Design, development and validation of a system for automatic help to medical text understanding.

Objective: The paper presents a web-based application, SIMPLE, that facilitates medical text comprehension by identifying the health-related terms of a medical text and providing the corresponding consumer terms and explanations.

Background: The comprehension of a medical text is often a difficult task for laypeople because it requires semantic abilities that can differ from a person to another, depending on his/her health-literacy level. Some systems have been developed for facilitating the comprehension of medical texts through text simplification, either syntactical or lexical.

A focus on the state of the art of food waste/losses issue and suggestions for future researches.

Today, the role of the supply chain (SC) strategies in Food-Waste/Losses (F-W/L) generation is neglected, because F-W/L are generally considered an unavoidable consequence of accidental events. Therefore, only operating plans are today put into practice, which aim at reducing the impact of product losses along the SC. This involves that structured analyses and strategic SC approaches are not available for the prevention/minimization of F-W/L.

Effectiveness of the food recovery at the retailing stage under shelf life uncertainty: An application to Italian food chains.

Food losses represent a significant issue affecting food supply chains. The possibility of recovering such products can be seen as an effective way to reduce such a phenomenon, improve supply chain performances and ameliorate the conditions of undernourished people. The topic has been already investigated by a previous paper enforcing the hypothesis of deterministic and constant Shelf Life (SL) of products.

Economic benefits from food recovery at the retail stage: an application to Italian food chains.

The food supply chain is affected by losses of products near to their expiry date or damaged by improper transportation or production defects. Such products are usually poorly attractive for the consumer in the target market even if they maintain their nutritional properties. On the other hand undernourished people face every day the problem of fulfilling their nutritional needs usually relying on non-profit organizations.