Mortality in patients with intracerebral hemorrhage associated with antiplatelet agents, oral anticoagulants or no antithrombotic therapy.

The association between preceding treatment with antiplatelet agents (APs), vitamin K antagonists (VKAs) or direct oral anticoagulants (DOACs) and mortality after intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) remains unclear. The aim of this multicenter, prospective cohort study was to assess the risk for death after ICH in consecutive patients who were on treatment with APs, VKAs, DOACs, or no antithrombotic agent. The primary outcome was in-hospital death by day 30.

Impact of residual pulmonary obstruction on the long-term outcome of patients with pulmonary embolism.

The impact of residual pulmonary obstruction on the outcome of patients with pulmonary embolism is uncertain.We recruited 647 consecutive symptomatic patients with a first episode of pulmonary embolism, with or without concomitant deep venous thrombosis. They received conventional anticoagulation, were assessed for residual pulmonary obstruction through perfusion lung scanning after 6 months and then were followed up for up to 3 years.

Recanalization rate in patients with proximal vein thrombosis treated with the direct oral anticoagulants.

Background: The recanalization rate in patients with deep venous thrombosis (DVT) of the legs treated with the direct oral anticoagulants (DOAC) is unknown.

Methods: In an Italian cohort, we investigated the rate of residual vein thrombosis (RVT) after three and/or six months in 352 patients with proximal DVT who had been treated with the DOACs as a stand-alone therapy or lead-in parenteral anticoagulants, and compared it to that recorded in a historical cohort of 1094 patients in which vitamin K antagonists (VKAs) had been employed. In both cohorts, RVT was defined as the ultrasound persistence of thrombotic material resulting in a diameter of at least 4mm of incompressibility of the proximal veins.

Clinical management and outcome of major bleeding in patients on treatment with vitamin K antagonists.

Background: The optimal management of major bleeding associated with vitamin K antagonists remains unclear.

Objectives: The aim of the study was to assess the determinants of outcome of vitamin K antagonists-associated major bleeding and the outcome of bleeding in relation with the therapeutic management.

Methods: Patients hospitalized for major bleeding while on vitamin K antagonists were included in a prospective, cohort study.

Management of new oral anticoagulants related life threatening or major bleedings in real life: a brief report.

Although new oral anticoagulants (NOAs) have been marketed in many countries, concern exists about the management of bleedings related to these drugs due to the lack of specific antidotes. The aim of our study was to report on real life management of NOAs-related life-threatening or major bleedings. We report data from consecutive cases of NOAs related major bleedings admitted to 4 hospitals since NOAs became marketed in Italy.

Serum analysis of coagulation factors in IPF and NSIP.

Recent literature and our previous proteomic findings prompted us to study the coagulation system in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), the pathogenesis of which remains unclear. The aim of this study was to compare coagulation factors in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and idiopathic nonspecific interstitial pneumonia (NSIP) patients and healthy controls. Thirty-three IPF patients (23 acute exacerbation and 10 stable IPF patients), 7 NSIP patients, and 44 controls were enrolled.

A fast and accurate palmprint recognition system based on minutiae.

Palmprint recognition is a challenging problem, mainly due to low quality of the pattern, large nonlinear distortion between different impressions of the same palm and large image size, which makes feature extraction and matching computationally demanding. This paper introduces a high-resolution palmprint recognition system based on minutiae. The proposed system follows the typical sequence of steps used in fingerprint recognition, but each step has been specifically designed and optimized to process large palmprint images with a good tradeoff between accuracy and speed.

Fast and Accurate Fingerprint Indexing Based on Ridge Orientation and Frequency.

This paper describes a new fingerprint indexing approach based on vector and scalar features, obtained from ridge-line orientations and frequencies. A carefully designed set of features and ad-hoc score measures allow the proposed indexing algorithm to be extremely effective and efficient, as confirmed by the results of extensive experiments. The new method markedly outperforms competing state-of-the-art techniques over six publicly available data sets.

Geriatric teledermatology: store-and-forward vs. face-to-face examination.

Background: Telemedicine could be useful in countries like Italy to meet the needs of elderly patients and in particular in those in precarious general conditions, for whom travelling even short distances can pose considerable practical and economical difficulties.

Objective: The aim of this study was to determine the efficacy of store-and-forward teledermatology vs face-to-face consultations in elderly patients.

Methods: A total of 130 geriatric patients with skin diseases requiring dermatological examination were enrolled.

Fingerprint indexing based on Minutia Cylinder-Code.

This paper proposes a new hash-based indexing method to speed up fingerprint identification in large databases. A Locality-Sensitive Hashing (LSH) scheme has been designed relying on Minutiae Cylinder-Code (MCC), which proved to be very effective in mapping a minutiae-based representation (position/ angle only) into a set of fixed-length transformation-invariant binary vectors. A novel search algorithm has been designed thanks to the derivation of a numerical approximation for the similarity between MCC vectors.

Minutia Cylinder-Code: a new representation and matching technique for fingerprint recognition.

In this paper, we introduce the Minutia Cylinder-Code (MCC): a novel representation based on 3D data structures (called cylinders), built from minutiae distances and angles. The cylinders can be created starting from a subset of the mandatory features (minutiae position and direction) defined by standards like ISO/IEC 19794-2 (2005). Thanks to the cylinder invariance, fixed-length, and bit-oriented coding, some simple but very effective metrics can be defined to compute local similarities and to consolidate them into a global score.

Prognostic stratification of acute pulmonary embolism: focus on clinical aspects, imaging, and biomarkers.

Pulmonary embolism (PE) represents a common disease in emergency medicine and guidelines for diagnosis and treatment have had wide diffusion. However, PE morbidity and mortality remain high, especially when associated to hemodynamic instability or right ventricular dysfunction. Prognostic stratification to identify high risk patients needing to receive more aggressive pharmacological and closer monitoring is of utmost importance.

The Manchester positioner--dual retention made easy.

Accurate easy placement bonded retainers have long been a desired aspect of contemporary orthodontic treatment. This article offers the reader a simple and precise method of placing a fixed bonded retainer. This technique also has the advantage of providing a retainer that can be used as both the positioner and the dual removable retainer.

The Risk-based Treatment of Acute Pulmonary Embolism.

Unlabelled: Risk evaluation and prognostic stratification based upon clinical and radiological findings and new cardiac biomarkers, such as natriuretic peptides (NP) and troponins, represent key points in modern management of acute pulmonary embolism (PE). Literature evidence shows that normotensive PE with right heart dysfunction (RHD), defined as submassive PE, has poorer prognosis when compared to normotensive PE without RHD, defined as non-massive PE; thus whether submassive PE should be managed more aggressively and with closer monitoring represents the crucial question about acute PE treatment. Although the answer is yet unclear, the most recent guidelines address to thrombolysis as treatment choice in selected high risk patients with submassive PE.

On the spatial distribution of fingerprint singularities.

Fingerprint singularities play an important role in several fingerprint recognition and classification systems. Although some general relationships and constraints about the location of singularities in the different fingerprint classes are well known, to the best of our knowledge no statistical models have been developed until now. This paper studies the spatial distributions of singularity locations in nature and derives, from a representative dataset of labelled samples, the probability density functions of the four main fingerprint classes.

Serial 2-point ultrasonography plus D-dimer vs whole-leg color-coded Doppler ultrasonography for diagnosing suspected symptomatic deep vein thrombosis: a randomized controlled trial.

Context: Patients with suspected deep vein thrombosis (DVT) of the lower extremities are usually investigated with ultrasonography either by the proximal veins (2-point ultrasonography) or the entire deep vein system (whole-leg ultrasonography). The latter approach is thought to be better based on its ability to detect isolated calf vein thrombosis; however, it requires skilled operators and is mainly available only during working hours. No randomized comparisons are yet available evaluating the relative values of these 2 strategies.

Comparison of blood viscosity using a torsional oscillation viscometer and a rheometer.

The absence of a simple and clinically practical method to determine whole blood viscosity can partly justify why the medical community has been slow in realizing the significance of whole blood viscosity. For this reason, the availability of a technique able to evaluate blood viscosity in a rapid and direct manner is welcome. To evaluate the feasibility in hemorheological laboratory of a new torsional oscillation viscometer, it was compared with a conventional cone-plate system.

Fingerprint image reconstruction from standard templates.

A minutiae-based template is a very compact representation of a fingerprint image and for a long time it has been assumed that it did not contain enough information to allow the reconstruction of the original fingerprint. This work proposes a novel approach to reconstruct fingerprint images from standard templates and investigates to what extent the reconstructed images are similar to the original ones (i.e.

Prevalence of factor V Leiden and prothrombin G20210A in patients with gastric cancer.

Aim: To analyze the prevalence of the two commonest thrombophilic mutations, factor V Leiden and prothrombin G20210A, in patients with gastric cancer.

Methods: One hundred and twenty-one patients with primary gastric carcinoma and 130 healthy subjects, comparable for age and sex, were investigated. Factor V Leiden was detected by using polymerase chain reaction and restriction enzyme digestion, and prothrombin G20210A gene mutation by allele-specific PCR.