bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Anti-Inflammatory Entrapment in Polycaprolactone/Silica Hybrid Material Prepared by Sol-Gel Route, Characterization, Bioactivity and in Vitro Release Behavior
Authors: Catauro Michelina , Bollino Flavia 
Published: July 2012

Aim A novel organic/inorganic hybrid material, based on poly(ε-caprolactone) (PCL) and silica (SiO2), were synthesized by the sol-gel method. An anti-inflammatory agent (indomethacin) was incorporated into the hybrid material to verify its local controlled drug delivery system. Methods The structure of the interpenetrating network was investigated by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. The morphology of the materials was studied by scanning electron microscopy. The structure of a molecular level dispersion was disclosed by atomic force microscopy. The bioactivity of the synthesized hybrid materials was revealed by the formation of a layer of hydroxyapatite on the surface of samples soaked in a simulated body fluid (sBF). Release kinetics in SBF were subsequently investigated. The amount of drug released was detected by UV-VIS spectroscopy. Results Pure anti-inflammatory agent exhibited linear release with time; in contrast, sol-gel silica entrapped drugs were released with a logarithmic time dependence starting with an initial burst effect followed by a gradual decrease. Conclusions SiO2/PCL (3, 6, 9 and 12 %wt) materials, prepared via sol-gel process, are organic/inorganic hybrid and bioactive materials. All the materials showed a good release and therefore could be used as drug delivery system.
Spiral Analysis in Subjects with Parkinson's Disease before and after Levodopa Treatment: A New Protocol with Stereophotogrammetric Systems
Authors: Galli Manuela , Vimercati Sara L. , Manetti Elena , Cimolin Veronica , Albertini Giorgio , De Pandis Maria F. 
Published: July 2012

Purpose A method for the quantification of handwritten spirals in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) pre and post levodopa treatment is reported. Methods Fifteen PD patients (mean age: 66.80±9.75 years) were assessed in the absence of medication (OFF condition) and under levodopa administration (ON condition). The control group was composed of 15 age-matched healthy (H) individuals (mean age: 63.70±9.40). They were asked to hand draw a spiral at self-selected speed, without resting their forearm on the table. The participants drew on a paper sheet, using a normal pen. The trace of the pen was determined from the 3D coordinates of passive markers placed on the pen and on the sheet, acquired with an optoelectronic system and some parameters were identified and computed. Results The method revealed to be significant in highlighting the differences between H and PD subjects and in detecting pharmacologic effect. PD patients are impaired in spiral drawing execution and levodopa improves drawing performance, evidenced by spatio-temporal parameters and velocity profiles. Conclusions The protocol is easily employable in clinic analysis because of its simplicity, the short duration of the test, and the natural test conditions. These characteristics suggest the applicability of this protocol to other fields of motor and cognitive assessments.
The Effect of the NRT Files Instrumentation on the Quality of the Surface of the Root Canal Wall
Authors: Pirani Chiara , Buonavoglia Alessio , Cirulli Pier Paolo , Baroni Chiara , Chersoni Stefano 
Published: July 2012

Purpose To analyze in vitro, trough scanning electron microscope (SEM), the shaping ability of NRT NiTi rotary system (Mani, Inc, Toshigi-Ken, Japan). Methods Ten extracted human teeth were cut at the level of the CEJ and prepared with Gates-Glidden burs 4-3-2 and NRT rotary files up to size #35. Irrigation was performed with 7.5 mL of 5% NaOCl and 7.5 mL of 10% EDTA during each canal instrumentation. Following the shaping sequence, a final irrigation was performed with EDTA followed by NaOCl, each left in situ for three minutes. Teeth were then fractured longitudinally, and the coronal, middle, and apical thirds of the canals were inspected with SEM. Three parameters, divided into four different levels (Alfa and Bravo, considered clinically acceptable; Charlie and Delta, considered clinically unacceptable), were used to score the canal morphology: presence and amount of smear layer; presence of organic and inorganic debris; surface profile. Results SEM assessment revealed that in the coronal and middle third the majority of canals shaped with NRT rotary system presented a clinically acceptable surface. The apical third presented a higher amount of smear layer and dentinal debris instead, compared to the coronal and middle third. Conclusions NRT files demonstrated that they provided good instrumentation of the coronal and middle third, while being unable to obtain a defects-free surface in the apical third.
Global Bioethics: Transnational Experiences
Authors: Ten Have Henk 
Published: July 2012

AbstractIn 1970, Van Rensselaer Potter was the first to the use the term ‘bioethics’ in a publication to advocate a new discipline needed to address the basic problems of human flourishing. In his early publications, Potter conceptualized bioethics as a bridge. First, it is a bridge between the present and the future; because of growing concerns about the future and the need to make sure that humankind will survive, bioethics is necessary as a new discipline to focus on long-term interests and goals; therefore, it can be regarded as the science of survival. Second, it is a bridge between science and values. The priority problems of humankind are multidimensional requiring us to combine all categories of knowledge and use really interdisciplinary approaches. Third, it is a bridge between nature and culture. From an evolutionary perspective, both are not static but dynamic notions; they are continuously changing, evolving, sometimes for the better sometimes for the worse. All available knowledge should be brought together to direct developments towards real progress in the future. Fourth, bioethics is a bridge between humankind and nature. Because the environment is increasingly polluted and natural resources are becoming more and more scarce, we need new ethics that take the findings of the new science of ecology seriously; one that regards human beings as interrelated with their environment.
In later publications Potter introduced the new name of ‘global bioethics’. On the one hand, he was disappointed about the development of bioethics with merely a focus on individual and medical issues. On the other hand, he wanted to underline the need for a broader perspective, transcending ethics specialties such as: medical ethics, environmental ethics, agricultural ethics, social ethics and religious ethics, and integrating them into a new interdisciplinary intellectual and practical endeavor to approach the global problems of the world community and future generations. Today, there appears to be an increased interest in global bioethics so that it may be timely to retrieve Potter’s original insights. Particularly, the efforts of UNESCO translate Potter’s views into a range of activities to promote bioethical infrastructure, among other in Islamic countries.
Organ Transplantation in Saudi Arabia
Authors: Shaheen Faisal 
Published: July 2012

AbstractThe achievements of the organ transplantation program in Saudi Arabia during the year 2011 reflected the progressive success in the number of organ donations and transplantations, but with escalating numbers of end stage organ failure patients awaiting transplantation. The organ failure census during 2011 showed more than 12,500 patients are on dialysis in 178 hospitals in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), and about 22.3% are on the active waiting list for transplantation, with another 20% being evaluated for inclusion in it. The KSA has an active deceased transplant program under the supervision of the Saudi Center for Organ Transplantation (SCOT). Clear policies have been laid down to facilitate diagnosis of death by brain function criteri, and the management of potential deceased donors. At the end of the year 2011, a total of 8820 possible deceased cases have been reported to SCOT, of which 710 were reported from 97 intensive care units around the Kingdom during that year. In the last five years, an average of 615 cases per year were reported. More energetic measures are still required to increase the number of reports of possible deceased cases, as well as obtaining consents. Only this will help bridge the gap between supply and demand of organs for more than 3000 patients in the active waiting list for organ transplantation. Inside the Kingdom by the end of 2011, renal transplantation have been performed from a total of 4830 living donors and 2349 deceased donors, of which 489 were transplanted in 16 active renal transplant centers. Also, liver transplations were performed from a total of 439 living donors and 620 deceased donors, in which 130 of them were transplanted in 4 active liver transplant centers. Whole heart transplantations have been performed from a total of 205 deceased donors; 540 were used as sources for heart valves, and 18 whole hearts were transplanted in one active heart transplant center, during that year. In addition, during that year, 19 lung transplant operations and two harvested pancreases were successfully transplanted. The consent for corneal donation was obtained from 43 eligible deceased organ donors, a result of 37 % of total consented cases. Finally, bone transplantations have been active since 2009. Although we still have to work harder to achieve the self-sufficiency of organ donation and transplantation, we believe we have made major strides towards this goal in the KSA, especially in the last year.
Does it make sense to speak of an "Islamic Bioethics"? Some lessons from the organ transplant controversy in Egypt
Authors: Hamdy Sherine 
Published: July 2012

AbstractWhy has Egypt, a pioneer of organ transplantation, been reluctant to pass a national organ transplant law for more than three decades? The talk will be based on Sherine Hamdy's newly released book, Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt (2012) which analyzes the national debate over organ transplantation in Egypt as it has unfolded during a time of major social and political transformation—including mounting dissent against a brutal regime, the privatization of health care, advances in science, the growing gap between rich and poor, and the Islamization of public space. She will ask what implications this has for an “Islamic Bioethics” in general.
A Muslim Clinical Ethics Consultant in the Western Healthcare System: Experience and Challenges
Authors: Bagheri Alireza 
Published: July 2012

AbstractClinical ethics consultation is defined as a service provided by an individual or a group to help patients, families and healthcare providers, to address uncertainty or conflict regarding value-laden issues that emerge in healthcare. Currently, in many Western societies, healthcare providers and patient populations increasingly come from diverse religious and cultural backgrounds. In this situation, the practitioner and patient or even the clinical ethicist do not share a common moral perspective or the same set of values regarding health, disease, life and death. Culture and religion, give identity and shape people’s moral reasoning and responses; for example, while in Western societies, bioethics relies on human reason to find out what is right or wrong, in many other societies people turn to traditional or religious values to understand what constitutes moral conduct.
Given the fact that in many cases clinical ethics consultations are needed when there is a disagreement on a value-laden decision making, the question is how should a clinical bioethicist advise, and help patients, families and healthcare providers in decision making in a diverse, cultural and religious setting? In other words, when a clinical ethicist is bound to her/his own cultural and religious inclination(s), how can s/he ensure that professional approaches in resolving the conflict between physician and patient are unbiased? For example, how can a Muslim ethics consultant provide consultation about abortion for an 18 weeks pregnant woman, or providing clinical ethics advice to a homosexual patient? By providing some examples such as the concept of individual autonomy, the importance of religious principles, the model of decision making in Islamic and non-Islamic context(s), this paper presents some of the challenging issues in which a Muslim clinical ethicist may face, while providing clinical ethics consultation in a non-Muslim society.
Fiqh Councils & Health Policy Actors: Gaps in the Applied Islamic Bioethics Discourse around Vaccines with Porcine Components
Authors: Padela Aasim 
Published: July 2012

AbstractDuring a 1995 meeting of the Islamic Organization for Medical Sciences [IOMS] medical experts and Islamic jurists deliberated on “Judically (sic) Prohibited and Impure Substances in Foodstuffs and Drugs.” The seminar resulted in the religious declaration that “gelatin formed as a result of transformation…of a judicially impure animal (e.g. pig)…is permissible to (consume).” This verdict was disseminated to health policy stakeholders by the Regional Office of the World Health Organization for the Eastern Mediterranean, so as to “relieve all Muslims…from the embarrassment they feel” when taking medicines with gelatin-based products.
More than a decade later in 2009, the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) issued a religious verdict, fatwa, declaring the GlaxoSmithKline meningitis vaccine to be impermissible, haram, as a result of the vaccine having porcine gelatin components. This judgment caused an uproar within the pharmaceutical industry and the Indonesian health ministry, as not only was a multi-million dollar market at stake, but the ability of Indonesians to fulfill the religious rite of the Hajj, for which the vaccine is required, was at-risk. The following year the MUI issued another fatwa declaring meningitis vaccines produced by Novartis and Tian Yuana to be porcine-free and thus halal.In this paper we apply a policy-oriented, applied Islamic bioethics lens to the Islamic bioethical deliberations around the use of vaccines with porcine components. We will illustrate areas of an incomplete dialogue between the biomedical community, the Islamic jurist community, and the health policy community that contribute to misunderstandings and misappropriation of Islamic juridical concepts and rulings. As we analyze these arguments, we will discuss how the biomedical community can help inform about the usage and definition of the concepts of istihala (transformation) and darurah (necessity), as used by jurists in their verdicts. We will then highlight how understanding the roles of the hakim (state authority), the differences between tayyib (pure and good) and halal (permissible), and between the normative ideal and contingent ruling within Islamic ethico-legal debate, can inform the biomedical and health policy communities about the application of Islamic bioethical verdicts. In this manner, we hope to contribute to efforts aimed at an engagement between science and religion where health promotion is valued, while fidelity to Islamic ethico-legal tradition is maintained. A continued dialogue in the encounter between the Islamic tradition, globalized medicine, and public health will enable Islamic legists to develop an enhanced technoscientific image, and will facilitate health actors to gain greater literacy with the pluralistic Islamic ethico-legal tradition, such that Islamic verdicts and health policies better meet the needs of Muslim communities.
The Ensoulment Debates Then and Now: Aristotelian, Thomist and Islamic Interfaith and Cross-Disciplinary Discourses
Authors: Weber Alan 
Published: July 2012

AbstractInternational bioethicists and theologians have been grappling since 1978–when Louise Brown became the first viable In Vitro Fertilized birth–with the meaning of the human. The birth in 1996 of Dolly the Sheep, the first mammal cloned from an adult somatic cell, further accelerated debate on a number of related issues including the ethics of human stem cell research and cloning, the moral status of embryos, the dignity of human life, and the point when life begins. Recent advances in induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) and Human Embryonic Stem Cell (hESC) research involving fertilized zygotes have further come under serious moral and religious scrutiny.
Detailed discussions of embryogenesis, including how and when the soul enters the conceptus, date to at least the time of the Presocratics (Heraclitus), and later the Pythagoreans (metempsychosis) and Aristotle. Not surprisingly, this philosophical discourse became intertwined with Galenic-Hippocratic medical ideas; when these topics later resurfaced in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, medieval Christian scholasticism, Jewish philosopher Moses ben Maimonides, as well as Islamic physicians and natural philosophers Ibn Rushd, Al Ghazali, Al Farabi, and Ibn Sina, a similar interplay among science, religion and philosophy can be uncovered. Examining how the ensoulment disputes and debates were framed, carried out and resolved in both the classical world and in late medieval Christianity, Judaism and Islam can provide insight by analogy and contrast into the current epistemological, hermeneutic and theological tools which are used today to help determine bioethical policy. Thus apart from an antiquarian or history of ideas interest in previous bioethical moral reasoning, a close analysis of how previous thinkers grappled with these difficult and not easily resolvable conundrums may contribute to the development of a robust and widely acceptable international framework and protocol for bioethical decision making.
Regulating novel methods of reproduction: Womb transplantation and Islamic Bioethics
Authors: Alghrani Amel 
Published: July 2012

AbstractAs scientific progress in the realm of assisted reproduction and biotechnology continues to race ahead, the next revolutionary breakthrough on the horizon is the prospect of womb transplantation. Fertility doctors around the world are researching how to attain the first human pregnancy following a womb transplant. The world’s first human womb transplant was first attempted in Saudi Arabia in 2000 with some success . On the 9th of August 2011, the world’s second human womb transplant was performed in Turkey and thus far it has been considered to be a success, since the new uterus has been inside the recipient for more than 120 days without any complications. We await to see whether it can successfully carry a foetus to term.
The purpose of womb transplantation is to restore fertility to patients with an abnormal, damaged, or absent uterus. In the UK alone, it is estimated that approximately 15,000 women per year who seek the help of fertility specialists are found to be incapable of becoming pregnant because of uterine factor infertility. Even though these women may have functioning ovaries, the lack of a functioning womb means they have no chance of gestating their own child to term. The only other option for such woman to achieve genetic motherhood is via surrogacy. For Muslim women, surrogacy is regarded as prohibited in Islam and thus not an option. The possibility of womb transplantation would provide a welcome means by which these women could experience gestational and genetic motherhood. However, this advance raises a host of legal and bioethical questions that have thus far been relatively neglected in legal and Islamic and Western bio-ethical discourse. Should this “non-life-saving transplant” be permissible? Is it akin to the transplantation of any other major organ or does it raise separate and unique ethical questions? This presentation outlines the research currently underway into this advance and considers the legal, bio-ethical and regulatory ramifications this advance could raise.
Music, Moving Image, and the "Missing Majority": How Vernacular Media Competence Can Help Music Studies Move into the Digital Era
Authors: Tagg Philip 
Published: July 2012

Abstract
Given that over half the music heard in the urban West accompanies the moving image, it’s strange that most institutions of music education and research still treat it as an extra. Part of the problem is that knowledge relevant to music’s production and structural denotation is separated from that relating to its perception, uses and meanings. Despite the obvious skill with which the population at large can musically distinguish in a split second between, say, detective chords, horse-riding rhythms, and Japanese or Parisian instrumentation, such musical competence is often trivialized or ignored in conventional music teaching and research. Drawing on experience from running Music and the Moving Image courses since 1993, this article suggests ways in which the vernacular competence of the "nonmuso majority" can not only help improve communication between musicians/composers and other professionals involved in audiovisual production but also contribute to a reform of musicology by introducing a perception-based vocabulary for aspects of musical expression (timbre, meter, acoustic staging, vocal persona etc.) that are often marginalized in conventional music theory.
Walk This Way: The Pedagogical Value of Soundwalking to the Study of Film Sound
Authors: Spring Katherine 
Published: July 2012

Abstract
A soundwalk, according to Hildegard Westerkamp, is "any excursion whose main purpose is listening to the environment." This article describes and assesses a soundwalk exercise that was assigned to a class of upper-level undergraduate students enrolled in a course on film sound. The value of the assignment is discussed in light of scholarship on the theoretical and material distinctions between live/original and recorded/represented sound. The article concludes that the soundwalk effectively enhanced the abilities of student to listen attentively to films, acquire and employ a musical vocabulary, understand theoretical frameworks for discussions of film sound, and perform close analyses of film sound.
Teaching Film Sound as Material Form
Authors: Campanini Sonia 
Published: July 2012

Abstract
This article illustrates a possible approach to teaching film sound in academic courses focusing on the concept of material form, described as the interrelation of the soundtrack, the sound apparatus, and the sound text. This approach takes into consideration issues and ideas from other approaches and theories, such as film preservation and presentation, media archaeology, history of sound technologies, cinema as event, and performance.