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Both Michel Foucault and Barbara Cassin address Aristotle’s thought and the 5th century BCE sources attributed to the rhetorician Gorgias in order to reconstruct the history of the strategic exclusion of the Sophistics from the Western philosophical tradition. They retrace the scene of the rhetoric agon that Aristotle engaged with Gorgias. Both theorists’ arguments illuminate that the sophist has formulated an original account of political theatricality by talking about the scenes of the logos.

Neutrophils are the first line of defense in the innate immune system, helping to maintain tissue homeostasis as well as eliminating pathogens and self-components. The traditional view of neutrophils as simple phagocytes has been revised over the last decade as new research reveals their unappreciated complexity. Neutrophils are phenotypically and functionally heterogeneous, allowing them to act as modulators of both inflammation and immune responses. During acute inflammation, neutrophils perform a variety of beneficial effector functions, but when inflammation is induced by injury (sterile inflammation) the benefits of neutrophils in tissue repair are more controversial. In several pathological conditions, including cancer and autoimmune diseases, neutrophils can trigger harmful tissue damage. Interestingly, neutrophils are also key players in neuroinflammatory disorders, during which they transmigrate in the central nervous system, acquire a toxic phenotype, home in on neurons, and release harmful molecules that compromise neuronal functions. In this review, we discuss recent data that redefine the cell biology and phenotype of neutrophils, focusing on the role of these cells in multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer's disease, both of which feature strong neuroinflammatory components.

In vivo estimates of tibiotalar and the subtalar joint kinematics can unveil unique information about gait biomechanics, especially in the presence of musculoskeletal disorders affecting the foot and ankle complex. Previous literature investigated the ankle kinematics on ex vivo data sets, but little has been reported for natural walking, and even less for pathological and juvenile populations. This paper proposes an MRI-based morphological fitting methodology for the personalised definition of the tibiotalar and the subtalar joint axes during gait, and investigated its application to characterise the ankle kinematics in twenty patients affected by Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA). The estimated joint axes were in line with in vivo and ex vivo literature data and joint kinematics variation subsequent to inter-operator variability was in the order of 1°. The model allowed to investigate, for the first time in patients with JIA, the functional response to joint impairment. The joint kinematics highlighted changes over time that were consistent with changes in the patient's clinical pattern and notably varied from patient to patient. The heterogeneous and patient-specific nature of the effects of JIA was confirmed by the absence of a correlation between a semi-quantitative MRI-based impairment score and a variety of investigated joint kinematics indexes. In conclusion, this study showed the feasibility of using MRI and morphological fitting to identify the tibiotalar and subtalar joint axes in a non-invasive patient-specific manner. The proposed methodology represents an innovative and reliable approach to the analysis of the ankle joint kinematics in pathological juvenile populations.

Summary Can social gaze behavior reveal the leader during real-world group interactions? To answer this question, we developed a novel tripartite approach combining (1) computer vision methods for remote gaze estimation, (2) a detailed taxonomy to encode the implicit semantics of multi-party gaze features, and (3) machine learning methods to establish dependencies between leadership and visual behaviors. We found that social gaze behavior distinctively identified group leaders. Crucially, the relationship between leadership and gaze behavior generalized across democratic and autocratic leadership styles under conditions of low and high time-pressure, suggesting that gaze can serve as a general marker of leadership. These findings provide the first direct evidence that group visual patterns can reveal leadership across different social behaviors and validate a new promising method for monitoring natural group interactions. Highlights • Leadership shapes gaze dynamics during real-world human group interactions • Social gaze behavior distinctively identifies group leaders • Identification generalizes across leadership styles and situational conditions • Gaze can serve as a general marker of leadership Social Interaction; Neuroscience; Behavioral Neuroscience Graphical Abstract

This study aims at clarifying the prognostic role of high-grade tumor budding (TB) in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) with the first systematic review and meta-analysis on this topic. Furthermore, we analyzed with a systematic review the relationship between TB and a recently suggested TB-associated mechanism: the epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT). Analyzing a total of 613 patients, 251 of them (40.9%) with high grade-TB, we found an increased risk of all-cause mortality (RR, 1.46; 95% CI, 1.13-1.88, p = 0.004; HR, 2.65; 95% CI, 1.79-3.91; p < 0.0001) and of recurrence (RR, 1.61; 95% CI, 1.05-2.47, p = 0.03) for PDAC patients with high-grade TB. Moreover, we found that EMT is a central process in determining the presence of TB in PDAC. Thanks to this meta-analysis, we demonstrate the potential clinical significance of high-grade TB for prognostic stratification of PDAC. TB also shows a clear association with the process of EMT. Based on the results of the present study, TB should be conveyed in pathology reports and taken into account by future oncologic staging systems. © 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

Advanced Sensing Technologies (ASTs) have a great potential to improve surgical quality and to further develop Surgical Robotic Systems (SRSs), enhancing their technical and autonomy capabilities. Among these sensing techniques, Electrical Bioimpedance (EBI) provides a non-invasive, low-cost, and safe AST for the intraoperative localization of abnormal regions. The current EBI integration into SRS has only been demonstrated in an over-simplified condition (i.e. nearly flat surfaces), which are almost never encountered in real anatomies. To overcome this limitation, we develop a robotic assisted EBI scanning system able to work with tissues' surfaces of arbitrary shapes, leveraging 3D vision based tissue reconstruction in the scanning process. In addition, we propose a novel model based conductivity estimation method that exploits Finite Element (FE) simulation to compensate for errors introduced by non-planar surfaces and uncertainty in the electrodes' position. The system is evaluated through experiments in simulation and using ex vivo animal tissues. The experimental results show that the model based method achieves an accuracy of 99% independently of the curvature of the tissue surface, while the previous method achieves an accuracy ranging from 70% to 88% depending on the surface curvature. The obtained results are very promising and show a great potential to be integrated into existing SRSs for identifying different tissues during a robotic surgery without involving any additional tool.