Publications by authors named "Matteo Leonardi"

Purpose: To investigate early changes in AMD by evaluating and comparing choriocapillaris (CC) flow in fellow eyes of patients with unilateral neovascular age-related macular degeneration (nAMD) and in healthy controls using swept-source optical coherence tomography angiography (SS-OCTA).

Methods: Patients with unilateral nAMD and no/early/intermediate AMD (no/e/iAMD) in their fellow eye and normal controls who underwent SS-OCT and OCTA where included. CC perfusion was assessed on MATLAB as percentage of flow deficits (FD%) in the central 4.

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Molecular farming, initially developed to produce therapeutic proteins using genetically modified plants, gained renewed interest during the Ebola and COVID-19 outbreaks and has expanded into functional food ingredients. This article evaluates molecular farming technologies, market potential, and startups, and identifies opportunities in dairy proteins, food enzymes, collagen, and cellular agriculture.

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GW detectors are ultimately limited by thermal noise in their most sensitive region. Cryogenic operation combined with crystalline substrates and coatings is a promising approach to reduce this noise, thereby increasing their sensitivity and detection rate. However, crystalline materials can exhibit birefringent behaviors which will degrade the detector's sensitivity.

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In high-sensitive laser interferometers, such as the gravitational-wave detector KAGRA, ultra-high-quality mirrors are essential. In the case of KAGRA, where cavity mirrors are cooled down to 20 K, large-size Sapphire crystals are used as the substrate for the main mirrors to achieve both a good optical quality (i.e.

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Article Synopsis
  • High-quality sapphire substrates are essential for the KAGRA gravitational interferometer, serving as test masses to detect gravitational waves.
  • Standard methods face challenges in studying these substrates due to their extremely low optical absorption, necessitating advanced techniques.
  • This paper showcases a specialized absorption setup using Photo-thermal Common-path Interferometry to analyze sapphire samples, revealing that absorption variations are linked to the samples' growth history and structural defects.
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The astrophysical reach of current and future ground-based gravitational-wave detectors is mostly limited by quantum noise, induced by vacuum fluctuations entering the detector output port. The replacement of this ordinary vacuum field with a squeezed vacuum field has proven to be an effective strategy to mitigate such quantum noise and it is currently used in advanced detectors. However, current squeezing cannot improve the noise across the whole spectrum because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: when shot noise at high frequencies is reduced, radiation pressure at low frequencies is increased.

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Purpose: Assessment on enucleated pig eyes of a novel and minimally invasive method for the continuous monitoring of intraocular pressure (IOP), based on a novel wireless contact lens sensor (CLS).

Methods: The wireless CLS is a disposable silicone soft contact lens with a sensor embedded in it, allowing the wireless measurement of changes in corneal curvature induced by IOP variations. A CLS was adapted and tested on enucleated pig eyes.

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Purpose: To present a novel and minimally invasive approach to intraocular pressure (IOP) monitoring based on a sensing contact lens.

Methods: The key element of this measurement method is a soft contact lens with an embedded microfabricated strain gauge allowing the measurement of changes in corneal curvature correlated to variations in IOP. A prototype of this sensing contact lens was adapted and tested on enucleated porcine eyes.

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