Cost of implementing CAR-T activity and managing CAR-T patients: an exploratory study.

Background: Chimeric antigen receptor T cells (CAR-T) represent an innovation but raise issues for healthcare payers because of the uncertainty on impact at market launch, high cost and important organisational impact. The literature has focused on their assessment, appraisal and market access solutions. No evidence on the costs sustained to implement CAR-T is available and a few studies reported the cost of the CAR-T clinical pathway, including the activities that are remunerated through inpatient or outpatient fee-for-service/episode.

Reconstruction of the sphenoid sinus erosion or dehiscence after treatment of unruptured intracavernous aneurysms with flow diverter stents.

Background: Intracavernous carotid aneurysms (ICCAs) are rare, frequently asymptomatic, with a low rupture risk, which, however, can lead to life-threatening epistaxis. The aim of this study was to assess the effect of the treatment of asymptomatic ICCAs with flow diverters (FD) on sphenoid bone erosion or dehiscence in a selected cohort of patients.

Methods: We retrospectively reviewed all asymptomatic ICCAs with sphenoid bone erosion or dehiscence detected on cone beam CT (CBCT) and treated with FD between December 2018 and December 2022.

Assessment of a SARS-CoV-2 population-wide rapid antigen testing in Italy: a modeling and economic analysis study.

Background: This study aimed to compare the cost-effectiveness of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) mass testing, carried out in November 2020 in the Italian Bolzano/Südtirol province, to scenarios without mass testing in terms of hospitalizations averted and quality-adjusted life-year (QALYs) saved.

Methods: We applied branching processes to estimate the effective reproduction number (Rt) and model scenarios with and without mass testing, assuming Rt = 0.9 and Rt = 0.

Geographical variation in the use of private health insurance in a predominantly publicly-funded system.

We provide evidence of geographical variations in the use of private health insurance (PHI) in Italy. Our study offers an original contribution, using a 2016 dataset on the use of PHI amongst a population of more than 200,000 employees of a major company. The average claim per enrolee was €925, representing approximately 50% of public health expenditure per capita, primarily for dental care (27.

Detecting Human Actions in Drone Images Using YoloV5 and Stochastic Gradient Boosting.

Human action recognition and detection from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, has emerged as a popular technical challenge in recent years, since it is related to many use case scenarios from environmental monitoring to search and rescue. It faces a number of difficulties mainly due to image acquisition and contents, and processing constraints. Since drones' flying conditions constrain image acquisition, human subjects may appear in images at variable scales, orientations, and occlusion, which makes action recognition more difficult.

Causal Analysis of Activity in Social Brain Areas During Human-Agent Conversation.

This article investigates the differences in cognitive and neural mechanisms between human-human and human-virtual agent interaction using a dataset recorded in an ecologically realistic environment. We use Convergent Cross Mapping (CCM) to investigate functional connectivity between pairs of regions involved in the framework of social cognitive neuroscience, namely the fusiform gyrus, superior temporal sulcus (STS), temporoparietal junction (TPJ), and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC)-taken as prefrontal asymmetry. Our approach is a compromise between investigating local activation in specific regions and investigating connectivity networks that may form part of larger networks.

Evolutionary Optimisation of Beer Organoleptic Properties: A Simulation Framework.

Modern computational techniques offer new perspectives for the personalisation of food properties through the optimisation of their production process. This paper addresses the personalisation of beer properties in the specific case of craft beers where the production process is more flexible. Furthermore, this work presents a that could be suitable for more complex, industrial setups.

The economic impact of compassionate use of medicines.

Background: Compassionate use programs (CUP) for medicines respond to the ethical imperative of providing access to medicines before marketing approval to patients not recruited in trials. The economic impact of clinical trials has previously been investigated. No evidence on the net economic benefit of CUP exists.

Reflections on the Importance of Cost of Illness Analysis in Rare Diseases: A Proposal.

In the field of rare diseases (RDs), the evidence standard is often lower than that required by health technology assessment (HTA) and payer authorities. In this commentary, we propose that appropriate economic evaluation for rare disease treatments should be initially informed by cost-of-illness (COI) studies conducted using a societal perspective. Such an approach contributes to improving countries' understanding of RDs in their entirety as societal and not merely clinical, or product-specific issues.

Prefrontal Asymmetry BCI Neurofeedback Datasets.

Prefrontal cortex (PFC) asymmetry is an important marker in affective neuroscience and has attracted significant interest, having been associated with studies of motivation, eating behavior, empathy, risk propensity, and clinical depression. The data presented in this paper are the result of three different experiments using PFC asymmetry neurofeedback (NF) as a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) paradigm, rather than a therapeutic mechanism aiming at long-term effects, using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) which is known to be particularly well-suited to the study of PFC asymmetry and is less sensitive to artifacts. From an experimental perspective the BCI context brings more emphasis on individual subjects' baselines, successful and sustained activation during epochs, and minimal training.

A 500-year tale of co-evolution, adaptation, and virulence: Helicobacter pylori in the Americas.

Helicobacter pylori is a common component of the human stomach microbiota, possibly dating back to the speciation of Homo sapiens. A history of pathogen evolution in allopatry has led to the development of genetically distinct H. pylori subpopulations, associated with different human populations, and more recent admixture among H.

Social Economic Costs, Health-Related Quality of Life and Disability in Patients with Cri Du Chat Syndrome.

: Cri du Chat syndrome (CdC) is a rare disease caused by the deletion on the short arm of the chromosome 5, with an incidence of 1:15,000 to 1:50,000 live-born infants. No study at international level has assessed the costs, Quality of Life (QoL) and Disability through standardized quantitative tools. The aim is to estimate economic costs related to CdC from a societal perspective, to assess the QoL and Disability in patients with CdC along with their caregivers in Italy.

Factors influencing adherence to adjuvant endocrine therapy in breast cancer-treated women: using real-world data to inform a switch from acute to chronic disease management.

Purpose: Adjuvant endocrine therapy (AET) for ≥ 5 years is generally recommended for women with hormone receptor-positive breast cancer to reduce cancer recurrence/mortality; however, adherence can be suboptimal. We tested determinants of AET adherence using patient characteristics, treatment pathways, AET initiation timing, and multiple healthcare facility use. An underlying objective was to explore how oncological pathways mirror chronic disease management to monitor adherence and target improvement interventions using administrative datasets.

An Italian registry of chest pain patients in the emergency department: clinical predictors of acute coronary syndrome.

Background: The aim of this study was to describe the population of patients arriving in several Italian Emergency Departments (EDs) complaining of chest pain suggestive of acute coronary syndrome (ACS) in order to evaluate the incidence of ACS in this cohort and the association between ACS and different clinical parameters and risk factors.

Methods: This is an observational prospective study, conducted from the 1st January to the 31st December 2014 in 11 EDs in Italy. Patients presenting to ED with chest pain, suggestive of ACS, were consecutively enrolled.

Maximum Removal Efficiency of Barium, Strontium, Radium, and Sulfate with Optimum AMD-Marcellus Flowback Mixing Ratios for Beneficial Use in the Northern Appalachian Basin.

Mixing of acid mine drainage (AMD) and hydraulic fracturing flowback fluids (HFFF) could represent an efficient management practice to simultaneously manage two complex energy wastewater streams while reducing freshwater resource consumption. AMD discharges offer generally high sulfate concentrations, especially from the bituminous coal region of Pennsylvania; unconventional Marcellus shale gas wells generally yield HFFF enriched in alkaline earth metals such as Sr and Ba, known to cause scaling issues in oil and gas (O&G) production. Mixing the two waters can precipitate HFFF-Ba and -Sr with AMD-SO, therefore removing them from solution.

Consensus on the reporting and experimental design of clinical and cognitive-behavioural neurofeedback studies (CRED-nf checklist).

Neurofeedback has begun to attract the attention and scrutiny of the scientific and medical mainstream. Here, neurofeedback researchers present a consensus-derived checklist that aims to improve the reporting and experimental design standards in the field.

Dichorionic pregnancy complicated by a twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome.

Twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome (TTTS) is a serious complication typical of monochorionic pregnancies. Cases in dichorionic pregnancies have been described. The authors present a case report of a presumed TTTS in a dichorionic pregnancy followed at our institution in which the patient presented to the emergency department at 31 4/7 weeks' gestation complaining of lack of fetal movements.

Multicenter observational study on the reliability of the HEART score.

Objective: To rapidly and safely identify the risk of developing acute coronary syndrome in patients with chest pain who present to the emergency department, the clinical use of the History, Electrocardiogram, Age, Risk Factors, and Troponin (HEART) scoring has recently been proposed. This study aimed to assess the inter-rater reliability of the HEART score calculated by a large number of Italian emergency physicians.

Methods: The study was conducted in three academic emergency departments using clinical scenarios obtained from medical records of patients with chest pain.

Patient access to oral nutritional supplements: Which policies count?

Objectives: Oral nutritional supplements (ONS) represent a cost-effective method for treating malnutrition. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of public policies on patient access to ONS, using the Italian regionalized health care system as a case study, subsequently compared with the centralized British National Health Service.

Methods: Regional policies in the nine largest Italian regions and British policies were gathered through a literature review; interviews with officers responsible for clinical nutrition policies at the regional level in Italy were also conducted.

Author Correction: Electrical fingerprint of the amygdala guides neurofeedback training for stress resilience.

The original and corrected Acknowledgements are shown in the accompanying Author Correction.

Electrical fingerprint of the amygdala guides neurofeedback training for stress resilience.

Real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging (rt-fMRI) has revived the translational perspective of neurofeedback (NF). Particularly for stress management, targeting deeply located limbic areas involved in stress processing has paved new paths for brain-guided interventions. However, the high cost and immobility of fMRI constitute a challenging drawback for the scalability (accessibility and cost-effectiveness) of the approach, particularly for clinical purposes.

Volitional limbic neuromodulation exerts a beneficial clinical effect on Fibromyalgia.

Volitional neural modulation using neurofeedback has been indicated as a potential treatment for chronic conditions that involve peripheral and central neural dysregulation. Here we utilized neurofeedback in patients suffering from Fibromyalgia - a chronic pain syndrome that involves sleep disturbance and emotion dysregulation. These ancillary symptoms, which have an amplificating effect on pain, are known to be mediated by heightened limbic activity.

A Motivational Model of BCI-Controlled Heuristic Search.

Several researchers have proposed a new application for human augmentation, which is to provide human supervision to autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) systems. In this paper, we introduce a framework to implement this proposal, which consists of using Brain⁻Computer Interfaces (BCI) to influence AI computation via some of their core algorithmic components, such as heuristic search. Our framework is based on a joint analysis of philosophical proposals characterising the behaviour of autonomous AI systems and recent research in cognitive neuroscience that support the design of appropriate BCI.