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The purpose of this paper is to propose a Web application system for visualizing Twitter users based on temporal changes in the impressions received from the tweets posted by the users on Twitter.

The system collects a specified user’s tweets posted during a specified period using Twitter API, rates each tweet based on three distinct impressions using an impression mining system, and then generates pie and line charts to visualize results of the previous processing using Google Chart API.

Because there are more news articles featuring somber topics than those featuring cheerful topics, the impression mining system, which uses impression lexicons created from a newspaper database, is considered to be more effective for analyzing negative tweets.

The system uses Twitter API to collect tweets from Twitter. This suggests that the system cannot collect tweets of the users who maintain private timelines. According to our questionnaire, about 30 per cent of Twitter users’ timelines are private. This is one of the limitations to using the system.

The system enables people to grasp the personality of Twitter users by visualizing the impressions received from tweets the users normally post on Twitter. The target impressions are limited to those represented by three bipolar scales of impressions: “Happy/Sad”, “Glad/Angry” and “Peaceful/Strained”. The system also enables people to grasp the context in which keywords are used by visualizing the impressions from tweets in which the keywords were found.

Lung cancer is the leading cause of death worldwide. Physical and chemical agents such as tobacco smoke are the leading cause of various lung cancers. The intrinsic heterogeneity of normal lung tissue may be affected in different ways, giving rise to different types of lung cancers classified as either small‐cell lung cancer (SCLC) or non‐small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Adenocarcinoma, a NSCLC, accounts for 40 percent of all lung cancer cases and the incidence is increasing worldwide, especially among women. The survival rate and prognosis is poorest for adenocarcinoma. Therefore, diagnosis at the earliest stage (Stage I, localized) is critical for increasing survival rates of those suffering from lung cancer. However, many factors affect early diagnosis including the variable natural growth of tumors plus technological and human factors associated with manipulation of tissue samples and interpretation of results. This article reviews potential problems associated with diagnosing lung cancer and considers future directions of diagnostic technology.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on tracheal stent production with the aim of investigating the available devices and improving their performances. The biomedical field is a continuously growing area of the market always in search of the most innovative and competitive solutions for healthcare. Beside the actual critical period of the world economy, it shows continuous improvements in research and innovation.

Within a market analysis and the collaboration between engineering and biomedical research fields, it was outlined a new product concept able to satisfy the patient’s and physician’s requirements with the focus on the enhancement of the stent anchorage. As a result, the concept of a custom- or tailor-made stent was identified as a potential solution. Moreover, additive technologies were identified as the economically sustainable processes for manufacturing these innovative stents. In the present paper, different types of stents were derived from the proposed concept, they were designed, manufactured and their anchorage capability was tested. In particular, the procedures adopted for their design are described and discussed. Moreover, silicone fused deposition modelling was adopted and two types of deposition method, namely, layer-by-layer and continuous, were used to manufacture the devices identifying their pro, cons and limits. Finally, the stents were tested against migration and results were compared with one of the most widely used today.

The results show how additive manufacturing allowed to manufacture more efficient and migration resistant stents.

It is expected that this new stent design will reduce the risk of complications in stenting, as granulation, thanks to a more uniform stress distribution on the trachea tissues. These improved characteristics will allow to enhance the quality of both the product and the patient’s healthcare.