Eavesdropping on dolphins: Investigating the habits of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) through fixed acoustic stations.

This study investigates the bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus, Montagu 1821) habitat use in the Portofino marine protected area (NW Italy) and adjacent waters, a core area for the dolphins and a highly touristic area in the Mediterranean Sea. A permanent automated real-time passive acoustic monitoring system, able to detect and track dolphins continuously, was tested in the area within the activities of the Life+ Nature project ARION. The habits of bottlenose dolphins was investigated considering the resident rate inside the area, which quantifies the amount of time dolphins spent in these waters, by means of random forest regression.

A Permanent Automated Real-Time Passive Acoustic Monitoring System for Bottlenose Dolphin Conservation in the Mediterranean Sea.

Within the framework of the EU Life+ project named LIFE09 NAT/IT/000190 ARION, a permanent automated real-time passive acoustic monitoring system for the improvement of the conservation status of the transient and resident population of bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) has been implemented and installed in the Portofino Marine Protected Area (MPA), Ligurian Sea. The system is able to detect the simultaneous presence of dolphins and boats in the area and to give their position in real time. This information is used to prevent collisions by diffusing warning messages to all the categories involved (tourists, professional fishermen and so on).

Automatic measurement and visualization of focal femoral cartilage thickness in stress-based regions of interest using three-dimensional knee models.

Purpose: Thinning of cartilage is a common manifestation of osteoarthritis. This study addresses the need of measuring the focal femoral cartilage thickness at the weight- bearing regions of the knee by developing a reproducible and automatic method from MR images.

Methods: 3D models derived from semiautomatic MR image segmentations were used in this study.

[From research to users: the Worksafe European Project and the IST-Gaslini Prevention and Safety Project].

Objective: The Worksafe Project aims at increasing access to and use of the large amount of data related to the broad sector of health protection of workers and workplace safety recognising the key role of the communication and dissemination of the research results with particular reference to cancer.

Participants: Four scientific institutes: National Institute for Research on Cancer, Genoa (IST); Finnish Institute of Occupational Health (FIOH), Helsinki; Karolinska Institutet (KI), Stockholm; International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), Lyon, and two technological partners (Softeco Sismat, Genoa; Fundacion Robotiker, Bilbao).

Results: The creation of the Worksafe portal, a web based infrastructure that allows knowledge sharing on top of a distributed digital data collection and provides web accessed services addressing a broad interested audience including biomedicine companies universities, research institutions, local and national public organisations and private users.