Università Campus Bio-Medico

About: Università Campus Bio-Medico is a education organization based out in Rome, Italy. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Medicine. The organization has 2829 authors who have published 8519 publications receiving 193689 citations. The organization is also known as: Universita Campus Bio-Medico & Campus Bio-Medico University.

Oscillatory Activities in Neurological Disorders of Elderly: Biomarkers to Target for Neuromodulation

Abstract: Non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS) has been under investigation as adjunct treatment of various neurological disorders with variable success. One challenge is the limited knowledge on what would be effective neuronal targets for an intervention, combined with limited knowledge on the neuronal mechanisms of NIBS. Motivated on the one hand by recent evidence that oscillatory activities in neural systems play a role in orchestrating brain functions and dysfunctions, in particular those of neurological disorders specific of elderly patients, and on the other hand that NIBS techniques may be used to interact with these brain oscillations in a controlled way, we here explore the potential of modulating brain oscillations as an effective strategy for clinical NIBS interventions. We first review the evidence for abnormal oscillatory profiles to be associated with a range of neurological disorders of elderly (e.g., Parkinson's disease (PD), Alzheimer's disease (AD), stroke, epilepsy), and for these signals of abnormal network activity to normalize with treatment, and/or to be predictive of disease progression or recovery. We then ask the question to what extent existing NIBS protocols have been tailored to interact with these oscillations and possibly associated dysfunctions. Our review shows that, despite evidence for both reliable neurophysiological markers of specific oscillatory dis-functionalities in neurological disorders and NIBS protocols potentially able to interact with them, there are few applications of NIBS aiming to explore clinical outcomes of this interaction. Our review article aims to point out oscillatory markers of neurological, which are also suitable targets for modification by NIBS, in order to facilitate in future studies the matching of technical application to clinical targets.

A survey on using domain and contextual knowledge for human activity recognition in video streams

Abstract: We focus on activity recognition methods in video streams.We survey methods that incorporate a priori knowledge and context information.We categorize the surveyed works by the method use for handling the knowledge.We discuss the surveyed contributions and provide future directions. Human activity recognition has gained an increasing relevance in computer vision and it can be tackled with either non-hierarchical or hierarchical approaches. The former, also known as single-layered approaches, are those that represent and recognize human activities directly from the extracted descriptors, building a model that distinguishes among the activities contained in the training data. The latter represent and recognize human activities in terms of subevents, which are usually recognized my means of single-layered approaches. Alongside of non-hierarchical and hierarchical approaches, we observe that methods incorporating a priori knowledge and context information on the activity are getting growing interest within the community. In this work we refer to this emerging trend in computer vision as knowledge-based human activity recognition with the objective to cover the lack of a summary of these methodologies. More specifically, we survey methods and techniques used in the literature to represent and integrate knowledge and reasoning into the recognition process. We categorize them as statistical approaches, syntactic approaches and description-based approaches. In addition, we further discuss public and private datasets used in this field to promote their use and to enable the interest readers in finding useful resources. This review ends proposing main future research directions in this field.

Hepatic PPARs: their role in liver physiology, fibrosis and treatment.

Abstract: Complex molecular and cellular mechanisms are involved in the pathway of liver fibrosis Activation and transformation of hepatic stellate cells (HSCs) are considered the two main reasons for the cause and development of liver fibrosis The peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors (PPARs) belonging to the family of ligand-activated transcription factors play a key role in liver homeostasis, regulating adipogenesis and inhibiting fibrogenesis in HSCs Normal transcriptional function of PPARs contributes to maintain HSCs in quiescent phase A reduced expression of PPARs in HSCs greatly induces a progression of liver fibrosis and an increased production of collagen Here, we discuss role and function of PPARs and we take into consideration molecular factors able to reduce PPARs activity in HSCs Finally, although further validations are needed, we illustrate novel strategies available from in vitro and animal studies on how some PPARs-agonists have been proved effective as antifibrotic substances in liver disease