Bioventing is a technology used to abate the presence of pollutants in the subsoil. Microorganisms biodegrade the pollutant but the biochemical reaction requires oxygen and so an airflow is induced in the subsoil by means of injection and/or extraction wells. Costs, final result and decontamination time are reliant on contaminant type, soil permeability and several other factors, but oxygen subsoil concentration plays a very important role.

In a computer-aided system for skin cancer diagnosis, hair removal is one of the main challenges to face before applying a process of automatic skin lesion segmentation and classification. In this paper, we propose a straightforward method to detect and remove hair from dermoscopic images. Preliminarily, the regions to consider as candidate hair regions and the border/corner components located on the image frame are automatically detected. Then, the hair regions are determined using information regarding the saliency, shape and image colors.

Background: The high contagiousness and rapid spreading of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused a high number of critical to severe life-threatening cases, which required urgent hospital admission and treatment in intensive care units (ICUs). The pandemic has been a tough test for all European national health systems and their capability to provide an adequate reaction. Methods: The present work aims to reveal correlations between parameters such as COVID-19 incidence, ICU bed occupancy, ICU excess area, and mortality in Italian regions.

Mathematical models for subsoil decontamination by biological techniques

We study numerically the effect of thermal fluctuations and of variable fluid-substrate interactions on the spontaneous dewetting of thin liquid films. To this aim, we use a recently developed lattice Boltzmann method for thin liquid film flows, equipped with a properly devised stochastic term. While it is known that thermal fluctuations yield shorter rupture times, we show that this is a general feature of hydrophilic substrates, irrespective of the contact angle $\theta$. The ratio between deterministic and stochastic rupture times, though, decreases with $\theta$.