Antonino Previti

Microsyringe-Based Deposition of Two-Dimensional and Three-Dimensional Polymer Scaffolds with a Well-Defined Geometry for Application to Tissue Engineering

A technique for controlled deposition of biomaterials and cells in specific and complex architectures is described. It employs a highly accurate three-dimensional micropositioning system with a pressure-controlled syringe to deposit biopolymer structures with a lateral resolution of 5 microm. The pressure-activated microsyringe is equipped with a fine-bore exit needle and a wide variety of two- and three-dimensional patterns on which cells to be deposited can adhere. The system has been characterized in terms of deposition parameters such as applied pressure, motor speed, line width and height, and polymer viscosity, and a fluid dynamic model simulating the deposition process has been developed, allowing an accurate prediction of the topological characteristics of the polymer structures.

Exhaled air temperature in asthmatic children: a mathematical evaluation

Recently, the exhaled breath temperature has been proposed as a potential marker for the evaluation of airway inflammation in asthma. The purpose of this study was to verify the ability to distinguish asthmatics from normal controls by a dedicated detailed mathematical evaluation of the exhaled air curve. Analysis was performed in the different phases of the curve of exhaled temperature, i.e. the rate of temperature increase (Δe°T) and the mean plateau value. Principal components analysis (PCA) and artificial neural networks (ANNs) were used for the evaluation of the data in 90 asthmatic children and in 33 healthy age‐matched controls. Both PCA and ANNs showed that a separation between patients and controls can be obtained only by the evaluation of the plateau phase of the curve, which better reflects the periphery of the airway.

A free-standing hydrostatic bioreactor for neural tissue culture

A hydrostatic bioreactor for the study of cells and tissue is described. The system, which was developed to determine the effects of increased pressure on neural tissue, is capable of applying pressures of up to 100 mmHg with an error of /spl plusmn/2 mmHg in an enclosed chamber. On-line pH, pressure and temperature control enables the system to be monitored continuously and to be independent of bulky cell culture incubators.

Exhaled Breath Temperature: a key feature to discriminate asthmatic children

Editor, The skilful research team supervised by Prof. Popov reports their interesting integrated measurement systems (PAI-08-L-0222) able to accumulate the thermal energy released during the accumulation of multiple exhalations and conveying each single breath over a thermal block into a thermically isolated chamber. The system transduces the temperature of the thermal block by a high precision thermal sensor. A fitting procedure allows to model the acquired temperature values in relation to the initial temperature of the air in the thermal chamber. This work definitely confirms our findings about the information content of the plateau of exhalation in comparison to the rate of temperature increase. Such information is a key feature to discriminate asthmatic from non-asthmatic children. The cumulative curve acquired from the measurement device proposed by Popov et al., even if quite different from our single breath signal method, can be fitted by the same exponential model we adopted (Fig. 1), demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach: TðtÞ 1⁄4 Tp þ ðT0 TpÞ expð t=tauÞ: