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Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática

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Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática

Implementação ESB numa unidade hospitalar. Uso normalizado de mensagens HL7

Atualmente, os sistemas de informação hospitalares têm de possibilitar uma utilização diferenciada pelos diferentes intervenientes, num cenário de constante adaptação e evolução. Para tal, é essencial a interoperabilidade entre os sistemas de informação do hospital e os diversos fornecedores de serviços, assim como dispositivos hospitalares. Apesar da necessidade de suportar uma heterogeneidade entre sistemas ser fundamental, o acesso/troca de informação deve ser feito de uma forma protocolada, segura e transparente. A infraestrutura de informação médica moderna consiste em muitos sistemas heterogéneos, com diversos mecanismos para controlar os dados subjacentes. Informações relativas a um único paciente podem estar dispersas por vários sistemas (ex: transferência de pacientes, readmissão, múltiplos tratamentos, etc.). Torna-se evidente a necessidade aceder a dados do paciente de forma consolidada a partir de diferentes locais. Desta forma, é fundamental utilizar uma arquitetura que promova a interoperabilidade entre sistemas. Para conseguir esta interoperabilidade, podem-se implementar camadas de “middleware” que façam a adaptação das trocas de informação entre os sistemas. Todavia, não resolvemos o problema subjacente, ou seja, a necessidade de utilização de um standard para garantir uma interacção fiável entre cliente/fornecedor. Para tal, é proposto uma solução que passa por um ESB dedicado para a área da saúde, denominada por HSB (Healthcare Service Bus). Entre as normas mais usuais nesta área devem-se salientar o HL7 e DICOM, esta última mais especificamente para dispositivos de imagem hospitalar, sendo a primeira utilizada para gestão e trocas de informação médica entre sistemas. O caso de estudo que serviu de base a esta dissertação é o de um hospital de média dimensão cujo sistema de informação começou por ser uma solução monolítica, de um só fornecedor. Com o passar dos anos, o fornecedor único desagregou-se em vários, independentes e concorrentes, dando lugar a um cenário extremamente preocupante em termos de manutenção e evolução futura do sistema de informação existente. Como resultado do trabalho efetuado, foi proposta uma arquitetura que permite a evolução do sistema atual de forma progressiva para um HSB puro.

Adaptive offloading for infotainment systems

Infotainment applications in vehicles are currently supported both by the in-vehicle platform, as well as by user’s smart devices, such as smartphones and tablets. More and more the user expects that there is a continuous service of applications inside or outside of the vehicle, provided in any of these devices (a simple but common example is hands-free mobile phone calls provided by the vehicle platform). With the increasing complexity of ‘apps’, it is necessary to support increasing levels of Quality of Service (QoS), with varying resource requirements. Users may want to start listening to music in the smartphone, or video in the tablet, being this application transparently ‘moved’ into the vehicle when it is started. This paper presents an adaptable offloading mechanism, following a service-oriented architecture pattern, which takes into account the QoS requirements of the applications being executed when making decisions.

TEA: Timing and Energy Aware compression architecture for Efficient Configuration in CGRAs

Coarse Grained Reconfigurable Architectures (CGRAs) are emerging as enabling platforms to meet the high performance demanded by modern applications (e.g. 4G, CDMA, etc.). Recently proposed CGRAs offer time-multiplexing and dynamic applications parallelism to enhance device utilization and reduce energy consumption at the cost of additional memory (up to 50% area of the overall platform). To reduce the memory overheads, novel CGRAs employ either statistical compression, intermediate compact representation, or multicasting. Each compaction technique has different properties (i.e. compression ratio, decompression time and decompression energy) and is best suited for a particular class of applications. However, existing research only deals with these methods separately. Moreover, they only analyze the compaction ratio and do not evaluate the associated energy overheads. To tackle these issues, we propose a polymorphic compression architecture that interleaves these techniques in a unique platform. The proposed architecture allows each application to take advantage of a separate compression/decompression hierarchy (consisting of various types and implementations of hardware/software decoders) tailored to its needs. Simulation results, using different applications (FFT, Matrix multiplication, and WLAN), reveal that the choice of compression hierarchy has a significant impact on compression ratio (up to 52%), decompression energy (up to 4 orders of magnitude), and configuration time (from 33 n to 1.5 s) for the tested applications. Synthesis results reveal that introducing adaptivity incurs negligible additional overheads (1%) compared to the overall platform area.

Disposable immunosensor using a simple method for oriented antibody immobilization for label-free real-time detection of an oxidative stress biomarker implicated in cancer diseases

This work proposes a novel approach for a suitable orientation of antibodies (Ab) on an immunosensing platform, applied here to the determination of 8-hydroxy-2′-deoxyguanosine (8OHdG), a biomarker of oxidative stress that has been associated to chronic diseases, such as cancer. The anti-8OHdG was bound to an amine modified gold support through its Fc region after activation of its carboxylic functions. Non-oriented approaches of Ab binding to the platform were tested in parallel, in order to show that the presented methodology favored Ab/Ag affinity and immunodetection of the antigen. The immunosensor design was evaluated by quartz-crystal microbalance with dissipation, atomic force microscopy, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) and square-wave voltammetry. EIS was also a suitable technique to follow the analytical behavior of the device against 8OHdG. The affinity binding between 8OHdG and the antibody immobilized in the gold modified platform increased the charge transfer resistance across the electrochemical set-up. The observed behavior was linear from 0.02 to 7.0 ng/mL of 8OHdG concentrations. The interference from glucose, urea and creatinine was found negligible. An attempt of application to synthetic samples was also successfully conducted. Overall, the presented approach enabled the production of suitably oriented Abs over a gold platform by means of a much simpler process than other oriented-Ab binding approaches described in the literature, as far as we know, and was successful in terms of analytical features and sample application.

Oriented Tailoring of Plastic Antibodies for Prostate Specific Antigen and Application of the Imprinted Material as Ionophore in Potentiometric Detection

Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) is the biomarker of choice for screening prostate cancer throughout the population, with PSA values above 10 ng/mL pointing out a high probability of associated cancer1. According to the most recent World Health Organization (WHO) data, prostate cancer is the commonest form of cancer in men in Europe2. Early detection of prostate cancer is thus very important and is currently made by screening PSA in men over 45 years old, combined with other alterations in serum and urine parameters. PSA is a glycoprotein with a molecular mass of approximately 32 kDa consisting of one polypeptide chain, which is produced by the secretory epithelium of human prostate. Currently, the standard methods available for PSA screening are immunoassays like Enzyme-Linked Immunoabsorbent Assay (ELISA). These methods are highly sensitive and specific for the detection of PSA, but they require expensive laboratory facilities and high qualify personal resources. Other highly sensitive and specific methods for the detection of PSA have also become available and are in its majority immunobiosensors1,3-5, relying on antibodies. Less expensive methods producing quicker responses are thus needed, which may be achieved by synthesizing artificial antibodies by means of molecular imprinting techniques. These should also be coupled to simple and low cost devices, such as those of the potentiometric kind, one approach that has been proven successful6. Potentiometric sensors offer the advantage of selectivity and portability for use in point-of-care and have been widely recognized as potential analytical tools in this field. The inherent method is simple, precise, accurate and inexpensive regarding reagent consumption and equipment involved. Thus, this work proposes a new plastic antibody for PSA, designed over the surface of graphene layers extracted from graphite. Charged monomers were used to enable an oriented tailoring of the PSA rebinding sites. Uncharged monomers were used as control. These materials were used as ionophores in conventional solid-contact graphite electrodes. The obtained results showed that the imprinted materials displayed a selective response to PSA. The electrodes with charged monomers showed a more stable and sensitive response, with an average slope of -44.2 mV/decade and a detection limit of 5.8X10-11 mol/L (2 ng/mL). The corresponding non-imprinted sensors showed smaller sensitivity, with average slopes of -24.8 mV/decade. The best sensors were successfully applied to the analysis of serum samples, with percentage recoveries of 106.5% and relatives errors of 6.5%.

Label-free human chorionic gonadotropin detection at picogram levels using oriented antibodies bound to graphene screen-printed electrodes

Human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) is a key diagnostic marker of pregnancy and an important biomarker for cancers in the prostate, ovaries and bladder and therefore of great importance in diagnosis. For this purpose, a new immunosensor of screen-printed electrodes (SPEs) is presented here. The device was fabricated by introducing a polyaniline (PANI) conductive layer, via in situ electropolymerization of aniline, onto a screen-printed graphene support. The PANI-coated graphene acts as the working electrode of a three terminal electrochemical sensor. The working electrode is functionalised with anti-hCG, by means of a simple process that enabled oriented antibody binding to the PANI layer. The antibody was attached to PANI following activation of the –COOH group at the Fc terminal. Functionalisation of the electrode was analysed and optimized using Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS). Chemical modification of the surface was characterised using Fourier transform infrared, and Raman spectroscopy with confocal microscopy. The graphene–SPE–PANI devices displayed linear responses to hCG in EIS assays from 0.001 to 50 ng mL−1 in real urine, with a detection limit of 0.286 pg mL−1. High selectivity was observed with respect to the presence of the constituent components of urine (urea, creatinine, magnesium chloride, calcium chloride, sodium dihydrogen phosphate, ammonium chloride, potassium sulphate and sodium chloride) at their normal levels, with a negligible sensor response to these chemicals. Successful detection of hCG was also achieved in spiked samples of real urine from a pregnant woman. The immunosensor developed is a promising tool for point-of-care detection of hCG, due to its excellent detection capability, simplicity of fabrication, low-cost, high sensitivity and selectivity.

A Novel Run-Time Monitoring Architecture for Safe and Efficient Inline Monitoring

20th International Conference on Reliable Software Technologies - Ada-Europe 2015 (Ada-Europe 2015), Madrid, Spain.

PCR - based diagnosis to evaluate the performance of malaria reference centers

Although the Giemsa-stained thick blood smear (GTS) remains the gold standard for the diagnosis of malaria, molecular methods are more sensitive and specific to detect parasites and can be used at reference centers to evaluate the performance of microscopy. The description of the Plasmodium falciparum, P. vivax, P. malariae and P. ovale ssrRNA gene sequences allowed the development of a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) that had been used to differentiate the four species. The objective of this study was to determine Plasmodium species through PCR in 190 positive smears from patients in order to verify the quality of diagnosis at SUCEN's Malaria Laboratory. Considering only the 131 positive results in both techniques, GTS detected 4.6% of mixed and 3.1% of P. malariae infections whereas PCR identified 19.1% and 13.8%, respectively.

Supporting NAT traversal and secure communications in a protocol implementation framework

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores

A module for the XDense architecture in ns-3

Demo in Workshop on ns-3 (WNS3 2015). 13 to 14, May, 2015. Castelldefels, Spain.

A Novel Runtime Monitoring Architecture

Poster presented in 28th GI/ITG International Conference on Architecture of Computing Systems (ARCS 2015). 25 to 28, Mar, 2015, Poster Session. Porto, Portugal.

Relatório de estágio de qualificação profissional (fase intercalar do estágio)

No âmbito do Mestrado em Educação Pré-Escolar e Ensino do 1º Ciclo do Ensino Básico e da Prática Pedagógica Supervisionada, realizada em contexto de Creche, foi desenvolvido o presente relatório de estágio de qualificação profissional na Educação Pré-Escolar. A prática educativa sustentou-se num quadro teórico-concetual de referência, com vista à construção de saberes para a Educação de Infância, pelo compromisso e responsabilização progressiva da ação docente, tendo sido encarado como um momento de singular importância. Desta forma, este documento procura ilustrar o processo de desenvolvimento de competências profissionais pela estudante para este nível de educação. Nesta linha de pensamento, importa referenciar a metodologia de investigação-ação, que fundamentou a prática pedagógica da estudante ao longo das várias etapas do processo educativo: Observação, Planificação, Ação, Avaliação, Comunicação e Articulação. Assim, apoiada em estratégias e atitudes investigativas e reflexivas, esta metodologia potenciou a transformação, melhoria e adequação das suas práticas. O contexto de formação assumiu-se, portanto, como um lugar privilegiado de articulação entre teoria e prática, onde o processo de ensino e aprendizagem ficou pautado por intencionalidades educativas com vista ao desenvolvimento integral de cada criança, bem como pela construção de saberes e competências profissionais pela estagiária, elencadas nos Decretos-Lei n.º 240 e 241 de 2001. Tomando em consideração o processo desenvolvido, importa realçar a importância de uma formação profissional ao longo da vida, de modo a potenciar o desenvolvimento de uma atitude perante a Educação cada vez mais crítica, problematizadora, indagadora, reflexiva e investigativa, em prol do desenvolvimento holístico de cada criança.