Diagnostic performance of multi-organ ultrasound with pocket-sized device in the management of acute dyspnea

The availability of ultra-miniaturized pocket ultrasound devices (PUD) adds diagnostic power to the clinical examination. Information on accuracy of ultrasound with handheld units in immediate differential diagnosis in emergency department (ED) is poor. The aim of this study is to test the usefulness and accuracy of lung ultrasound (LUS) alone or combined with ultrasound of the heart and inferior vena cava (IVC) using a PUD for the differential diagnosis of acute dyspnea (AD)

The complex interplay between weather, social activity, and COVID-19 in the US

Empirical studies on the impact of weather and policy interventions on Covid-19 infections have dedicated little attention to the mediation role of social activity. In this study, we combine mobile locations, weather, and COVID-19 data in a two-way fixed effects mediation model to estimate the impact of weather and policy interventions on the COVID-19 infection rate in the US before the availability of vaccines, disentangling their direct impact from the part of the effect that is mediated by the endogenous response of social activity. We show that, while temperature reduces viral infectiousness, it also increases the amount of time individuals spend out of home, which instead favours the spread of the virus. This second channel substantially attenuates the beneficial effect of temperature in curbing the spread of the virus, offsetting one-third of the potential seasonal fluctuations in the reproduction rate. The mediation role of social activity is particularly pronounced when viral incidence is low, and completely offsets the beneficial effect of temperature. Despite being significant predictors of social activity, wind speed and precipitation do not induce sufficient variation to affect infections. Our estimates also suggest that school closures and lockdowns are effective in reducing infections. We employ our estimates to quantify the seasonal variation in the reproduction rate stemming from weather seasonality in the US

Triage at shift changes and distortions in the perception and treatment of emergency patients

Employing more than 2 million emergency department (ED) records, we combine machine learning and regression discontinuity to document novel distortions in triage nurses’ assessments of patients’ conditions and investigate the short- and medium-term consequences for patients. We show that triage nurses progressively become more lenient during their shifts, and identical ED patients arriving just after a shift change are thus assigned a lower priority. We show that these patients receive lower levels of care and require additional emergency care afterward. We conclude that distortions in nurses’ initial assessments of urgency bias’ medical staff’s perceptions

Conditional displacement operator for traveling fields

We show that the conditional displacement operator $\hat{U}_{CD}=\exp [\hat{b}^{\dagger}\hat{b}(\beta \hat{a}^{\dagger}-\beta ^{\ast}\hat{a})]$ acting upon an arbitrary state of traveling waves can be well approximated by the action of a Kerr medium placed between two beam splitters whose respective second ports are fed by highly excited coherent states. Applications to the generation of nonclassical states and measurement of Wigner function of arbitrary states are also considered

Normalized ground states for Schr\"odinger equations on metric graphs with nonlinear point defects

We investigate the existence of normalized ground states for Schr\"odinger equations on noncompact metric graphs in presence of nonlinear point defects, described by nonlinear $\delta$-interactions at some of the vertices of the graph. For graphs with finitely many vertices, we show that ground states exist for every mass and every $L^2$-subcritical power. For graphs with infinitely many vertices, we focus on periodic graphs and, in particular, on $\mathbb{Z}$-periodic graphs and on a prototypical $\mathbb{Z}^2$-periodic graph, the two-dimensional square grid. We provide a set of results unravelling nontrivial threshold phenomena both on the mass and on the nonlinearity power, showing the strong dependence of the ground state problem on the interplay between the degree of periodicity of the graph, the total number of point defects and their dislocation in the graph.Comment: 28 pages, 4 figure

Impact of alien insect pests on Sardinian landscape and culture

Geologically Sardinia is a raft which, for just under thirty million years, has been crossing the western Mediterranean, swaying like a pendulum from the Iberian to the Italian Peninsula. An island so large and distant from the other lands, except for its "sister" Corsica, has inevitably developed an autochthonous flora and fauna over such a long period of time. Organisms from other Mediterranean regions have added to this original contingent. These new arrivals were not randomly distributed over time but grouped into at least three great waves. The oldest two correspond with the Messinian salinity crisis about 7 million years ago and with the ice age, when, in both periods, Sardinia was linked to or near other lands due to a fall in sea level. The third, still in progress, is linked to human activity. Man has travelled since ancient times and for many centuries introduced allochthonous species to Sardinia which radically modified the native flora and fauna, but always at a very slow and almost unnoticeable rate. The use of sailing or rowing boats, with their low speeds, hindered the transport of living organisms from one place to another. The use of the steam boat, introduced around 1840 but widely diffuse around 1870-1880, opened the doors to more frequent arrivals and also to organisms from the American Continent. This technical innovation had an influence over the whole world economy, with its well-known grain crisis, and coincided in Sardinia with the arrival of Roman dairymen, producers of pecorino cheese and the beginning of the expansion of sheep farming which would continue uninterrupted until the present day. In this period of sudden social and environmental change, an insect was introduced which would turn out to be probably the most economically devastating agricultural pest in Europe: the Grape Phylloxera. The vineyard and wine business collapsed first in France then in Italy. The Phylloxera arrived in Sardinia in 1883 and wine production crashed a very short time later and only resumed after the distribution of American vine rootstock at the beginning of the 20th Century. From then, vine cultivation in Europe was modified with the essential use of this rootstock. Since then methods of transport have increased enormously in number and speed. The number of allochthonous and invasive species has increased proportionally: some of them along with exotic plants which are cultivated on the island, others following man in his activities. Often these new pests attack and destroy ornamental plants which have become part of the Sardinian landscape, causing it to change; just as often their presence requires methods of pest management which are different from the traditional methods on specific crops; finally in at least one case (the Asian tiger mosquito) they pose a threat to our health

Integrating road transport and emissions modelling: REM workshop outcomes and follow-up investigation

The European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) organised a two day workshop on the topic Road-transport and Emissions Modelling. The workshop was carried out under the umbrella of Enlargement and Integration Action 2015 and hosted by the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the University “Ss. Cyril and Methodius” in Skopje, on 10th and 11th of September 2015. During the two days, 12 speakers presented their work on various topics related to road-transport and emissions modelling. The aim of this report is to present the key findings of the workshop, as well as the key conclusions from the discussion lead during this two-day event. The report consists of two parts. The first one presents the JRC and its activities in support to the enlargement and integration process. Latest achievements of JRC in this area are presented. The second part presents the key findings of the presentations given by the speakers and reports the key conclusions from the discussions lead during the event on the workshop topics. Finally, recommendations for further activities in this thematic area are given.JRC.C.4 - Sustainable Transpor

Understanding social relationships in egocentric vision

The understanding of mutual people interaction is a key component for recognizing people social behavior, but it strongly relies on a personal point of view resulting difficult to be a-priori modeled. We propose the adoption of the unique head mounted cameras first person perspective (ego-vision) to promptly detect people interaction in different social contexts. The proposal relies on a complete and reliable system that extracts people\u5f3s head pose combining landmarks and shape descriptors in a temporal smoothed HMM framework. Finally, interactions are detected through supervised clustering on mutual head orientation and people distances exploiting a structural learning framework that specifically adjusts the clustering measure according to a peculiar scenario. Our solution provides the flexibility to capture the interactions disregarding the number of individuals involved and their level of acquaintance in context with a variable degree of social involvement. The proposed system shows competitive performances on both publicly available ego-vision datasets and ad hoc benchmarks built with real life situations