Bücher von Giuseppe Amato

This book aims at filling a gap in relation to the pathophysiology of the inguinal region and the genesis of groin protrusions. While inguinal hernia is a widespread disease and hernia repair accounts for the most frequently performed surgical procedure, these two aspects have been unsatisfactorily investigated, so that to date there is no shared hypothesis on how visceral protrusion through inguinal barrier occur. Exact knowledge on the pathogenesis is fundamental for adequately managing a disease, otherwise all curative approaches would  not be  evidence-based, but merely empirically identified  and with uncertain outcomes carried out. Moreover, in absence of pathogenetic certainty, formulating guidelines simply results in an unjustified methodology harbinger of polemics and controversies. Previous studies concerning the pathogenesis of inguinal protrusions were mainly focused on the detection of biochemical changes, mostly related to collagen chains, metalloproteinase and similar elements. Nevertheless, despite decades of researches, a sure relationship between these ultrastructural modifications and visceral protrusion has not been proven. On the contrary, over the years very few investigations dealt with evidencing eventual modifications in the tissue structures of the herniated groin. An extensive research finalized to ascertain in patients and in cadavers structural changes of the tissue elements composing the groin was therefore carried out by the author and his researchers team. The findings of these studies resulted to be very useful for definitely evidencing the etiology of inguinal hernia disease. Overall, the proposed book scrutinizes and widens all emerging aspects related to pathogenesis, histology, physiology, surgical and functional anatomy of the inguinal area affected by hernia protrusion. It intends to be a reference guide to surgeons willing to better understand the structural modifications occurring in patients affected by this disease with the aim of improving treatment results.

The area of similarity searching is a very hot topic for both research and c- mercial applications. Current data processing applications use data with c- siderably less structure and much less precise queries than traditional database systems. Examples are multimedia data like images or videos that offer query by example search, product catalogs that provide users with preference based search, scientific data records from observations or experimental analyses such as biochemical and medical data, or XML documents that come from hetero- neous data sources on the Web or in intranets and thus does not exhibit a global schema. Such data can neither be ordered in a canonical manner nor meani- fully searched by precise database queries that would return exact matches. This novel situation is what has given rise to similarity searching, also - ferred to as content based or similarity retrieval. The most general approach to similarity search, still allowing construction of index structures, is modeled in metric space. In this book. Prof. Zezula and his co authors provide the first monograph on this topic, describing its theoretical background as well as the practical search tools of this innovative technology.