Ricerc@Sapienza

For the diagnosis of anti-MAG polyneuropathy the commercial ELISA manufacturer currently recommends a cut-off of 1000 Bühlmann Titer Units (BTU). We analyzed sera from 80 anti-MAG neuropathy patients and 383 controls (with other neuropathies or healthy controls) to assess the ELISA sensitivity and specificity at different thresholds. A better combination of sensitivity/specificity was found at a threshold >1500 BTU than at >1000 BTU. The best value of specificity was obtained at threshold >7000 BTU.

The skin prick test (SPT) is the most common test for the diagnosis of allergy. SPT is performed by pricking the skin, usually in the volar surface of the forearm, with a lancet through a drop of an allergen extract and is usually the first choice test in the diagnostic workup for allergic diseases because of its reliability, safety, convenience and low cost. SPT is minimally invasive and has the advantage of testing multiple allergens in 15 to 20 min.

In this early development phase of the DEMO design the uncertainty affecting many operational and design parameters can modify main outcomes of accident scenario aiming at studying the critical conditions for the vacuum vessel and the contiguous containment volumes. The aim of this paper is to perform a preliminary sensitivity analysis of an accident progression predicted by MELCOR code considering selected parameters as a figure of merit to predict possible code outcomes.

Perturbation methods are part of the reactor physics foundation devoted to the study of fundamental
quantities used in design and safety analysis of nuclear reactors. In deterministic codes, such as
ERANOS, standard perturbation theory (SPT) and generalized perturbation theory (GPT) methods have
been historically developed and used. Monte Carlo codes, such as MCNP 6.1, can also perform, via adjoint
weighted tally, SPT calculations of reactivity worths. In this work a method, referred to as MC-GPT, is

Ongoing perturbations in the global climate have triggered changes in the frequency or magnitude of extreme climatic events, including drought. Increasingly common or intense droughts have threatened ungulates. Intensifying trend of drought has been observed in China since the 1980s. We assessed drought vulnerability of 60 ungulate taxa distributed in China by synthesizing information on drought exposure and intrinsic vulnerability related to biological traits.

In this paper, a novel Full Reference method is proposed for image quality assessment, using the combination of two separate metrics to measure the perceptually distinct impact of detail losses and of spurious details. To this purpose, the gradient of the impaired image is locally decomposed as a predicted version of the original gradient, plus a gradient residual. It is assumed that the detail attenuation identifies the detail loss, whereas the gradient residuals describe the spurious details.

An ultra-compact plasmonics-based sensor is investigated which is excited by Fano resonance. The structure is numerically simulated by the finite-difference time-domain method. The sensor utilizes unique waveguide geometry named as metal-insulator-metal (MIM) waveguide geometry which has an intriguing feature to confine signal far beyond diffraction light. Thus, it is used to devise ultra-compact optical circuits. The MIM waveguide is coupled to a pair of elliptical ring resonators and the interaction between the resonators excites special mode which is known as Fano resonance mode.