Ricerc@Sapienza

Ultrasonography is the best available tool for the initial work-up of thyroid nodules. Substantial interobserver variability has been documented in the recognition and reporting of some of the lesion characteristics. A number of classification systems have been developed to estimate the likelihood of malignancy: several of them have been endorsed by scientific societies, but their reproducibility has yet to be assessed.

Objective:
The Unified Classification System (UCS) presents itself as an evolution of the Vancouver Classification (VCS) for the evaluation of periprosthetic fractures of the proximal femur (PPF). The aim of our study was to evaluate the interobserver and intraobserver reliability, with the purpose of highlighting any loss of reproducibility or validity of the new classification system, compared to the previous one, when applied to the proximal femur.
Material and Methods:

More walkable neighborhoods are linked to increased physical activity. The Walking Suitability Index of the territory (T-WSI) is an easy method to evaluate walkability on the basis of direct observation. T-WSI provides 12 indicators divided into 4 categories (practicability, safety, urbanity, pleasantness); the weighted analysis of these indicators gives an overall score of the actual usability of the neighborhood. The aim of the study is to evaluate the ability of T-WSI’ indicators to measure, in a reliable way, any street’s walkability variations occurred over time.

Translation and cross-cultural adaptation of the 39-item Parkinson’s Disease Questionnaire (PDQ-39) to the Italian culture was performed by Oxford University Innovation in 2008, but this version has never been validated. Therefore, we performed the process of validation of the Italian version of the PDQ-39 (PDQ-39-IT) following the “Consensus-Based Standards for the Selection of Health Status Measurement Instruments” checklist. The translated PDQ-39-IT was tested with 104 patients diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease (PD) who were recruited between June and October 2017.

The paper focuses on the reliability of an undervoltage electromechanical relay suitable for critical industrial applications. The specific application underlined in this paper is a mutual aid system for gensets: the relay is able to actuate the parallel of the batteries in case of failure of the starting-up of the genset. A particular 'Plunger-type' electromechanical device, with redundant contacts, has been proposed in order to maximize the MTBF parameter; electronics devices have been rejected in according with on-filed statistic surveys about the relative failure rates.

The aim of this work is to present some issues related to fault tolerant electric drives,which are able to overcome different types of faults occurring in the sensors, in thepower converter and in the electrical machine, without compromising the overallfunctionality of the system. These features are of utmost importance in safety-criticalapplications.

In this paper it is shown how to obtain a low-cost, high-resolution and fault-robust position sensing system for permanent magnet synchronous motor drives operating in safety-critical systems, by combining high-frequency signal injection with binary Hall-effect sensors. It is shown that the position error signal obtained via high-frequency signal injection can be merged easily into the quantization-harmonic-decoupling vector tracking observer used to process the Hall-effect sensor signals.

Nowadays there are 3 % of missed start-ups of emergency gensets in Italian hospitals every year. The subject of this work is the analysis of the failure to start an emergency genset due to the failure of the batteries. The work is based on ten years statistics of maintenance on hospital facilities. A real case study is here described; measurements were made on a 1000 kVA genset of a hospital to study the real operating conditions of the system. The whole electrical, mechanical and dynamic model of the starter system of a genset is studied.