Alberto Colombo

Paracervical anesthesia for outpatient hysteroscopy

One hundred seventy-seven women aged 41 +/- 8 (mean +/- SD) years, referred for evaluation of excessive uterine bleeding, were enrolled in an open-label randomized trial to evaluate the efficacy of local anesthesia before hysteroscopy in an outpatient population. The patients underwent hysteroscopy and endometrial biopsy with paracervical block by 10 mL of 1% mepivacaine hydrochloride solution (n = 87) or no local anesthesia (n = 90) and assessed lower abdominal and pelvic pain according to a 10-point linear analog scale. The mean +/- SD pain score was 4.5 +/- 2.0 at hysteroscopy and 5.2 +/- 2.1 at endometrial biopsy in the 87 subjects given a paracervical block versus 4.9 +/- 2.2 and 5.7 +/- 2.4 in the 90 women not given local anesthesia, without statistically significant differences. Paracervical anesthesia for routine outpatient hysteroscopy in premenopausal women may be superfluous.

Tumor Necrosis Factor in Plasma and Peritoneal Fluid of Women with and without Endometriosis

To determine whether in vivo levels of tumor necrosis factor a in plasma and peritoneal fluid differ in infertile subjects with and without endometriosis, peripheral blood and peritoneal fluid samples were collected in 94 women undergoing laparoscopy for infertility. Quantitative determinations of tumor necrosis factor a were performed by an enzyme immunoassay test. Tumor necrosis factor a levels were below the detection limit (10 pg/ml) in plasma and peritoneal fluid of 42 (91%) and 30 (90%) patients with endometriosis and 40 (83%) and 31 (91%) subjects without the disease, respectively. In our series, plasma and tumor necrosis factor a levels were not different in infertile women with and without endometriosis.

Excitonic effects in thiophene oligomers

Abstract Excitonic interactions in conjugated chains are studied by analysing the optical and vibrational properties of unsubstituted thiophene oligomers with different supramolecular organization. Single quasiplanar molecules, electronically decoupled in the solid state, have been obtained by inclusion of the thiophene oligomers in perhydrotriphenylene. Resonant Raman scattering shows that the strong spectral changes which occur upon molecular aggregation can be explained only by electronic excited state interactions, in rather good agreement with the prediction of the molecular exciton model.

The Use of a Meta-Model to Support Multi-Project Process Measurement

In todays environment, software companies are engaged in multiple projects delivered on heterogeneous platforms for a wide class of applications in disparate application domains. They are increasingly engaged in the co-development of software systems through joint software development projects including staff from partners and customers as well as their own. As a result, they must support multiple software development processes while trying to guarantee uniform levels of process enactment, and product quality across all projects. Our approach is capable of providing process measurement in a joint-project, multi-process model business environment. It is based on a simple meta-model for computing across-process, multiple-project metrics designed to permit monitoring of CMMI compliance. The open source tool Spago4Q has been developed to support our approach and is capable of producing the measurements needed for monitoring of a set of large-scale development projects using different process models, in a real industrial setting in Europe. The results support the view that that it will not always be possible to aggregate the same set of metrics across disparate process models.

Microbiological Evaluation of Commercial Probiotic products available in Italy

Abstract Scientific evidence of the prevention and therapy of some intestinal diseases is accumulating in regard to probiotic products. However, sufficient information on the use of probiotics in specific therapies is not yet available and, above all, there is no clear legislation about these products in Europe. In this study, we evaluated five different probiotic products commercially available in Italy for their qualitative and quantitative microbial content after about 12 and 22 months of storage. We also evaluated the stability of lactobacilli to 0.3% bile salts and to pH of 3.58 and 7.98. There were discrepancies between the declared content and our results found after storage for 4 of the tested products. Bile salts and basic pH did not affect the growth of the lactobacilli tested, while for 2 tested products 6 hours at acid pH produced a complete inhibition of bacterial growth. Our results suggest the need for clear legislation and adequate control of the manufacturing of probiotic products.

Gonadotropin releasing hormone agonist treatment before hysterectomy for menorrhagia and uterine leiomyomas

Objective. To investigate the effect of gonadotropin releasing hormone agonist (goserelin) treatment before hysterectomy for leiomyomata‐associated menorrhagia.

Activity of levofloxacin and ciprofloxacin in combination with cefepime, ceftazidime, imipenem, piperacillin-tazobactam and amikacin against different Pseudomonas aeruginosa phenotypes and Acinetobacter spp.

Background: Combination therapy is used to widen the antimicrobial spectrum, minimize toxicity and prevent the emergence of resistant mutants. Methods: Synergy between levofloxacin or ciprofloxacin and ceftazidime, cefepime, imipenem, piperacillin-tazobactam and amikacin was evaluated by checkerboard assay with 55 strains and by time-kill curves with 8 strains of Pseudomonasaeruginosa and Acinetobacter spp. Results: In the checkerboard assay, synergy and additivity were the most frequent effects observed among all the combinations against P. aeruginosa and Acinetobacter spp., with no significant differences between the two fluoroquinolones. No antagonism was observed. In the time-kill curves, synergy was evidenced against all the tested strains, at least for one combination at one of the time points considered. Levofloxacin and ciprofloxacin combined with ceftazidime, as well as levofloxacin plus amikacin, were synergistic for all the strains tested. Conclusion: Combinations of fluoroquinolones with β-lactams or amikacin show an enhanced activity against P. aeruginosa and Acinetobacter spp.

Veralipride for Hot Flushes during Gonadotropin-Releasing Hormone Agonist Treatment

Hot flushes are the commonest symptom induced by gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonists (GnRHa). We performed an open observational trial to evaluate the efficacy of veralipride, an antidopaminergic drug, in reducing hot flushes in 25 premenopausal women treated with a GnRHa for endometriosis (8 subjects) or menorrhagia (17 subjects). The patients received goserelin depot for 6 months and veralipride was added for the third month. Hot flushes, severe in all women at 2 months, improved in both frequency and intensity in 92% of the subjects during veralipride administration. The benefit obtained persisted until the end of the GnRHa treatment.

A metamodel for modeling and measuring Scrum development process

Many organizations using agile processes would like to adopt a process measurement framework, e.g. for assessing their process maturity. In this paper we propose a meta-model supporting derivation of specific data models for agile development processes. Then, we show how our meta-model can be used to derive a model of the Scrum process.

Discovering the software process by means of stochastic workflow analysis

A fundamental feature of the software process consists in its own stochastic nature. A convenient approach for extracting the stochastic dynamics of a process from log data is that of modelling the process as a Markov model: in this way the discovery of the short/medium range dynamics of the process is cast in terms of the learning of Markov models of different orders, i.e. in terms of learning the corresponding transition matrices. In this paper we show that the use of a full Bayesian approach in the learning process helps providing robustness against statistical noise and over-fitting, as the size of a transition matrix grows exponentially with the order of the model. We give a specific model-model similarity definition and the corresponding calculation procedure to be used in model-to-sequence or sequence-to-sequence conformance assessment, this similarity definition could also be applied to other inferential tasks, such as unsupervised process learning.