Personalized Bone Reconstruction and Regeneration in the Treatment of Craniosynostosis

Craniosynostosis (CS) is the second most prevalent craniofacial congenital malformation due to the premature fusion of skull sutures. CS care requires surgical treatment of variable complexity, aimed at resolving functional and cosmetic defects resulting from the skull growth constrain. Despite significant innovation in the management of CS, morbidity and mortality still exist. Residual cranial defects represent a potential complication and needdedicated management to drive a targeted bone regeneration while modulating suture ossification. To this aim, existing techniques are rapidly evolving and include the implementation of novel biomaterials, 3D printing and additive manufacturing techniques, and advanced therapies based on tissue engineering. This review aims at providing an exhaustive and up-to-date overview of the strategies in use to correct these congenital defects, focusing on the technological advances in the fields of biomaterials and tissue engineering implemented in pediatric surgical skull reconstruction, i.e., biodegradable bone fixation systems, biomimetic scaffolds, drug delivery systems, and cell-based approaches.

Proceedings of the Resource Efficient Vehicles Conference - 2021 (rev2021)

rev2021 was the first edition of the conference on Resource Efficient Vehicles, held online on 14-16 June 2021. This vehicle-centric conference aims to bring together participants from academia, industry and public agencies to discuss research from all relevant fields connected to resource efficiency in all motorised modes of transport and interdependent surrounding systems. The theme of this multidisciplinary conference is Resolving Functional Conflicts in Vehicle Design, a theme explored through topics including modelling for multifunctional design; making trade-offs; efficient use of materials and space; integrating new solutions; transforming the product system; transforming the vehicle-transport system; sustainable design; and early-stage design. The 2021 edition of the conference consisted of 40 selected papers for presentation at the conference, complemented with four workshops, five keynote lectures from invited speakers, and a concluding panel discussion with four invited participants. It was organised by the Centre for ECO2 Vehicle Design at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

Traveling cortical netwaves compose a mindstream

ABSTRACTThe brain creates a physical response out of signals in a cascade of streaming transformations. These transformations occur over networks, which have been described in anatomical, cyto-, myeloarchitectonic and functional research. The totality of these networks has been modelled and synthesised in phases across a continuous time-space-function axis, through ascending and descending hierarchical levels of association1-3 via changing coalitions of traveling netwaves4-6, where localised disorders might spread locally throughout the neighbouring tissues. This study quantified the model empirically with time-resolving functional magnetic resonance imaging of an imperative, visually-triggered, self-delayed, therefor double-event related response task. The resulting time series unfold in the range of slow cortical potentials the spatio-temporal integrity of a cortical pathway from the source of perception to the mouth of reaction in and out of known functional, anatomical and cytoarchitectonic networks. These pathways are consolidated in phase images described by a small vector matrix, which leads to massive simplification of cortical field theory and even to simple technical applications.

“I Have Never Seen Anything Like It Before”

Functional movement disorders represent up to 20% of cases referred to some movement disorders clinics. The longer the symptoms are present,, the lower the success rate in resolving functional syndromes. A good knowledge of the positive features on clinical examination that facilitate an early diagnosis is important. Psychiatric or psychological factors need not be present at the time of presentation to make a diagnosis of functional disease. This assists in the diagnosis and may allow closer and valuable involvement from psychiatry colleagues. Close and primary involvement of a neurologist to allow a diagnosis to be made in a timely manner to avoid unnecessary investigations is important.

An Adaptive Architecture of Service Component for Persuasive Computing

This paper proposes a framework which focuses on thoroughly resolving functional dependency among components and enabling “Delay Adaptation”. This framework introduces an “Adaptation Table” to describe components’ interfaces and their interactions. Since functional dependency comes from the interactions among components, this “Adaptation Table” makes the dependency under control, a support toolkit is also developed. At last, the analysis of a case shows that the framework achieves the result that we expect in great measure.