A systematic review of simulation methods applied to cancer care services.

There is significant potential for Operational Research to support improvements in care services for cancer patients. In this systematic review, we examine computer simulation techniques used in supporting hospital-based cancer care, the type of problems addressed, the quality of the model and implementation, and the impact on patients. We identified 51 papers distributed between four problem types: patient flow/pathway modelling, scheduling, cost analysis, and resource allocation.

ARGO 2.0: a Hybrid NLP/ML Framework for Diagnosis Standardization.

A relevant problem in medicine is the standardization of the diagnosis associated with a clinical case. Although diagnosis formulation is an intrinsically subjective and uncertain process, its standardization may take benefit from digital solutions automating the routines at the basis of such a decision. In this work, we propose ARGO 2.

UV Irradiation of Wood Surface: Bonding Properties.

Various surface modification techniques have been developed to improve synthetic polymer surfaces' wetting, adhesion, and printing by adding various functional (polar) groups. UV irradiation has been proposed as a suitable procedure to achieve adequate surface modifications of such polymers, which can be of further use to bond many compounds of interest. The activation of the surface, the favourable wetting properties, and the increased micro tensile strength of the substrate after short-term UV irradiation suggest that such pretreatment can also improve the bonding of the wood-glue system.

An Optimized Energy-Harvesting Transmission Scheme for Diffusion-Based Molecular Communications.

In this paper, we propose an optimized transmission scheme with energy-harvesting for a diffusion-based molecular communication system composed by nano-devices fed by piezoelectric nanogenerators. To this end, we firstly derive a system model that analytically describes the mean and the variance of the aggregated noise at the output of the receiver and the achievable Bit Error Rate. Then, we formulate an optimization problem that minimizes an objective function defined as a linear combination of the probability that the voltage across the ultra-nanocapacitor of the transmitter goes under a target value and the number of enqueued packets.

The Associations between Dietary Supplement Use, Diet Quality, and Health-Related Quality of Life among Older Female Cancer Survivors.

Evidence-based guidelines for cancer survivorship do not recommend dietary supplementation, yet older cancer survivors report high prevalence of dietary supplement use, specifically multivitamin (MVM), calcium, and vitamin D. Female cancer survivors (≥65 years) who were ≤5 years post-cancer diagnosis completed questionnaires assessing health-related quality of life (HRQoL), diet quality, and supplement intake. Intakes of MVM, calcium, and vitamin D supplementation were 61.