OBJECTIVE: Comparison of COPD financial burden and underlying factors, between Eastern upper middle income and a Western European high income, healthcare settings. METHODS: The patient sample was 433 in Belgium and 322 in Serbia, age ≥ 40, with spirometry and clinically confirmed COPD diagnosis. Belgian trial followed patients prospectively during 2006, using structured survey of clinicians in charge. Serbian trial conducted in 2008, retrieved data from clinical invoice database. Time horizon was one year and perspective of third party payers was taken into account for both studies. Clinical outcomes of interest were disease exacerbation, hospital admission and death. Economic inputs referred to COPD-attributable medical services consumption value during observed period of time. RESULTS: Average annual cost was 1,812.84 € for the Serbian patients and 1,738.13 €/year for the Belgian patients (not including the value of laboratory diagnostics or imaging techniques). Severity grade and duration of hospital admissions significantly directly correlated with overall cost in both populations. Pattern of diagnostic procedures requested and ATC classes of drug consumed to treat COPD remains similar and comparable in both countries. GDP per capita ratio in respective years (10.4: 37.4), exhibits the paradox of patient being much less affordable to treat in a less developed society. CONCLUSIONS: Burden of COPD in Europe is huge and, due to contemporary life style expected to grow further. We compared cost of illness structures between two societies with different macroeconomic past in healthcare financing and management. According to our findings, direct medical costs were driven by exacerbations and hospital admissions. Significantly cheaper human labor caused higher relative relevance of drug acquisition expenses in the East and higher portion of hospital admission costs in the West. More in-depth research of indirect COPD attributable costs (e.g. lost productivity, absenteeism, premature death etc) will be needed in future. It implies serious health policy necessities to provide accessibility of care.

Psychotic disorders carry social and economic costs for sufferers and society. Recent evidence highlights the risk posed by urban upbringing and social deprivation in the genesis of paranoia and psychosis. Evidence based psychological interventions are often not offered because of a lack of therapists. Virtual reality (VR) environments have been used to treat mental health problems. VR may be a way of understanding the aetiological processes in psychosis and increasing psychotherapeutic resources for its treatment. We developed a high-fidelity virtual reality scenario of an urban street scene to test the hypothesis that virtual urban exposure is able to generate paranoia to a comparable or greater extent than scenarios using indoor scenes. Participants (n = 32) entered the VR scenario for four minutes, after which time their degree of paranoid ideation was assessed. We demonstrated that the virtual reality scenario was able to elicit paranoia in a nonclinical, healthy group and that an urban scene was more likely to lead to higher levels of paranoia than a virtual indoor environment. We suggest that this study offers evidence to support the role of exposure to factors in the urban environment in the genesis and maintenance of psychotic experiences and symptoms. The realistic high-fidelity street scene scenario may offer a useful tool for therapists.

When artificial agents interact and cooperate with other agents, either human or artificial, they need to recognize others' actions and infer their hidden intentions from the sole observation of their surface level movements. Indeed, action and intention understanding in humans is believed to facilitate a number of social interactions and is supported by a complex neural substrate (i.e. the mirror neuron system). Implementation of such mechanisms in artificial agents would pave the route to the development of a vast range of advanced cognitive abilities, such as social interaction, adaptation, and learning by imitation, just to name a few. We present a first step towards a fully-fledged intention recognition system by enabling an artificial agent to internally represent action patterns, and to subsequently use such representations to recognize - and possibly to predict and anticipate - behaviors performed by others. We investigate a biologically-inspired approach by adopting the formalism of Associative Self-Organizing Maps (A-SOMs), an extension of the well-known Self-Organizing Maps. The A-SOM learns to associate its activities with different inputs over time, where inputs are high-dimensional and noisy observations of others' actions. The A-SOM maps actions to sequences of activations in a dimensionally reduced topological space, where each centre of activation provides a prototypical and iconic representation of the action fragment. We present preliminary experiments of action recognition task on a publicly available database of thirteen commonly encountered actions with promising results.

Originalne definicije mrežnih deskriptora transmisije, međupoloženosti, vrsne produktivnosti i vrsne profitabilnosti podrazumijevaju da je kolicina komunikacije između svaka dva vrha jednaka. Ta pretpostavka je izmijenjena, i poboljsana u ovom radu. Kolicina komunikacije je utežena sa d(u, v)^{;λ};, za λ<0.

The Narumi-Katayama index of a graph $G$, denoted by $NK(G)$, is equal to the product of degrees of vertices of G. In this paper we investigate its behavior under several binary operations on graphs. We present explicit formulas for its values for composite graphs in terms of its values for operands and some auxiliary invariants. We demonstrate applications of our results to several chemically relevant classes of graphs and show how the Narumi-Katayama index can be used as a measure of graph irregularity.

About 39% of the Bosnian population is urban. The main objective of this work is to get an insight into urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) in Bosnia with a focus on legal and regulatory framework, governance, and advisory services’ role. Information were collected by a literature review and semi-structured interviews of 30 urban gardeners as well as extension agents and municipal officers in Sarajevo region. The paper analyses references to UPA in the main agricultural development policies in Bosnia; assesses focus on UPA by extension agents; and analyses urban planning and zoning regulations and budget dedicated to agriculture in many municipalities of Sarajevo region. Semi-structured interviews focused also on economic, environmental, aesthetical and social benefits of UPA. Development of UPA requires improving the regulatory framework, promoting multilevel and multi-stakeholder governance, and fostering pluralistic extension and advisory services.