed out a clear superiority of the parametric approach.

Lo studio descritto in questa nota riguarda la fattibilità di servizi di trasporto passeggeri basati sull'utilizzo del mezzo elicotteristico, su scala regionale

This research proposes a novel approach to improve the ability to forecast low frequency extreme events of transport-related pollution in urban areas using a limited input data set. The approach is based on the idea of a self-managing model, able to adapt to unexpected changes in pollution level. In more detail, for a given combination of variables, it selects the most suitable prediction model within a set of alternative air quality models, estimated for a wider range of locations and conditions. In this study, the new approach is tested for the prediction of nitrogen dioxide concentration in the United Kingdom (UK), specifically in an air quality monitoring site of the Greater Manchester Area, by comparing it with a context-specific statistical model (ARIMAX). The analysis results show that the two methods are similar in terms of global covariance and difference between observed and simulated concentrations, however the performance of the new approach in the prediction of extreme air pollution events is up to 27% better than the standard statistical approach and up to 113% better than the artificial neural network method.

The aim of this research is to find a solution for the standardization of road signs in the EU zone by a comparative analysis of different national sign systems to establish a common set from a single country. This work is based on the idea that road sign standardization might increase the safety level of transnational journeys and foster the relationships among the various members of the EU Community. This paper presents the outcome of the first step of the research, which focuses on the harmonization of danger signs. In more detail, a multicriteria approach is applied to rank 19 EU Member States on the basis of three main aspects: the installation cost of new signs, new sign learning issues and the effectiveness of sign systems. The study allows for the installation cost by quantifying the degree of similarity among road sign systems and the roadway network extension, on which new signs should be placed.

This paper deals with the design of logistic terminals taking Sicily, in the South of Italy, as a case study. It focuses on consolidation terminals for truckers and addresses the problem of optimising location pattern and public share in investments. This problem is solved through a Stackelberg game between the designer and the collective of road carriers. So a bilevel approach combines a system-optimum problem, at the upper level, with the carrier equilibrium problem, at the lower level. The choice behaviour of the lower-level player is simulated by a random utility model. The output of the game suggests that private companies and society should share the investments and the public contribution should be high; furthermore, transhipment and consolidation services should be concentrated at few terminals to exploit fully economies of scale at the expense of the average travel time to reach the logistic platforms.

CD95 and ceramide are known to be involved in the apoptotic mechanism. The triggering of CD95 induces a cascade of metabolic events that progressively and dramatically modifies the cell shape by intense membrane blebbing, leading to apoptotic bodies production. Although the CD95 pathway has been abundantly described in normal thyrocytes, the effects of cell permeable synthetic ceramide at morphological and biochemical levels are not fully known. In the present study, we show that thyroid follicular cells (TFC) exposed to 20 microM of C(2)-ceramide for 4 h are characterized by morphological features of necrosis, such as electron-lucent cytoplasm, mitochondrial swelling, and loss of plasma membrane integrity without drastic morphological changes in the nuclei. By contrast, TFC treated with 2 microM of C(2)-ceramide for 4 h are able to accumulate GD3, activate caspases cascade, and induce apoptosis. Furthermore, we provide evidence that 20 microM of C(2)-ceramide determine the destruction of mitochondria and are not able to induce PARP cleavage and internucleosomal DNA fragmentation, suggesting that the apoptotic program is not activated during the death process and nuclear DNA is randomly cleaved as the consequence of cellular degeneration. Pretreatment with 30 microM of zVAD-fmk rescued TFC from 2 microM of C(2)-ceramide-induced apoptosis, whereas, 20 microM of C(2)-ceramide exposure induced necrotic features. Deltapsi(m) was obviously altered in cells treated with 20 microM of C(2)-ceramide for 4 h (75% +/- 3.5%) compared with the low percentage (12.5% +/- 0.4%) of cells with altered Deltapsi(m) exposed to 2 microM of C(2)-ceramide. Whereas, only 20% +/- 1.1% of cells treated with anti-CD95 for 1 h showed altered Deltapsi(m). Additionally, Bax and Bak, two pro-apoptotic members, seem to be not oligomerized in the mitochondrial membrane following ceramide exposure. These results imply that high levels of exogenous ceramide contribute to the necrotic process in TFC, and may provide key molecular basis to the understanding of thyroid signaling pathways that might promote the apoptotic mechanism in thyroid tumoral cells.

This paper suggests a methodology to assess, through quantitative indicators, the public transport based accessibility inside an urban area. Such indicators derive from two functions, one called the “activity function”, allowing for the presence of generators and attractors of mobility and another termed the “impedance function”, measuring the generalized cost of public transport journeys. The proposed method was tested and applied to a zone on the outskirts of Palermo (capital of the Sicilian Region), to evaluate the effects of a new tram line, which is under construction and will be activated by the end of 2012. The study shows that such a line is not sufficient to enhance significantly the accessibility of this zone except near the tramway. Therefore, to reach a high level of accessibility in the whole study area minimising, at the same time, the public transport operating costs, it could be better to plan an integrated system in which the tram service is supported by new bus lines or novel routes of the existing ones. Today, many European cities face the shortage of public funds, which raises the issue of efficiency for local policy actions. Given the above, the authors intend to provide the local town authorities with methodological tools to improve public transport performance and consequently accessibility, under severe budget constraints, by the re-organization of the service and a better exploitation of existing facilities.

In this paper we show that individual attitudes of road carriers and their latent preferences toward specific freight service attributes do play a role in determining their mode choices. Specifically, we contribute to the empirical literature on freight agents' mode choice by exploring the role of the "perceived importance" of the most relevant service dimensions in determining the attractiveness of two alternatives to "all-road" transport: logistics terminals and road-sea intermodal services. This is carried out through a revealed/stated preference experiment and a mixture of logit framework. Our results support the hypothesis that operators' attitudes towards time, punctuality and risk of loss/damage can significantly enhance the explanatory power of the choice model, thus providing useful information for policy-makers to improve the regional freight mobility system. The "all road" option is preferred by hauliers concerned with the risk of loss/damage but it is, instead, disregarded by those assigning great relevance to punctuality. We also found substantial heterogeneity among respondents: larger firms tend to assign a lower value to time but a higher importance to the risk of loss/damage, especially if shipments are not frequent. In addition, the relevance of service reliability is higher the reliability greater the load size. Finally, we find that the nature of the transported goods significantly influences the choices of operators: when consigning perishables, hauliers tend to prefer the flexibility of a road-related mode. Any policy aiming at fostering the growth of intermodal transport and logistics and to remove obstacles to implementing rationalisation policies in the field of freight transport should take account of these elements. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Ghosts are new mass lesions in the right cardiac chamber after leads extraction, whose clinical significance is not clear. Because we do not know the true origin of ghosts, prolonged hospitalization and antibiotic therapy are considered necessary. Sixteen patients scheduled for leads removal

Our research aims to explore the impact of latent variables, mirroring urban travellers’ attitudes and perceptions, on the individual decision making process regarding the mode of transport. The paper describes the first results of an ongoing research activity, which derive from a pilot study conducted in Palermo, the capital of the Sicilian Region (in the south of Italy), and demonstrate that policy makers, in designing a socially desirable and environmentally sustainable urban mobility system, should take into account how travellers perceive the qualitative dimensions of transport.

This paper examines helicopter transfer services to reach attractive and not very accessible tourist areas, taking Sicily and its minor islands, in the South of Italy, as a case study. We investigate the viability of helicopter scheduled services for tourists moving from/to airports or doing one day tours to visit far away places. The mode choice of tourists is simulated using random utility models employing stated preference data. Heli-shuttle service is planned in terms of fleet size, frequency, fare and location pattern of heliports. The paper also analyses how a public subsidy reducing fares might change the set of feasible connections.

Questa ricerca ha un duplice obiettivo. Da un lato ottenere elementi conoscitivi utili alla pianificazione in ambito regionale di iniziative a supporto del trasporto intermodale, con particolare riferimento al trasporto strada-mare (Ro/Ro) e alla realizzazione di autoporti (piattaforme logistiche attraverso le quali ottenere un maggior consolidamento delle spedizioni e la promozione di servizi ad elevato valore aggiunto come controllo di qualità della merce, servizi di info-mobilità, etc.); dall’altro sviluppare strumenti analitici di supporto alla politica regionale. Il contesto geografico di riferimento è la regione Sicilia dove, nonostante la posizione geografica favorevole, l’intermodalità terra-mare stenta a decollare. A tal fine, è stata condotta una analisi di tipo stated preference su un campione di autotrasportatori, diretta a studiarne le principali caratteristiche e le preferenze, ed è stato proposto un modello di analisi dei dati basato sul concetto di utilità aleatoria del tipo mixed logit. Per garantire una maggiore aderenza del modello alla realtà si è proceduto sia ipotizzando che gli operatori di trasporto percepiscano in modo eterogeneo l’importanza del tempo di viaggio, sia includendo, nella stima, variabili latenti relative alla percezione dell’importanza di alcuni rilevanti attributi di scelta.

This research addresses the role of innovative forms of passenger air transport in favouring mobility of tourists visiting minor islands. In particular, we studied the feasibility of scheduled transport services using helicopter and seaplane for connecting Sicily in the south of Italy, to the near and very attractive Eolie Islands rapidly. In order to estimate the potential service demand, we allowed for the number of tourists arriving in the Eolie Archipelago during the period 1999-2008. In detail, we considered only the market of visitors with a high willingness-to-pay for time savings (individuals choosing superior hotels) coming from origins at least 300 km away from the Eolie Islands. Furthermore, we excluded a quota of travellers not disposed to flying, determined on the basis of a previous study about air transport demand. We also considered as potential users of the proposed transport services a percentage of the Eolie Isles’ population that was set according to a recent study about the use of air transport by Sicilian residents. The resulting observations were employed to estimate forecasts through an ARIMA model. After a technical analysis to identify the types of helicopter and seaplane suited to implementing regular transport services, we performed a cost analysis concerning the proposed non-conventional air transport services (taking account of fixed, variable, trading and financial costs). In particular, based on the ARIMA model demand forecasts, we determined the service supply (daily frequency and number of aircrafts) in the different cases and evaluated the related total cost per passenger. At the final step, we compared the helicopter and seaplane options with the various existing transport alternatives that can be used to get to the Eolie Islands from the major regional airport, according to generalized transport cost (calculated by adding value of transit time, external costs and service fare). We found out that according to the generalized cost criterion, helicopter is the best solution to connect the main Sicilian airport to the Eolie Isles.

This paper describes an approach for planning the introduction of bus lanes into the urban road network, that has been applied to the urban area of Palermo. The proposed modelling tool adopts a multi-agent objective function expressing the trade-off between the interests of diverse stakeholders: the generalized transport cost for car drivers and the travel time for public transport users. The reaction of car traffic to a certain planning scenario has been simulated by the DUE assignment technique and the positive impact of the modal shift on the objective function has been tackled by attaching a suitable weight to the time saving for bus passengers. The rise in the bus travel speed, owing to the bus lane solution, has been predicted for a set of urban roads by a neural network, so as to take into account many quantitative and qualitative road attributes. The optimal location pattern of bus ways has been searched by a greedy heuristic that through a step-by-step strategy builds the problem solution by keeping, at each stage, the best alternative.

Background: Large pedunculated colorectal polyps are often difficult to remove endoscopically. Methods: Four patients with giant pedunculated polyps (>3 cm) underwent an endoscopic procedure in which the polyp stalk was ligated with multiple clips and resected with a needle-knife papillotome. Results: No complications occurred either during or immediately after the procedure. Mean size of the resected polyps was 4.8 ± 1.2 cm (range 3 to 6 cm). Mean time for the entire procedure was 31 ± 5 minutes (range 25 to 45). No bleeding was found after a mean follow-up period of 4.3 ± 1.1 months (range 3 to 6 months). Conclusions: Although technical refinements are necessary to make the procedure easier and faster, this approach might represent the only option for selected patients who would otherwise need surgical resection of large pedunculated colonic polyps.

This paper illustrates the early results of ongoing research developing novel methods to analyse and simulate the relationship between trasport-related air pollutant concentrations and easily accessible explanatory variables. The final scope is to integrate the new models in traditional traffic management support systems for a sustainable mobility of road vehicles in urban areas. This first stage concerns the relationship between the hourly mean concentration of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and explanatory factors reflecting the NO2 mean level one hour back, along with traffic and weather conditions. Particular attention is given to the prediction of pollution peaks, defined as exceedances of normative concentration limits. Two model frameworks are explored: the Artificial Neural Network approach and the ARIMAX model. Furthermore, the benefit of a synergic use of both models for air quality forecasting is investigated. The analysis of findings points out that the prediction of extreme concentrations is best performed by integrating the two models into an ensemble. The neural network is outperformed by the ARIMAX model in foreseeing peaks, but gives a more realistic representation of the concentration's dependency upon wind characteristics. So, the Neural Network can be exploited to highlight the involved functional forms and improve the ARIMAX model specification. In the end, the study shows that the ability to forecast exceedances of legal pollution limits can be enhanced by requiring traffic management actions when the predicted concentration exceeds a lower threshold than the normative one.

This research aims to explore the impact of latent variables, mirroring the users’ preferences, on the individual decision making process regarding the mode of transport. The paper describes the first results of an ongoing research activity, which derives from a pilot study carried out in Palermo. The authors have administered to a sample of travellers a questionnaire and they simulated the mode choice behaviour referring to the random utility theory. Then the transport demand over the entire area of Palermo has been studied in order to design the cordon pricing scenario with the application of an additional cost on private car dedicated to a selected area of the historic centre of Palermo. The results support the assumption that the design of a competitive public transport supply, using a road pricing policy, should pass through the complete understanding of the relationship between mode choice and latent constructs.

Studies concerning the development of the magnocellular system are scarce and discordant in literature. We carried out an immunohistochemical study on supraotic and paraventricular hypothalamic nuclei using antivasopressin and antioxytocin antibodies in developing rats between the 15th day of intrauterine life and the 6th day of postnatal life. In addition, we performed RT-PCR experiments to establish the stage at which these hormones appear and neurosecretory activity commences. The results showed that supraoptic and paraventricular nuclei appear, respectively, on the 16th and the 18th day of intrauterine life and both immediately synthetize vasopressin neurohormone. By contrast, synthesis of oxytocin takes place from the 2nd day after birth. Probably, these nuclei synthetize oxytocin in conjunction with the decline of placental maternal oxytocin.

Interaction between Gibberellic Acid and Kinetin in Overcoming Apical Dominance, Natural and Induced by IAA, in Tomato (Lycopersicum esculenturn Mill. Cultivar Potentate)