The method for cancer pain relief proposed by the World Health Organization (WHO) consists of guidelines for a three-step treatment, from non-opioids to weak and then strong opioids, according to need. Adjuvant drugs can be added to each step. This report presents the 2-year experience of the WHO Collaborating Centre at the National Cancer Institute of Milan in the use of this method. This retrospective study shows that a correct use of the analgesic ladder can reduce pain to a third of its initial intensity. The use of non-opioids had an average duration of 19.2 days; in 52% of the cases treatment was discontinued due to inefficacy and in 42%, to side effects. Weak opioids were administered on an average for 28.0 days. A shift to Strong opioids was made in 92% of the cases due to inefficacy and in 8% because of side effects. Treatment with strong opioids lasted for an average of 46.6 days and can be considered the mainstay of cancer pain therapy. Performance status was not altered considerably during the study and hours of sleep were doubled. The analgesic ladder proved efficacious in 71% of the cases. Neurolytic procedures had to be used in 29%. The authors conclude that analgesics, as proposed by WHO, are the most suitable treatment arm in controlling pain in palliative treatment for advanced cancer patients. Lack of availability or underuse of opioids constitute the real obstacle to the application of this method.

Abstract:The availability of sex-disaggregated data in the fields of research, technology and development is extremely important for supporting the growing political commitment to promote and monitor women participation in the different fields of S&T. During the late 1990s the European Commission identified as a priority the availability of this data. Even if scientific publications and patents are widely accepted indicators of scientific and technological performances, until now it has been impossible to measure bibliometric and patent output by gender in a large set of data. Starting from a feasibility study carried out for the European Commission on the whole set of patents published in 1998 by the European Patent Office and on 30,000 authors of items published in 1995 on scientific journals of international relevance, the paper demonstrates that it is possible to obtain robust gender indicators on S&T output.

Information retrieval (IR) systems were ongmally devel oped to process, store, search and retrieve narrative informa tion. Structured databases are therefore created to store the items contairung enough information to identify and retneve the onginal documents. This paper proposes an extension of classification and indexing to pictorial data, specifically to pictorial parts of multimedia documents. This goal is attained by adopting structural techniques for digital image description. The de scriptions of the objects (digital structures) present in the image are proposed as pictorial index terms. Such a generaliza tion has led to a uniform management of the non-homoge neous kinds of data composing the document and has allowed the outlining of a multimedia IR system raised from interdisci plinary experiences. In the paper the approach to image description is presented and a control structure to index textual and pictorial data is discussed.

This paper describes the architecture and the main features of DOMINO, a multimedia information retrieval system whose database is a collection of multimedia documents (MDs) con stituted of a mixing of texts and images. DOMINO data structure has been designed in such a way that both MD integrity and query symmetry with respect to the type of information involved (textual or pictorial) are preserved. In this paper we will focus on the general aspects of DOMINO architecture bringing out a thorough description of the textual data structure, based on an inverted file structure, and on its generation, inquiry and updating procedures. Spe cial effort has been made to design a data structure for which storage requirements and retrieval time are optimized depend ing on the type of search strategies the system should pursue.

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