MedSecurance Project: Advanced Security-for-Safety Assurance for Medical Device IoT (IoMT).

The MedSecurance project focus on identifying new challenges in cyber security with focus on hardware and software medical devices in the context of emerging healthcare architectures. In addition, the project will review best practice and identify gaps in the guidance, particularly the guidance stipulated by the medical device regulation and directives. Finally, the project will develop comprehensive methodology and tooling for the engineering of trustworthy networks of inter-operating medical devices, that shall have security-for-safety by design, with a strategy for device certification and certifiable dynamic network composition, ensuring that patient safety is safeguarded from malicious cyber actors and technology "accidents".

An isothermal lab-on-phone test for easy molecular diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 near patients and in less than 1 hour.

OBJECTIVES: The performance of a new point-of-care CE-IVD-marked isothermal lab-on-phone COVID-19 assay was assessed in comparison to a gold standard real-time reverse transcriptase-PCR method. METHODS: The study was conducted following a nonprobability sampling of ≥16-year-old volunteers from three different laboratories, using direct mouthwash (N = 24) or nasopharyngeal (N = 191) clinical samples. RESULTS: The assay demonstrated 95.19% sensitivity and 100% specificity for detection of SARS-CoV-2 in direct nasopharyngeal crude samples and 78.95% sensitivity and 100% specificity in direct mouthwash crude samples. It also successfully detected currently predominant SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern (Beta B.1.351, Delta B.1.617.2, and Omicron B.1.1.529) and demonstrated to be inert against potential cross-reactions of other common respiratory pathogens that cause infections that present similar symptoms to COVID-19. CONCLUSION: This lab-on-phone pocket-sized assay relies on an isothermal amplification of SARS-CoV-2's N and E genes, taking just 50 minutes from sample to result, with only 2 minutes of hands-on time. It presents good performance when using direct nasopharyngeal crude samples, enabling a low-cost, real-time, rapid, and accurate identification of SARS-CoV-2 infections at the point of care, which is important for both clinical management and population screening, as a tool to break the chain of transmission of COVID-19 pandemic, especially in low-resources environments.

Modulation of cortical interhemispheric interactions by motor facilitation or restraint.

Cortical interhemispheric interactions in motor control are still poorly understood and it is important to clarify how these depend on inhibitory/facilitatory limb movements and motor expertise, as reflected by limb dominance. Here we addressed this problem using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a task involving dominant/nondominant limb mobilization in the presence/absence of contralateral limb restraint. In this way we could modulate excitation/deactivation of the contralateral hemisphere. Blocks of arm elevation were alternated with absent/present restraint of the contralateral limb in 17 participants. We found the expected activation of contralateral sensorimotor cortex and ipsilateral cerebellum during arm elevation. In addition, only the dominant arm elevation (hold period) was accompanied by deactivation of ipsilateral sensorimotor cortex, irrespective of presence/absence of contralateral restraint, although the latter increased deactivation. In contrast, the nondominant limb yielded absent deactivation and reduced area of contralateral activation upon restriction. Our results provide evidence for a difference in cortical communication during motor control (action facilitation/inhibition), depending on the "expertise" of the hemisphere that controls action (dominant versus nondominant). These results have relevant implications for the development of facilitation/inhibition strategies in neurorehabilitation, namely, in stroke, given that fMRI deactivations have recently been shown to reflect decreases in neural responses.