Oral bacteria that degrade sulphur-containing amino acids (cysteine, cystine, and methionine) produce volatile sulphur compounds (VSCs = hydrogen sulphide, methyl mercaptan, and dimethyl sulphide) ...highly correlated with halitosis. When these bacteria are given the right environment, i.e. periodontal disease, cariogenic biofilm or food source they can grow in number very quickly and will start to convert proteins to VSC that, together with volatile fatty acids are largely responsible for oral malodor. Recently, the prevention of dental caries and periodontal diseases using various probiotics has been attempted. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of probiotics based on in vitro analysis, such as antibacterial activity, and to evaluate the neutralizing effect of probiotics on halitosis, the levels of VSCs were measured by gas chromatography. .
Dental plaque-related diseases (cavities, gingivitis, periodontitis and halitosis) have been traditionally controlled by mechanical non-specific removal of plaque. However, many novel treatment ...approaches aim to inhibit the growth of pathogenic bacteria or to remove their toxins. Probiotics are viable microorganisms which, when administered in adequate amounts, provide a health benefit to the host. Recently, probiotics have been applied as new tools for the improvement of dental health. They have been used to substitute existing antibiotic treatments due to increased resistant bacteria. Probiotics not only have antibacterial activity, but they also have inhibitory effects on the reappearance of oral pathogenic bacteria. The aim of this study was to assess the clinical effect of the administration of probiotics agents in the treatment of mild to moderate periodontitis.
Trigger performance of the ALICE Silicon Pixel Detector Altini, V.
Nuclear instruments & methods in physics research. Section A, Accelerators, spectrometers, detectors and associated equipment,
09/2011, Letnik:
650, Številka:
1
Journal Article
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The ALICE Silicon Pixel Detector (SPD) forms the two innermost layers of the ALICE Inner Tracking System (ITS). It consists of two-layer barrel of hybrid silicon pixel detectors. The SPD contains ...1200 pixel readout chips and about 10
7 pixel cells. The unique feature of the SPD among the vertex detectors of LHC experiments is the prompt trigger capability, called Fast-Or, which allows it to contribute to the experimental first level trigger decision. The SPD data stream includes 1200 digital signals (Fast-Or) promptly asserted by each readout chip on the presence of at least one pixel hit in the matrix. The off-detector Pixel Trigger system elaborates in real time the 1200 Fast-Or signals continuously received from the detector in order to generate a pre-processed signal for the ALICE first level trigger. All the Fast-Or signals are written in the data and available for offline analysis. In this contribution it is presented the methodology used to evaluate the performance of the Fast-Or. The methods are entirely based on offline data analysis. Results are given for a sample of data of proton–proton collisions at
s
=
7
TeV
.
It has been customary to explain the dentally beneficial effects of xylitol and certain other natural compound as lysozyme and seas salt in terms of microbiological effects only. Several studies have ...tested the use of natural ingredients, alcohol and fluoride free, in mouthwashes. The purpose of this study was to evaluate a combined mouthwash formulation containing natural antibiofilm agents in oral care wound healing after routinely oral surgery (extraction) procedures.
Patients were assigned following a blinded randomized controlled trial and divided into two groups, an experimental group (I = 15) and a control (placebo) group (II = 15). Any infectious complications, wound healing, plaque accumulation in the stitches, and presence of trismus and inflammation were evaluated at ten and thirty days after extraction procedure. Pain and swelling were evaluated using the well-known visual analogue scale (VAS) scale throughout study period following extraction. The mean difference in Pre and Post values were compared among the groups. The change in pre-post score was analyzed using the paired t test.
An appreciable wound healing was seen in the experimental group when compared to the control sites, with no reported adverse effects. Four weeks postoperative patient's satisfaction level, to subjective and objective outcome measurements in documenting the result of a mouthwash treatment showed an interesting difference between groups.
Since combined mouthwash formulations, containing natural/bioactive substances, could provide a cheap, safe and acceptable alternative in oral care, further studies will also be required to study these effects and their mechanism of action in detail.
Numerous studies in the literature confirm the importance of the use of probiotics in inflammatory states of the prostate in humans. Our pilot study aimed to test probiotics strains ability to ...improve urinary bacterial load in male subjects.
Twenty healthy men aged 55-65 years, with recurrent urinatory infections were enrolled and randomized into 2 groups. Urine culturing to detect Enterobacteriaceae (Escherichia Coli and Enterococcus faecalis) was performed at baseline and at 12 weeks after the starting of the study.
We found that taking the probiotic reduces the bacterial load of E. coli and E. faecalis in urine cultures. The use of the probiotic in these inflammatory states does not affect the change in weight in the tested subjects.
Our data confirm and improve the main results reported in the scientific literature on the importance of taking probiotics in prostatitis.
Performance of the ALICE SPD cooling system Francescon, A; Rinella, G Aglieri; Altini, V ...
Journal of physics. Conference series,
01/2012, Letnik:
395, Številka:
1
Journal Article
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The new generation of silicon detectors for particle physics requires very reduced mass and high resistance to radiations with very limited access to the detector for maintenance. The Silicon Pixel ...Detector (SPD) is one of the 18 detectors of the ALICE (A Large Io Collider Experiment) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. It constitute the two innermost layers of the Inner Tracking System (ITS) and it is the closest detector to th interaction point. An evaporative cooling system, based on C4F10 evaporation at 1.9 bar, was chosen to extrac the 1.35 kW power dissipated by the on-detector electronics. The whole system wa extensively tested and commissioned before its installation inside the ALICE experimenta area. Since then we had to deal with a decrease of the flow in some lines of the system tha imposed severe restrictions on the detector operation. Recently, a test bench has been built in order to carry out a series of tests to reproduce the misbehaviour of the system and investigat proper actions to cure the problem. The performance of the systems and the most interesting results of the above mentioned test will be presented.
The ALICE Electronic Logbook Altini, V; Carena, F; Carena, W ...
Journal of physics. Conference series,
04/2010, Letnik:
219, Številka:
2
Journal Article
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All major experiments need tools that provide a way to keep a record of the events and activities, both during commissioning and operations. In ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) at CERN, this ...task is performed by the Alice Electronic Logbook (eLogbook), a custom-made application developed and maintained by the Data-Acquisition group (DAQ). Started as a statistics repository, the eLogbook has evolved to become not only a fully functional electronic logbook, but also a massive information repository used to store the conditions and statistics of the several online systems. It's currently used by more than 600 users in 30 different countries and it plays an important role in the daily ALICE collaboration activities. This paper will describe the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) based architecture of the eLogbook, the database schema and the relevance of the information stored in the eLogbook to the different ALICE actors, not only for near real time procedures but also for long term data-mining and analysis. It will also present the web interface, including the different used technologies, the implemented security measures and the current main features. Finally it will present the roadmap for the future, including a migration to the web 2.0 paradigm, the handling of the database ever-increasing data volume and the deployment of data-mining tools.
ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is the heavy-ion detector designed to study the physics of strongly interacting matter and the quark-gluon plasma at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Some ...specific calibration tasks are performed regularly for each of the 18 ALICE sub-detectors in order to achieve most accurate physics measurements. These procedures involve events analysis in a wide range of experimental conditions, implicating various trigger types, data throughputs, electronics settings, and algorithms, both during short sub-detector standalone runs and long global physics runs. A framework was designed to collect statistics and compute some of the calibration parameters directly online, using resources of the Data Acquisition System (DAQ), and benefiting from its inherent parallel architecture to process events. This system has been used at the experimental area for one year, and includes more than 30 calibration routines in production. This paper describes the framework architecture and the synchronization mechanisms involved at the level of the Experiment Control System (ECS) of ALICE. The software libraries interfacing detector algorithms (DA) to the online data flow, configuration database, experiment logbook, and offline system are reviewed. The test protocols followed to integrate and validate each sub-detector component are also discussed, including the automatic build system and validation procedures used to ensure a smooth deployment. The offline post-processing and archiving of the DA results is covered in a separate paper.
The ALICE data quality monitoring Haller, B von; Roukoutakis, F; Chapeland, S ...
Journal of physics. Conference series,
04/2010, Letnik:
219, Številka:
2
Journal Article
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ALICE is one of the four experiments installed at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC), especially designed for the study of heavy-ion collisions. The online Data Quality Monitoring (DQM) is an ...important part of the data acquisition (DAQ) software. It involves the online gathering, the analysis by user-defined algorithms and the visualization of monitored data. This paper presents the final design, as well as the latest and coming features, of the ALICE's specific DQM software called AMORE (Automatic MonitoRing Environment). It describes the challenges we faced during its implementation, including the performances issues, and how we tested and handled them, in particular by using a scalable and robust publish-subscribe architecture.We also review the on-going and increasing adoption of this tool amongst the ALICE collaboration and the measures taken to develop, in synergy with their respective teams, efficient monitoring modules for the sub-detectors. The related packaging and release procedure needed by such a distributed framework is also described. We finally overview the wide range of usages people make of this framework, and we review our own experience, before and during the LHC start-up, when monitoring the data quality on both the sub-detectors and the DAQ side in a real-world and challenging environment.
The ALICE online data storage system Divià, R; Fuchs, U; Makhlyueva, I ...
Journal of physics. Conference series,
04/2010, Letnik:
219, Številka:
5
Journal Article
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The ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) Data Acquisition (DAQ) system has the unprecedented requirement to ensure a very high volume, sustained data stream between the ALICE Detector and the ...Permanent Data Storage (PDS) system which is used as main data repository for Event processing and Offline Computing. The key component to accomplish this task is the Transient Data Storage System (TDS), a set of data storage elements with its associated hardware and software components, which supports raw data collection, its conversion into a format suitable for subsequent high-level analysis, the storage of the result using highly parallelized architectures, its access via a cluster file system capable of creating high-speed partitions via its affinity feature, and its transfer to the final destination via dedicated data links. We describe the methods and the components used to validate, test, implement, operate, and monitor the ALICE Online Data Storage system and the way it has been used in the early days of commissioning and operation for the ALICE Detector. We will also introduce the future developments needed from next year, when the ALICE Data Acquisition System will shift its requirements from those associated to the test and commissioning phase to those imposed by long-duration data taking periods alternated by shorter validation and maintenance tasks which will be needed to adequately operate the ALICE Experiment.
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