Ricerc@Sapienza

Ovarian cancer is one of the most aggressive gynaecologic malignancies in women worldwide. The lack of proper screening programs and the characteristic abdominal spreading with minimal clinical symptoms give rise of its high lethality. Most patients show advanced disease at diagnosis and have a poor prognosis. The surveillance of ovarian cancer patients after initial treatment is a challenging question in clinical practice and there is no consensus in literature about the most appropriate follow-up strategy for these women.

Charged particle beams are used in particle therapy (PT) to treat oncological patients due to their selective dose deposition in tissues with respect to the photons and electrons used in conventional radiotherapy. Heavy (Z > 1) PT beams can additionally be exploited for their high biological effectiveness in killing cancer cells. Nowadays, protons and carbon ions are used in PT clinical routines. Recently, interest in the potential application of helium and oxygen beams has been growing.

Nowadays there is a growing interest in particle therapy treatments exploiting
light ion beams against tumors due to their enhanced relative biological
effectiveness and high space selectivity. In particular promising results are
obtained by the use of 4He projectiles. Unlike the treatments performed
using protons, the beam ions can undergo a fragmentation process when
interacting with the atomic nuclei in the patient body. In this paper the results
of measurements performed at the Heidelberg Ion-Beam Therapy center are

Ion beam therapy is a rapidly growing technique for tumor radiation therapy. Ions allow for a high dose deposition in the tumor region, while sparing the surrounding healthy tissue. For this reason, the highest possible accuracy in the calculation of dose and its spatial distribution is required in treatment planning. On one hand, commonly used treatment planning software solutions adopt a simplified beam–body interaction model by remapping pre-calculated dose distributions into a 3D water-equivalent representation of the patient morphology.

Tumour control is performed in particle therapy using particles and ions, whose high irradiation precision enhances the effectiveness of the treatment, while sparing the healthy tissue surrounding the target volume.
Dose range monitoring devices using photons and charged particles produced by the beam interacting with the patient’s body have already been proposed, but no attempt has been made yet to exploit the detection of the abundant neutron component.

Monkey neurophysiology and human neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that passive viewing of optic flow stimuli activates a cortical network of temporal, parietal, insular, and cingulate visual motion regions. Here, we tested whether the human visual motion areas involved in processing optic flow signals simulating self-motion are also activated by active lower limb movements, and hence are likely involved in guiding human locomotion. To this aim, we used a combined approach of task-evoked activity and resting-state functional connectivity by fMRI.

Studies indicate that both explicit and implicit processing of affectively charged stimuli may be reflected in specific behavioural markers and physiological signatures. Here, we investigated whether the pleasantness ratings of a neutral target were affected by the subliminal perception of a painful (a slap) or pleasant (a caress) touch delivered to others. In particular, we combined the continuous flash suppression technique with the affective misattribution procedure to explore subliminal processing of observed pain and pleasure in others.

Graph theory analysis on resting state electroencephalographic rhythms disclosed topological properties of cerebral network. In Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients, this approach showed mixed results. Granger causality matrices were used as input to the graph theory allowing to estimate the strength and the direction of information transfer between electrode pairs.

PURPOSE:
Leptin (LEP) is a peptide hormone with multiple physiological functions. Besides its systemic actions, it has important peripheral roles such as a mitogen action on keratinocytes following skin lesions. We previously showed that LEP mRNA is significantly induced in response to neutron irradiation in mouse skin and that the protein increases in the irradiated epidermis and in the related subcutaneous adipose tissue. In this work, we investigated the post-transcriptional regulation of LEP by miRNAs and the conservation of LEP's role in radiation response in human cells.

Purpose: Developing a predictive model of the shrinkage of liver tissues in microwave ablation.