F. De Rosa

Expression of lactoferrin on human granulocytes: analysis with polyclonal and monoclonal antibodies

Lactoferrin (LF), an iron‐binding protein present in specific granules of neutrophils, is expressed on membrane after granulocyte activation. It may represent a target for anti‐neutrophil cytoplasmic antibodies (ANCA) in patients affected by some immunomediated diseases. We recently produced two MoAbs, AGM 2.29 and AGM 10.14, that recognize two spatially distant epitopes of human LF. In this study we perform a cytometric analysis in order to evaluate the expression of LF on the surface of granulocytes obtained from freshly drawn blood or after purification, in both the presence and absence of stimuli. Our results demonstrate that LF is not constitutively expressed on membrane of circulating neutrophils. After priming with phorbol myristate acetate (PMA) or tumour necrosis factor‐alpha (TNF‐α), an increased mean fluorescence intensity (MFI) was obtained on neutrophils stained with polyclonal anti‐LF antibodies and with AGM 2.29. The kinetics of LF expression during activation demonstrated a progressive increase in MFI within 45 min. No increase in MFI was documented when primed granulocytes were stained with MoAb AGM 10.14, thus indicating that the epitope recognized by AGM 10.14 is not exposed at the cell surface. Following membrane permeabilization, performed in order to analyse the binding of anti‐LF MoAbs to cytoplasmic LF, a marked increase in MFI was obtained by staining granulocytes with both anti‐LF MoAbs. Indirect immunofluorescence (IIF) analysis confirmed that AGM 2.29 and AGM 10.14 reacted with human granulocytes, showing a cytoplasmic pattern on formalin–acetone‐fixed neutrophils and a perinuclear one on ethanol‐fixed cells.

Management of diarrhoeic type of irritable bowel syndrome with exclusion diet and disodium cromoglycate.

Several studies have stressed the role of food intolerance as one of the major factors in the pathogenesis of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). The purpose of this study was to determine the proportion of patients with IBS that can respond well to an exclusion diet with/without oral disodium cromoglycate and to document the effects of this combination. We selected 120 ambulatory patients with diarrhoeic type IBS; 66 of them (55%) had a concomitant food intolerance (assessed by skin prick test), showing a positive reaction to one (32%) or more foods (68%). Sixty-three (52.5%) tested by cytotoxic test showed more positive reactions. The results were evaluated by means of semiquantitative subjective and objective scores. Thirty patients were randomly treated with a strict exclusion diet, while the other 36 were treated with both exclusion diet and oral disodium cromoglycate (250 mg four times daily) for four months. We observed an improvement of symptoms in 18 (60%) of the 30 patients that had received the only exclusion diet, whereas thirty-two of 36 patients (89%) who had undergone both dietary and cromoglycate treatments showed an improvement that was clinically and statistically significant (p = 0.01).Thus it is concluded that dietary exclusion in association with disodium cromoglycate is most effective in carefully selected patients with diarrhoeic type IBS, with a very high probability of prolonged symptomatic benefit in those subjects that do respond.

Mobile adaptive information systems on MANET: what we need as basic layer?

In the last few years, we have witnessed an increasing use of mobile devices in several areas, such as e-commerce, e-learning and e-government. At present, there are several kinds of mobile devices, each one already equipped with the most current wireless technologies, e.g., Bluetooth, WiFi (the standard 802.11x) and GPRS (general packet radio system). Such a technological basis allows to build ad-hoc networks (MANETs - mobile ad-hoc networks) among mobile devices, but the mere fact that it is technically possible is not sufficient to allow for effective usage of the resources (in particular software applications) contained within these networks. Up to now, research on MANETs concentrates on routing protocols, but more issues need to be taken into account when designing and realizing information systems for MANETs, such as how to exploit mobility and adaptivity at the application layer. This position paper analyzes ad-hoc network routing protocols in order to determine the minimal services that a MANET network layer should provide for the upper layers. Starting from such an analysis, a service interface is defined, on top of which to build application layer software, and specifically, an orchestration platform to support cooperative workflows on mobile ad-hoc networks. A scenario is presented showing the opportunity of having cooperative workflow on MANETs. Such a service interface might be a common factor between researchers on MANET routing protocols and researchers on information systems for ad-hoc networks.

Tobramycin: Toxícologícal and Pharmacological Studies in Animals and Pharmacokinetic Research in Patients with Varying Degrees of Renal Impairment.

Pharmacological investigations with tobramycin have been conducted in animals and in man. In the experimental animal, tobramycin showed lower acute toxicity and lower nephrotoxicity than gentamicin. Moreover, the antibiotic did not cause any significant systemic effects and was rapidly absorbed in the blood and excreted in the urine. The pharmacokinetic evaluation of tobramycin was undertaken in patients with varying degrees of reduced renal function. The influence of peritoneal and extracorporeal dialysis on the removal of the antibiotic from the serum of patients with terminal renal failure was examined. Possible tobramycin treatment schedules for patients with varying degrees of reduced renal function are briefly discussed.

Characterization of parasite antigens from human hydatid cyst fluid by SDS-PAGE and IEF

Combining high resolution power of SDS-PAGE and IEF with the specific immunological recognition of a human antiserum directed againstEchinococcus granulosus antigens, we could identify, in 4 hydatid cystic fluids of human origin, 4 antigens with a molecular weight in the range 32-13 KD, and an antigen of 200 KD which, in reducing conditions, gave 2 bands of 67 and 52 KD. In addition, mainly in one of the cystic fluids, there were at least another 4 specific non-reducible bands with a molecular weight ranging from 80 to 40 KD. Specific parasite antigens, which constitute not more than 3% of total protein content of the cystic fluid, migrate, in isoelectric focusing, from a pH of less than 5 to more than 8.

Image retrieval using resegmentation driven by query rectangles

Abstract Image retrieval using pictorial attributes such as color, position, and shape is a topic of vigorous research. We address two key issues in image retrieval: the use of rectangles in queries to express properties of regions in the desired target images, and the use of oversegmentation to build the index of images in the database. In our method, the rectangles in the users query are used to control a partial resegmentation of each candidate image. These query-driven, partial resegmentations provide the features needed for determining the distance between the query and each candidate, so that the closest candidates can be determined and retrieved. This method enables the construction of image retrieval systems with completely automatic indexing and relatively fast querying time. We show results of both qualitative and performance tests.

DAN: An Automatic Segmentation and Classification Engine for Paper Documents

The paper documents recognition is fundamental for office automation becoming every day a more powerful tool in those fields where information is still on paper. Document recognition follows from data acquisition, from both journals, and entire books in order to transform them in digital objects. We present a new system DAN (Document Analysis on Network) for Document recognition that follows the Open Source methodologies, XML description for documents segmentation and classification, which turns to be beneficial in terms of classification precision, and general-purpose availability.

The serological diagnosis of human hydatid disease by time-resolved fluoroimmunoassay

The use of a new immunoassay, time-resolved fluoroimmunoassay (TR-FIA), in the diagnosis of human hydatid disease has been evaluated. This technique, which is based on the labelling of antibodies with europium (Eu), was compared with a well-established method, the enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Of 102 patients with hydatid disease, 97 (95.1%) were positive according to TR-FIA and 83 (81.4%) according to ELISA. The rate of non-specificity for other parasitic infections (n = 206) was 8.7% for TR-FIA and 17.5% for ELISA. It is concluded that TR-FIA is more sensitive and more specific than ELISA in the diagnosis of human hydatid disease.

A visual query by example system for digital documents

The decreasing cost and the increasing availability of new technologies is enabling people to create their own digital libraries. One of the main topic in personal digital libraries is allowing people to select interesting information among all the different digital formats available today (pdf, html, tiff,...). Moreover the advantage of keeping these libraries available on-line is raising the demand for converting paper documents into digital documents. These motivations drove us to design a new system which could enable the user to interact and query documents independently from the digital formats in which they are represented. In order to achieve this independence from the format we consider all the digital documents contained in a digital library as images. Our system tries to automatically detect the layout of the digital documents and recognize the geometric regions of interest in order to allow the user to query his digital library by visual content.

Fermat theorem and elliptic color histogram features

Color histograms are widely used for content-based image retrieval. Their advantages are efficiency, and insensitivity to small changes in camera viewpoint. However, a histogram is a coarse characterization of an image, and so images with very different appearances can have similar histograms. This is particularly important for large image databases, in which many images can have similar color histograms. We will show how to find a relationship between histograms and elliptic curves, in order to define a similarity color feature based onto parametric elliptic equations. This equations are directly involved in the Fermats Last Theorem, thus representing a solution which is interesting in terms of theory and parametric properties.