Hepatitis C virus (HCV), which is both a hepatotropic and a lymphotropic virus, has been proposed as a possible causative agent of mixed cryoglobulinaemia. This 'benign' lymphoproliferative disorder can switch over to a malignant B-cell non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL). Therefore HCV infection has been investigated in a series of 50 unselected Italian patients with B-cell NHL. Antibodies against HCV were found in 30% of NHL and HCV viraemia in 32% of cases. HCV-related markers were detected in 34% (17/50) of our NHL patients; this prevalence is particularly significant when compared with HCV seropositivity in Hodgkin's lymphoma (3%) and healthy controls (1.3%).

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A new phase-based technique for localization and tracking of items moving along a conveyor belt and equipped with UHF-RFID (Ultra High Frequency -Radio Frequency IDentification) tags is here described and validated. The technique is based on a synthetic-array approach that takes advantage of the fact that the tagged items move along a conveyor belt whose speed and path are known a priori. In this framework, a joint use is done of synthetic-array radar principles, knowledge-based processing, and efficient exploitation of the reader-tag communication signal. The technique can be easily implemented in any conventional reader based on an I-Q receiver and it does not require any modification of the reader antenna configurations usually adopted in UHF-RFID portals. Numerical results are used to investigate the performance analysis of such method, also furnishing system design guidelines. Finally, the localization capability is also demonstrated through a measurement campaign in a real conveyor belt scenario, showing that a centimeter order accuracy in the tag position estimation can be achieved even in a rich multipath environment.