Introduction: Neonatal brain damage due to hypoxic-ischemic event is a major burden in the western world. Hypothermia is the first-line treatment, but the risk of death and long-term neurodevelopmental impairment remains still high. Allopurinol, a xantine-oxidase inhibitor, reduces the production of oxygen radicals and may have a synergic action with hypothermia as shown in animal models. This European funded study aims to evaluate the efficacy and safety of Allopurinol in infants with hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy.

Introduction: Hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE) is the most serious outcome of perinatal asphyxia and therapeutic hypothermia (HT) is its only accepted effective treatment, reducing neuronal damage and ischemia reperfusion injury. As previously reported hypothermia interferes with leukocyte functions and retards the release of proinflammatory cytokines.

Invasive disseminated neonatal aspergillosis is an uncommon disease, with only scattered reports in literature in the last few years. Here we report on a 25-week gestational age, 730 g at birth preterm female infant who developed on day-of-life 10 multiple cutaneous exhulcerative lesions in her right arm, trunk and abdomen. Early recognition and diagnosis of these lesions as a due to cutaneous initial symptom of cutaneous disseminated aspergillosis, as well as prompt treatment with Liposomal amphotericin B + Itraconazole, secured successful recovery from the systemic infection. Skin lesions healed without any surgical treatment. The infant was discharged in good health. Long-term follow-up at three years of age revealed normality of all neurodevelopmental and cognitive parameters. To our knowledge, this is one of the very few cases of survival, free from sequelae, for a preterm infant affected by neonatal cutaneous disseminated aspergillosis.

The spectral envelope conveys sound quality and the time envelope is responsible for speech intelligibility. The spectral envelope can be identified in terms of the poles and zeros according to the linear system theory. This chapter deals with the poles and zeros creating spectral envelopes by taking an example of spectral records on piano string vibration. Sinusoidal modeling of spectral peaks due to poles in the frequency domain represents spectral fine structure of a temporally changing response such as a piano tone. Time-waveform decomposition in the transient state into pulse sequences in the time domain is explored in order to find the zeros that make the spectral envelope in the frequency domain. The two approaches to sound quality or signal signatures in the time and frequency domains are formulated on the basis of the least square error (LSE) criterion. The zeros are mainly responsible for the source signatures. The exciting source, such as a piano hammer, makes the outer spectral envelopes of the vibration response, while the inner envelope is rendered by the zeros due to a single cycle of the cyclic source-wave traveling on the piano string.