Publications by authors named "Sparacino G"

Article Synopsis
  • The research investigates the psychological impacts of acromegaly, a rare condition that can lead to anxiety and depression among patients.
  • A systematic review in January 2024 analyzed 55 studies focusing on anxiety, depression, and the potential absence of alexithymia in acromegaly patients, using various medical databases.
  • Findings show that anxiety and depression are prevalent in acromegaly patients, negatively affecting their health-related quality of life (HR-QoL), and highlight the need for early psychological assessment and integrated interventions to improve patient well-being.
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Continuous Glucose Monitoring sensors (CGMs) have revolutionized type 1 diabetes (T1D) management. In particular, in several cases, the retrospective analysis of CGM recordings allows clinicians to review and adjust patients' therapy. However, in this set-up, the artifacts that are often present in CGM data could lead to incorrect therapeutic actions.

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Background: Automated insulin delivery (AID) systems, permit improved treatment of type 1 diabetes (T1D). Unfortunately, malfunctioning in the insulin pump or in the infusion set can prevent insulin from being administered, reducing the AID efficacy and posing the patient at risk. Different data-driven methods available in the literature can be used to deal with the problem of automatically detecting complete insulin suspension in real-time.

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Background And Objectives: One of the major problems related to type 1 diabetes (T1D) management is hypoglycemia, a condition characterized by low blood glucose levels and responsible for reduced quality of life and increased mortality. Fast-acting carbohydrates, also known as hypoglycemic treatments (HT), can counteract this event. In the literature, dosage and timing of HT are usually based on heuristic rules.

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Pseudoachalasia is a condition in which symptoms, manometry, and imaging findings highly resemble primary achalasia but has a secondary etiology. The majority of patients with pseudoachalasia have the condition as the result of a malignancy, most often at the gastroesophageal junction. There may be issues with timely identification of this malignancy as symptoms are often obscure with diagnostic testing yielding nonspecific results.

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Background: In type 1 diabetes therapy, precise tuning of postprandial corrective insulin boluses (CIBs) is crucial to mitigate hyperglycemia without inducing dangerous hypoglycemic events. Several heuristic formulas accounting for continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) trend have been proposed in the literature. However, these formulas suggest a lot of quantized CIB adjustments, and they lack personalization.

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The retrospective analysis of continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) timeseries can be hampered by colored and non-stationary measurement noise. Here, we introduce a Bayesian denoising (BD) algorithm to address both autocorrelation of measurement noise and temporal variability of its variance. BD utilizes adaptive, models of signal and noise, whose unknown variances are derived on partially-overlapped CGM windows, via smoothing approach based on linear mean square estimation.

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Background And Objective: In type 1 diabetes (T1D), a quantitative evaluation of the impact on hypoglycemia of suboptimal therapeutic decision (e.g. incorrect estimation of the ingested carbohydrates, inaccurate insulin timing, etc) is unavailable.

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Writing notes is the most widespread method to report clinical events. Therefore, most of the information about the disease history of a patient remains locked behind free-form text. Natural language processing (NLP) provides a solution to automatically transform free-form text into structured data.

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Article Synopsis
  • * When choosing models, prediction accuracy is important, but patient safety and physiological soundness must also be considered; the paper highlights the need for interpretable algorithms.
  • * A case study comparing two long-short term memory neural networks (LSTM) with similar accuracy revealed that only one (p-LSTM) effectively captured the physiological relationships needed for better therapeutic decisions, improving patient glycemic control when integrated into the DSS.
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Background And Objective: Continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) sensors measure interstitial glucose concentration every 1-5 min for days or weeks. New CGM-based diabetes therapies are often tested in in silico clinical trials (ISCTs) using diabetes simulators. Accurate models of CGM sensor inaccuracies and failures could help improve the realism of ISCTs.

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Objective: Design and assessment of new therapies for type 1 diabetes (T1D) management can be greatly facilitated by in silico simulations. The ReplayBG simulation methodology here proposed allows "replaying" the scenario behind data already collected by simulating the glucose concentration obtained in response to alternative insulin/carbohydrate therapies and evaluate their efficacy leveraging the concept of digital twin.

Methods: ReplayBG is based on two steps.

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Article Synopsis
  • Accurate blood glucose prediction is crucial for managing type 1 diabetes and involves comparing personalized physiological models with black-box algorithms for better decision-making.
  • A personalized physiological model was developed using patient data and integrated with a particle filter, while various black-box models, including deep learning techniques, were also evaluated for their predictive performance.
  • Non-parametric black-box models outperformed the personalized physiological model and other techniques in predicting blood glucose levels, underscoring the effectiveness of black-box strategies in this context.
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Stroke recovery trajectories vary substantially. The need for tracking and prognostic biomarkers in stroke is utmost for prognostic and rehabilitative goals: electroencephalography (EEG) advanced signal analysis may provide useful tools toward this aim. EEG microstates quantify changes in configuration of neuronal generators of short-lasting periods of coordinated synchronized communication within large-scale brain networks: this feature is expected to be impaired in stroke.

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Hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia is a rare condition presenting with anemia requiring transfusion and nosebleeds often refractory to supportive therapy. We discuss a case of a male in his 60s with a history of epistaxis, anemia requiring transfusions, and acute on chronic worsening shortness of breath presenting for evaluation. He was diagnosed with hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia.

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Background: Analyzing continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) data is a mandatory step for multiple purposes spanning from reporting clinical trial outcomes to developing new algorithms for diabetes management. This task is repetitive, and scientists struggle in computing literature glucose control metrics and waste time in reproducing possibly complex plots and reports. For this reason, to provide the diabetes technology community a unified tool, here we present Automated Glucose dATa Analysis (AGATA), an automated glucose data analysis toolbox developed in MATLAB/Octave.

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Background: Results of cardiovascular outcome trials enabled a shift from "treat-to-target" to "treat-to-benefit" paradigm in the management of type 2 diabetes (T2D). However, studies validating such approach are limited. Here, we examined whether treatment according to international recommendations for the pharmacological management of T2D had an impact on long-term outcomes.

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Accurate blood glucose (BG) forecasting is key in diabetes management, as it allows preventive actions to mitigate harmful hypoglycemic/hyperglycemic episodes. Considering the encouraging results obtained by seasonal stochastic models in proof-of-concept studies, this work assesses the methodology in two datasets (open-loop and closed-loop) recorded in free-living conditions. First, similar postprandial glycemic profiles are grouped together with fuzzy C-means clustering.

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Stage 2 sleep spindles are considered useful biomarkers for the integrity of the central nervous system and for cognitive and memory skills. We investigated sleep spindles patterns in subjects after 12 months of their hospitalization in the intensive care unit (ICU) of the Padova Teaching Hospital due to COVID-19 between March and November 2020. Before the nap, participants (13 hospitalized in ICU - ICU; 9 hospitalized who received noninvasive ventilation - nonlCU; 9 age and sex-matched healthy controls - CTRL, i.

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Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) sensors micro-invasively provide frequent glucose readings, improving the management of Type 1 diabetic patients' life and making available reach data-sets for retrospective analysis. Unlikely, CGM sensors are subject to failures, such as compression artifacts, that might impact on both real-time and respective CGM use. In this work is focused on retrospective detection of compression artifacts.

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Aim: Treatment algorithms define lines of glucose lowering medications (GLM) for the management of type 2 diabetes (T2D), but whether therapeutic trajectories are associated with major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE) is unclear. We explored whether the temporal resolution of GLM usage discriminates patients who experienced a 4P-MACE (heart failure, myocardial infarction, stroke, death for all causes).

Methods: We used an administrative database (Veneto region, North-East Italy, 2011-2018) and implemented recurrent neural networks (RNN) with outcome-specific attention maps.

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Objective: To disentangle the pathophysiology of cognitive/affective impairment in Coronavirus Disease-2019 (COVID-19), we studied long-term cognitive and affective sequelae and sleep high-density electroencephalography (EEG) at 12-month follow-up in people with a previous hospital admission for acute COVID-19.

Methods: People discharged from an intensive care unit (ICU) and a sub-intensive ward (nonICU) between March and May 2020 were contacted between March and June 2021. Participants underwent cognitive, psychological, and sleep assessment.

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Background: Advanced decision support systems for type 1 diabetes (T1D) management often embed prediction modules, which allow T1D people to take preventive actions to avoid critical episodes like hypoglycemia. Real-time prediction of blood glucose (BG) concentration relies on a subject-specific model of glucose-insulin dynamics. Model parameter identification is usually based on the mean square error (MSE) cost function, and the model is usually used to predict BG at a single prediction horizon (PH).

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Obstetric complications (OCs) may contribute to the heterogeneity that characterizes psychiatric illness, particularly the phenotypic presentation of first episode psychoses (FEP). Our aim was to examine the relationship between OCs and socio-demographic, clinical, functioning and neuropsychological characteristics in affective and non-affective FEP. We performed a cross-sectional,study where we recruited participants with FEP between 2011 and 2021, and retrospectively assessed OCs using the Lewis-Murray scale.

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