BACKGROUND Surgery is the cornerstone for clinical management of patients with borderline ovarian tumors (BOT). As these patients have an excellent overall prognosis, perioperative morbidity is the critical point for decision making when the treatment strategy is developed and the primary surgical approach is defined. METHODS Clinical and surgical parameters of patients undergoing surgery for...

OBJECTIVES Cricopharyngeal dysfunction may lead to severe dysphagia and aspiration. The objective of this systematic review was to evaluate the existing studies on the effectiveness of myotomy, dilatation, and botulinum toxin (BoT) injection in the management of cricopharyngeal dysphagia. METHODS PubMed and Web of Science databases were searched to identify eligible studies by using the terms...

In this talk I will present recent research in swarm robotics, the discipline that studies robotic systems composed of swarms of robots tightly interacting and cooperating to reach their goals. In particular, I will present a new type of robot, called swarm-bot, and the results of a number of experiments run with it. A swarm-bot is an artifact composed of a swarm of assembled s-bots. The s-bots...

BACKGROUND Borderline ovarian tumors (BOTs) are a subset of epithelial ovarian tumors with low malignant potential but significant risk of relapse (10% to 30%). Unfortunately, surgical prognostic factors for BOT relapse have not been clearly identified, probably due to the use of heterogeneous surgical definitions and limited follow-up. The aim of this study was to assess potential relapse risk...

This paper provides an overview of the SWARM-BOTS project, a robotic project sponsored by the Future and Emerging Technologies program of the European Commission. The paper illustrates the goals of the project, the robot prototype and the 3D simulator we built. It also reports on the results of experimental work in which distributed adaptive controllers are used to control a group of real, or s...

PURPOSE Recent studies have shown that the risk of cerebro- and cardiovascular events (CVEs) is higher in patients with primary aldosteronism (PA) than in those with essential hypertension (EH), and that silent brain infarction (SBI) is a risk factor and predictor of CVEs. Here, we evaluated the relationship between findings from laser speckle flowgraphy (LSFG), a recently introduced non-invasi...

To date, CAPTCHAs have served as the first line of defense to prevent unauthorized access by (malicious) bots web-based services, while at same time maintaining a trouble-free experience for human visitors. However, recent work in literature has shown that sophisticated using advancements Machine Learning (ML) can easily bypass existing CAPTCHA-based defenses. This introduces CAPTURE, novel CAP...