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Introduction
Publications
Publications (93)
Background
Falls have high socioeconomic costs. Information and communication technologies may support provision and monitoring of multisensory (MSR) physiotherapy programmes. The HOLOBalance platform used augmented reality holograms to provide patient-centred, individualised MSR.
Objectives
To determine the platform’s safety, acceptability and fe...
Effective management of hearing loss through the use of modern hearing aids significantly improves communication and the quality of life for individuals experiencing auditory impairment. Complementary counselling of patients with hearing loss who will be fitted with hearing aids for the first time should be evidence-based and adapted to their indiv...
Purpose
The aim of this paper is to present and describe the development and validation of new Words in the Babble test in modern Greek.
Materials and Methods
Four 50-word phonemically balanced lists in babble noise were administered to 44 normal hearing subjects and 53 patients with hearing loss (HL) ears with mild and moderate sensorineural HL (...
In the era of burgeoning high-dimensional data, particularly in fields likemedicine, where data collection is increasing, the need for effective feature selectionin machine learning is paramount. Feature selection helps mitigate challengessuch as noise and irrelevant information, leading to a deeper understanding ofresults and improved predictive c...
Feasibility and acceptability of the HOLObalance telerehabilitation system compared with standard care for older adults at risk of falls: The HOLOBalance assessor blinded pilot randomised controlled study. for publication in Age and Ageing journal.
Current clinical decision support systems (DSS) are trained and validated on observational data from the target clinic. This is problematic for treatments validated in a randomized clinical trial (RCT), but not yet introduced in any clinic. In this work, we report on a method for training and validating the DSS using the RCT data. The key challenge...
Background: Despite the high frequency of tinnitus and its impact on wellbeing, little is known about its economic burden and no data to our knowledge are available on out-of-pocket (OOP) expenses.
Methods: In 2022 a survey was conducted on OOP costs of tinnitus. We enrolled 679 participants with slight, moderate and severe tinnitus in Italy, Unite...
Objectives. The study aimed to assess the relationship of tinnitus with hyperacusis with cognitive impairment as indicated by the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) tool.Methods. This multicenter cross-sectional study included individuals with chronic tinnitus from the “Unification of Treatments and Interventions for Tinnitus Patients” (UNITI) da...
Background
Tinnitus is a leading cause of disease burden globally. Several therapeutic strategies are recommended in guidelines for the reduction of tinnitus distress; however, little is known about the potentially increased effectiveness of a combination of treatments and personalized treatments for each tinnitus patient.
Methods
Within the Unifi...
Objectives:
Vestibular rehabilitation clinical guidelines document the additional benefit offered by the Mixed Reality environments in the reduction of symptoms and the improvement of balance in peripheral vestibular hypofunction. The HOLOBalance platform offers vestibular rehabilitation exercises, in an Augmented Reality (AR) environment, project...
Objectives:
Peripheral vestibular disorders except from reflexes dysfunction correspond also to cognitive decline. The objectives of this cross-sectional study were to a) identify correlations among variables of functional gait, cognitive function, and perceived dizziness and b) explore variables that could be used as prognostic factors of functio...
Auditory evoked potentials (AEPs) are brain-derived electrical signals, following an auditory stimulus, utilised to examine any obstructions along the brain neural-pathways and to diagnose hearing impairment. The clinical evaluation of AEPs is based on the measurements of the latencies and amplitudes of waves of interest; hence, their identificatio...
Background
Tinnitus is a leading cause of disease burden globally. Several therapeutic strategies are recommended in guidelines for the reduction of tinnitus distress; however, little is known about the potential increased effectiveness of a combination of treatments and personalized treatments for each tinnitus patient.
Methods
Within the Unifica...
jats:sec> Background Balance rehabilitation programs represent the most common treatments for balance disorders. Nonetheless, lack of resources and lack of highly expert physiotherapists are barriers for patients to undergo individualized rehabilitation sessions. Therefore, balance rehabilitation programs are often transferred to the home environme...
Debilitating hearing loss (HL) affects ~6% of the human population. Only 20% of the people in need of a hearing assistive device will eventually seek and acquire one. The number of people that are satisfied with their Hearing Aids (HAids) and continue using them in the long term is even lower. Understanding the personal, behavioral, environmental,...
Tinnitus is the perception of sound when no actual external noise is present. Tinnitus is highly prevalent, with more than 1 in 7 adults in the EU having tinnitus, and it causes negative effects on quality of life for many individuals. However, there is currently no cure for tinnitus and its pathophysiology and genesis are unknown. Auditory evoked...
Tinnitus treatment, diagnosis and management across Europe varies significantly. The lack of national clinical guidelines for tinnitus management in most European countries and the absence of a common language across all disciplines involved is reflected in the diversification of healthcare practices. Interprofessional Training for Tinnitus Researc...
Multiple studies for balance rehabilitation interventions have been accomplished aiming to demonstrate that sensory interventions and cognitive functionality are crucial for postural control and improvement of the quality of patient's daily life. However, none of the existing studies is filling the lack of expert physiotherapists availability. A pi...
Physical inactivity and sedentary time are associated with all-cause mortality, chronic non-communicable diseases and falls in the elderly. Objective of this review is to assess and summarize recommendations from clinical guidelines for physical activity (PA) of older adults in general and related to falls. A scoping review of the existing clinical...
Voice loss constitutes a crucial disorder which is highly associated with social isolation. The use of multimodal information sources, such as, audiovisual information, is crucial since it can lead to the development of straightforward personalized word prediction models which can reproduce the patient’s original voice. In this work we designed a m...
BACKGROUND
Balance rehabilitation programs constitute the most common treatment for balance disorders. Nonetheless, lack of resources and of highly expert physiotherapists barriers for patients to have individualized rehabilitation sessions and the required in person monitoring of the rehabilitation program. Therefore, balance rehabilitation progra...
Background
Balance rehabilitation programs represent the most common treatments for balance disorders. Nonetheless, lack of resources and lack of highly expert physiotherapists are barriers for patients to undergo individualized rehabilitation sessions. Therefore, balance rehabilitation programs are often transferred to the home environment, with a...
Background
Hearing loss is a major public health challenge. Audiology services need to utilise a range of rehabilitative services and maximise innovative practice afforded by technology to actively promote personalized, participatory, preventative and predictive care if they are to cope with the social and economic burden placed on the population b...
Background
Tinnitus represents a relatively common condition in the global population accompanied by various comorbidities and severe burden in many cases. Nevertheless, there is currently no general treatment or cure, presumable due to the heterogeneity of tinnitus with its wide variety of etiologies and tinnitus phenotypes. Hence, most treatment...
Falls are a major health concern. The HOLOBALANCE tele-rehabilitation system was developed to deliver an evidence based, multi-sensory balance rehabilitation programme, to the elderly at risk of falls. The system delivers a series of balance physiotherapy exercises and cognitive and auditory training tasks prescribed by an expert balance physiother...
Tinnitus is the perception of a phantom sound and the individual's reaction to it. Although much progress has been made, tinnitus remains an unresolved scientific and clinical issue, affecting more than 10% of the general population and having a high prevalence and socioeconomic burden. Clinical decision support systems (CDSS) are used to assist cl...
Background
Dizziness and imbalance are common symptoms that are often inadequately diagnosed or managed, due to a lack of dedicated specialists. Decision Support Systems (DSS) may support first-line physicians to diagnose and manage these patients based on personalised data.
Aim
To examine the diagnostic accuracy and application of the EMBalance D...
Current evidence on efficacy of hearing aids (HAs) on tinnitus perception and annoyance is considered insufficient due to the heterogeneity of tinnitus characteristics and of methods used in the relevant clinical studies. This is a scoping review focused on the methodological aspects of clinical studies evaluating the value of HA fitting as part of...
Tinnitus disability is a heterogeneous and complex condition, affecting more than 10% and compromising the quality of life of 2% of the population, with multiple contributors, often unknown, and enigmatic pathophysiology. The available treatment options are unsatisfactory, as they can, at best, reduce tinnitus severity, but not eliminate its percep...
Background
Tinnitus represents a relatively common condition in the global population accompanied by various comorbidities and severe burden in many cases. Nevertheless, there is currently no general treatment or cure, presumable due to the heterogeneity of tinnitus with its wide variety of etiologies and tinnitus phenotypes. Hence, most treatment...
Objectives:
Recently, it has been hypothesized that blood prestin concentration levels may reflect cochlear damage and thus serve as an easily measurable, early sensorineural hearing loss (HL) biomarker. This is a scoping review aiming to identify and critically appraise current evidence on prestin blood levels and their temporal variation in rode...
Although a wide range of tinnitus management interventions is currently under research and a variety of therapeutic interventions have already been applied in clinical practice, no optimal and universal tinnitus treatment has been reached yet. This fact is to some extent a consequence of the high heterogeneity of the methodologies used in tinnitus...
Tinnitus is a common symptom of a phantom sound perception with a considerable socioeconomic impact. Tinnitus pathophysiology is enigmatic and its significant heterogeneity reflects a wide spectrum of clinical manifestations, severity and annoyance among tinnitus sufferers. Although several interventions have been suggested, currently there is no u...
Background: Residual Inhibition is considered as tinnitus alteration immediately after exposure to sound. Its clinical significance and correlation with the pathophysiology and treatment prognosis of tinnitus remain enigmatic. The objective of this review is to critically appraise scientific evidence regarding the residual inhibition prevalence and...
Tinnitus is the perception of a phantom sound and the patient's reaction to it. Although much progress has been made, tinnitus remains a scientific and clinical enigma of high prevalence and high economic burden, with an estimated prevalence of 10%–20% among the adult population.
The EU is funding a new collaborative project entitled “Unification o...
As for hypertension, chronic pain, epilepsy and other disorders with particular symptoms, a commonly accepted and unambiguous definition provides a common ground for researchers and clinicians to study and treat the problem. The WHO's ICD11 definition only mentions tinnitus as a nonspecific symptom of a hearing disorder, but not as a clinical entit...
Introduction
Approximately one in three of all older adults fall each year, with wide ranging physical, psychosocial and healthcare-related consequences. Exercise-based interventions are the cornerstone for falls prevention programmes, yet these are not consistently provided, do not routinely address all components of the balance system and are oft...
As for hypertension, chronic pain, epilepsy and other disorders with particular symptoms, a commonly accepted and unambiguous definition provides a common ground for researchers and clinicians to study and treat the problem. The WHO's ICD11 definition only mentions tinnitus as a nonspecific symptom of a hearing disorder, but not as a clinical entit...
Abstract: It is generally accepted that one of the main difficulties of employees on maritime industry is the effective approach of medical care at sea in harsh weather conditions and long distances from ashore by absence of on-board doctor and limited equipment or medicines. The objective of the present study was to examine the health issues of se...
Abstract
Background/Aim: Currently, over 1.5 million seafarers, are employed in the global commercial fleet, which comprises of more
than 50,000 ships. Traditionally, life at sea has been known to be of low quality and often complicated by various health issues.
Despite the considerable number of seamen and the severity of their health issues, to d...
Professional musicians are at high risk of developing tinnitus due to their over-exposure to music at both occupational and recreational level. This is a 5-year long prospective case series study performed in the Musicians/Performing Arts Medicine Clinic of the 1st Otorhinolaryngology Department of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens...
In this study, we propose a dynamic Bayesian network (DBN)-based approach to behavioral modelling of community dwelling older adults at risk for falls during the daily sessions of a hologram-enabled vestibular rehabilitation therapy programme. The component of human behavior being modelled is the level of frustration experienced by the user at each...
Background:
Deregulation of critical proteins involved in cell cycle stability, such as cyclins, is a frequent genetic event in the development and progression of solid malignancies. Concerning laryngeal squamous cell carcinoma (LSCC), cyclin D1 oncogenic transformation leads to an aberrant protein expression and seems to affect the biological beh...
Tinnitus remains a scientific and clinical problem whereby, in spite of increasing knowledge on effective treatment and management for tinnitus, very little impact on clinical practice has been observed. There is evidence that prolonged, obscure and indirect referral trajectories persist in usual tinnitus care.
Objective
It is widely acknowledged...
Purpose
The EU-funded research project EVOTION has brought together clinical, technical, and public health experts with the aim to offer a solution for the holistic management of hearing loss. This report presents the challenges, strengths, and key take-home messages of working in this multidisciplinary consortium.
Method
Fifteen consortium members...
Purpose: Although findings in human studies trying to identify signs of cochlear synaptopathy (CS) are still controversial, several methodological restrictions exist, including inconsistencies in participants profiles, definition of study groups and inclusion criteria, diverse electrophysiological measurements settings and noise exposure history me...
p class="abstract"> Background: Research on noise induced hearing loss pathophysiology has recently focused on synapses rather than outer hair cells, following relevant evidence from animal studies. Findings from human studies, mainly targeting on effect of chronic exposure are controversial. Aim of this study is to investigate the immediate effect...
Balance disorders are expressed with main symptoms of vertigo, dizziness instability and disorientation. Most of them are caused by inner ear pathologies, but neurological, medical and psychological factors are also responsible. Balance disorders overwhelmingly affect daily activities and cause psychological and emotional hardship. They are also th...
Falls, caused by dizziness and balance deficits, and their consequences in terms of the resultant functional limitations and of the associated costs for the involved actors as well as for the healthcare system are a serious problem in modern societies. Vestibular rehabilitation therapy (VRT) is proposed as a personalized intervention both for ameli...
Caspases (cysteine-aspartic proteases) represent a family of enzymes that modify several functions crucial for cell hoameostasis such as inflammation and apoptosis. According to their implication in the apoptotic pathways, caspases are characterized as initiators and executioners, respectively. In the first group have been inserted caspase-2,-8,-9,...
Introduction
The holistic management of hearing loss (HL) requires an understanding of factors that predict hearing aid (HA) use and benefit beyond the acoustics of listening environments. Although several predictors have been identified, no study has explored the role of audiological, cognitive, behavioural and physiological data nor has any study...
Objective: The aim of this study was to develop Greek sentence-based speech audiometry test in quiet test for hearing-impaired (HI) children (G-SEBSAT).
Methods: Seventy-six children were recruited following approval by the local ethics committee and after obtaining informed consent from their parents. The collection of vocabulary was based on show...
Objective:
The aim of the study was to test the reliability and validity of the Dizziness Handicap Inventory in the Greek language (DHI).
Design:
This study was performed in a university tertiary centre. Internal consistency was estimated using Cronbach's alpha for the DHI, physical (DHI-P), functional (DHI-F) and emotional (DHI-E) subscale scor...
Somatosensory tinnitus is a generally agreed subtype of tinnitus that is associated with activation of the somatosensory, somatomotor, and visual-motor systems. A key characteristic of somatosensory tinnitus is that is modulated by physical contact or movement. Although it seems common, its pathophysiology, assessment and treatment are not well def...
Background: Though clinical guidelines for assessment and treatment of chronic subjective tinnitus do exist, a comprehensive review of those guidelines has not been performed. The objective of this review was to identify current clinical guidelines, and compare their recommendations for the assessment and treatment of subjective tinnitus in adults....
Background: Though clinical guidelines for assessment and treatment of chronic subjective tinnitus do exist, a comprehensive review of those guidelines has not been performed. The objective of this review was to identify current clinical guidelines, and compare their recommendations for the assessment and treatment of subjective tinnitus in adults....
Background:
Balance problems are caused by multiple factors and often lead to falls and related fractures, bringing large socio-economic costs. The complexity of balance control mechanisms, the lack of medical expertise, and the absence of specialised equipment contribute to the delayed or incorrect diagnosis and management ofthese patients. Advan...
In this work we present the methodology for the development of the EMBalance diagnostic Decision Support System (DSS) for balance disorders. Medical data from patients with balance disorders have been analysed using data mining techniques for the development of the diagnostic DSS. The proposed methodology uses various data, ranging from demographic...
p class="abstract"> Background: Since the use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as the gold standard for acoustic neuroma diagnosis, the size of the majority of newly diagnosed acoustic neuromas has decreased. Management strategy is challenging, especially in young patients with small tumors. Therefore, prognostic factors for tumor growth may fac...
We conducted a case-control study to investigate the effect of diet on laryngeal carcinogenesis. Our study population was made up of 140 participants-70 patients with laryngeal cancer (LC) and 70 controls with a non-neoplastic condition that was unrelated to diet, smoking, or alcohol. A food-frequency questionnaire determined the mean consumption o...
In this work we present a framework for the analysis and mining of multiparametric data related to balance disorders. The overall concept is to define the schema of the analysis that provides optimal results for diagnostic decision support in balance disorders. The work is part of the integrated EMBalance platform which targets the management of pa...
In Europe alone, over 70 million people experience tinnitus; for seven million people, it creates a debilitating condition. Despite its enormous socioeconomic relevance, progress in successfully treating the condition is somewhat limited. The European Union has approved funding to create a pan-European tinnitus research collaboration network (2014–...
In this work, we present the concept, the methodological ideas and the architecture of the EMBALANCE platform. EMBALANCE platform extends existing but generic and currently uncoupled balance modeling activities, leading to a multi-scale and patient-specific balance Hypermodel, which is incorporated to a Decision Support System (DSS), towards the ea...
Due to the inaccessibility of the inner ear, direct in vivo information on cochlear mechanics is difficult to obtain. Mathematical modelling is a promising way to provide insight into the physiology and pathology of the cochlea. Finite element method (FEM) is one of the most popular discrete mathematical modelling techniques, mainly used in enginee...