The knowledge of how cruciate ligaments stabilize the knee joint could be very useful during the execution of daily living activities for the development of clinical procedures. The objective of this study was to evaluate a cruciate ligament model that could achieve this knowledge while avoiding any destructive measurements in living healthy subjects. Subject-specific geometries and kinematic d...

Although the anterior drawer test at the ankle joint is commonly used in routine clinical practice, very little is known about the sharing of load between the individual passive structures and the joint response at different flexion angles.A mathematical model of the ankle joint was devised to calculate ligament fibre recruitment and load/displacement curves at different flexion angles. Ligamen...

Mice represent one of the most important animal models for biomedical research. For the scientific community, the ability of flying mice under weightless conditions in space offers many valuable advantages respect to other rodents. These advantages includes the option of testing a wide range of transgenic animals, the ability to increase the number of animals that can be flown, and reduced dema...

The Italian Space Agency, in line with its scientific strategies and the National Utilization Plan for the International Space Station (ISS), contracted Thales Alenia Space Italia to design and build a spaceflight payload for rodent research on ISS: the Mice Drawer System (MDS). The payload, to be integrated inside the Space Shuttle middeck during transportation and inside the Express Rack in t...

We present the concept of a community-augmented meta-analysis (CAMA), a simple yet novel tool that significantly facilitates the accumulation and evaluation of previous studies within a specific scientific field. A CAMA is a combination of a meta-analysis and an open repository. Like a meta-analysis, it is centered around a psychologically relevant topic and includes methodological details and ...

In a natural environment, objects that we look for often make characteristic sounds. A hiding cat may meow, or the keys in the cluttered drawer may jingle when moved. Using a visual search paradigm, we demonstrated that characteristic sounds facilitated visual localization of objects, even when the sounds carried no location information. For example, finding a cat was faster when participants h...

We present a technique for segmenting pen strokes into lines and arcs. The technique uses pen speed information to help infer the segmentation intended by the drawer. To begin, a set of candidate segment points is identified. This set includes speed minima below a threshold computed from the average pen speed. It also includes curvature maxima at which the pen speed is again below a threshold. ...

Forty-six patients were entered into a prospective clinical and stress radiographic study done to assess the value of acute surgical treatment of injuries to the knee ligaments sustained during sports activities. After an average follow-up period of 51/2 years (range 4-61/2 years) medial instability was found only in two patients, both of whom were in the group with isolated rupture of the medi...

In healthcare, serious adverse events and medical errors can easily occur jeopardizing patient safety and continuity of treatment [1]. However, studies have revealed that identifying risks and working on analyzing and mitigating them, have proven to lower down undesirable and preventable healthcare associated events [2]. The Health and Safety Executive defines hazard as ‘’ anything that may cau...