Appropriateness, safety, and effectiveness of "drip and ship" teleconsultation model in Southeastern Tuscany: a feasibility study.

PURPOSE: Teleconsultation is a consultation between two or more physicians about the diagnostic work-up and therapeutic strategy in the treatment of an individual case by means of modern telematics. 'Drip-and-ship' teleconsultation model consists of the transfer of patients, through telematics stroke networks, with large arteries occlusions from primary to comprehensive stroke centers equipped for endovascular therapy. We retrospectively investigated appropriateness, safety, and effectiveness of 'drip-and-ship' teleconsultation model in a rural area of Tuscany. METHODS: Outcome measures were: door-to-ship time (including door-to-needle time), ratio of number treated/total sent patients, adverse events/mortality during transfer, and mortality and modified Rankin scale at 90 days. Analysis of non-treated patients was also done. RESULTS: Seventy-eight patients were included; 16/78 patients were sent for endovascular therapy alone, and 62/78 for "drip-and-ship"; 12 patients were not treated. Door-to-ship, and door-to-needle times (mean ± SD) were 105 ± 29.8 and 62.5 ± 37.5 min, respectively. The ratio number of treated/total sent patients was 0.85. At 90 days, the global mortality rate was 21%, and 40% of patients showed favorable outcome. The main cause of non-treatment was spontaneous recanalization. CONCLUSIONS: The high value for treated/total sent patients' ratio underlines that "drip-and-ship" teleconsultation model is appropriate and effective, with a few untreated patients. The model is safe, without adverse events during transfer. Taken together, our outcomes are in line with the previous reports. "Drip-and-ship" teleconsultation model is safe and effective in rural areas, allowing good selections and rapid treatments for stroke patients, based on the transfer from the primary to the comprehensive stroke center.

Cerebral venous congestion correlates to acute aneurysm rupture: An illustrative case with Doppler ultrasonography study.

BACKGROUND: The objective of our description is to shed light on some new hemodynamic and clinical characteristics in the unstable cerebral aneurysm Case: We describe a 54 year old woman who presented a tension headache, that increasing for several days. A CT scan performed in ER suggests a possible arterial ectasia at the level of the circle of Willis. The patient is hospitalized. An angio CT shows an aneurysm of the anterior communicating artery, without signs of fixation and/or other instability. A subsequent TCCD examination with venous study shows clear congestion at the level of the spheno-parietal sinus. The Valsalva maneuver determines an increase in local congestion. In the light of the ultrasound picture, the patient was quickly received in Neurosurgery with success. CONCLUSION: we describe a clinical case where the worsening tension headache was not secondary to the increase of volume of the aneurysm but was an epiphenomenon of venous congestion, explored with TCCD. The mass effect of the aneurysm determined venous sinus compression and changed the hemodynamic of the cerebral venous flow. We believe that venous outflow obstruction and a high intracranial venous pressure gradient may be a cerebral aneurysm rupture factor.

NSL a Neuro-Symbolic Language for a Neuro-Symbolic Processor (NSP).

A Neuro-Symbolic Language for monotonic and non-monotonic parallel logical inference by means of artificial neural networks (ANNs) is presented. Both the language and its compiler have been designed and implemented in order to translate the neural representation of a given problem into a VHDL software, which in turn can set devices such as FPGA. The result of this operation leads to an electronic circuit that we call NSP (Neuro-Symbolic Processor).