A Web Based Tool to Support a Personalized Therapeutic Path Through the Use of Psychological Tests

Psychology tests are tools used to evaluate specific aspects of individual psyche and behavior, in clinical practice and for research purposes. They are validated and standardized both in the administration procedures and interpretation of results. Nowadays, most of these tests are questionnaires administered to patients on paper support. The patient’s answers to the questionnaires constitute a basis for self-presentation and self-awareness at the beginning of the therapeutic path. The computer is a valuable aid allowing a quickly consultation of all the answers and highlighting the most salient ones. The main aim of this work was to design, develop and test a computerized support tool for the interpretation of psychological tests that allow good interaction between groups of therapists sharing the same operating modes. The developed system allows: first the storing of the numerical values corresponding to the answers to the questionnaires of the patients; then it creates a complete ’Picture’ of the patient and allows the automatic computation of the correlation between the indexes of the various scales. The graphical correlations between scales can be also a valuable aid in finding the outliers, so patients far away from the trend line.

Leaks of CP violation in the real two-Higgs-doublet model

We discuss the $$Z_2$$ Z 2 symmetric two-Higgs-doublet model with a real soft-breaking term (real 2HDM). We explain in detail why it is not tenable to assume CP conservation in the scalar sector to keep the dimension two term real, while CP is violated by the dimension four Yukawa couplings. We propose the calculation of the infinite tadpole of the (would-be) pseudoscalar neutral scalar. We construct a simple toy model with the same flaws, where the unrenormalizable infinity is easier to calculate. We then consider the same tadpole in the real 2HDM. We spearhead this effort focusing on diagrams involving solely bare quantities. This involves hundreds of Feynman three-loop diagrams that could feed the CP violation from the quark into the scalar sector, and is only possible with state of the art automatic computation tools. Remarkably, some intermediate results agree when using three independent derivations, including the peculiar cancellation of the leading pole divergence due to a subtle interplay between masses and the Jarlskog invariant, which we calculate analytically. The calculation is not complete however, since the full two-loop renormalization of the real 2HDM is not yet available in the literature. Still, we argue convincingly that there is an irremovable infinity.

Automatic Segmentation and Measurement of Infantile Hemangioma

Infantile hemangiomas (IHs) are a type of vascular tumors that affect around 10% of newborns. The measurement of the lesion size and the assessment of the evolution is done manually by the physician. This paper presents an algorithm for the automatic computation of the IH lesion surface. The image scale is computed by using the Hough transform and the total variation. As pre-processing, a geometric correction step is included, which ensures that the lesions are viewed as perpendicular to the camera. The image segmentation is based on K-means clustering applied on a five-plane image; the five planes being selected from seven planes with the use of the Karhunen-Loeve transform. Two of the seven planes are 2D total variation filters, based on symmetrical kernels, designed to highlight the IH specific texture. The segmentation performance was assessed on 30 images, and a mean border error of 9.31% was obtained.

Improving Automatic IPSyn Coding

Purpose The Computerized Language ANalysis–Index of Productive Syntax (CLAN-IPSyn) system is designed to facilitate automatic computation of the IPSyn measure of productive child syntax. Roberts et al. (2020) conducted a thorough comparison of hand-generated and automatic scores on the Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn) measure (Scarborough, 1990) and found a high level of error for CLAN-IPSyn. We report on the use of the Roberts et al. analysis to reduce and eliminate errors in CLAN-IPSyn, to improve its accuracy. Method Scores provided by manual and machine scoring of the 20 transcripts used in Roberts et al. (2020) were compared. Divergences in point assignment were examined and significant modifications made to the CLAN-IPSyn program to increase its accuracy. Conclusion The currently available, free version of CLAN at https://talkbank.org is now significantly more correct in terms of exemplars produced, and should assist clinicians and researchers in using the revised IPSyn (Altenberg et al. 2018).