Spatial Distribution of Seropositive Dogs to Leptospira spp. and Evaluation of Leptospirosis Risk Factors Using a Decision Tree

Background: Leptospirosis is an important zoonotic disease associated with poor areas of urban settings of developing countries and early diagnosis and prompt treatment may prevent disease. Although rodents are reportedly considered the main reservoirs of leptospirosis, dogs may develop the disease, may become asymptomatic carriers and may be used as sentinels for disease epidemiology. The use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) combined with spatial analysis techniques allows the mapping of the disease and the identification and assessment of health risk factors. Besides the use of GIS and spatial analysis, the technique of data mining, decision tree, can provide a great potential to find a pattern in the behavior of the variables that determine the occurrence of leptospirosis. The objective of the present study was to apply Geographical Information Systems and data prospection (decision tree) to evaluate the risk factors for canine leptospirosis in an area of Curitiba, PR.Materials, Methods & Results: The present study was performed on the Vila Pantanal, a urban poor community in the city of Curitiba. A total of 287 dog blood samples were randomly obtained house-by-house in a two-day sampling on January 2010. In addition, a questionnaire was applied to owners at the time of sampling. Geographical coordinates related to each household of tested dog were obtained using a Global Positioning System (GPS) for mapping the spatial distribution of reagent and non-reagent dogs to leptospirosis. For the decision tree, risk factors included results of microagglutination test (MAT) from the serum of dogs, previous disease on the household, contact with rats or other dogs, dog breed, outdoors access, feeding, trash around house or backyard, open sewer proximity and flooding. A total of 189 samples (about 2/3 of overall samples) were randomly selected for the training file and consequent decision rules. The remained 98 samples were used for the testing file. The seroprevalence showed a pattern of spatial distribution that involved all the Pantanal area, without agglomeration of reagent animals. In relation to data mining, from 189 samples used in decision tree, a total of 165 (87.3%) animal samples were correctly classified, generating a Kappa index of 0.413. A total of 154 out of 159 (96.8%) samples were considered non-reagent and were correctly classified and only 5/159 (3.2%) were wrongly identified. on the other hand, only 11 (36.7%) reagent samples were correctly classified, with 19 (63.3%) samples failing diagnosis.Discussion: The spatial distribution that involved all the Pantanal area showed that all the animals in the area are at risk of contamination by Leptospira spp. Although most samples had been classified correctly by the decision tree, a degree of difficulty of separability related to seropositive animals was observed, with only 36.7% of the samples classified correctly. This can occur due to the fact of seronegative animals number is superior to the number of seropositive ones, taking the differences in the pattern of variable behavior. The data mining helped to evaluate the most important risk factors for leptospirosis in an urban poor community of Curitiba. The variables selected by decision tree reflected the important factors about the existence of the disease (default of sewer, presence of rats and rubbish and dogs with free access to street). The analyses showed the multifactorial character of the epidemiology of canine leptospirosis.

Inequalities in access to education and healthcare

The burden of disease is borne by those who suffer as patients but also by society at large, including health service providers. That burden is felt most severely in parts of the world where there is no infrastructure, or foreseeable prospects of any, to change the status quo without external support. Poverty, disease and inequality pervade all the activities of daily living in low-income regions and are inextricably linked. External interventions may not be the most appropriate way to impact on this positively in all circumstances, but targeted programmes to build social capital, within and by countries, are more likely to be sustainable. By these means, basic oral healthcare, underpinned by the primary healthcare approach, can be delivered to more equitably address needs and demands. Education is fundamental to building knowledge-based economies but is often lacking in such regions even at primary and secondary level. Provision of private education at tertiary level may also introduce its own inequities. Access to distance learning and community-based practice opens opportunities and is more likely to encourage graduates to work in similar areas. Recruitment of faculty from minority groups provides role models for students from similar backgrounds but all faculty staff must be involved in supporting and mentoring students from marginalized groups to ensure their retention. The developed world has to act responsibly in two crucial areas: first, not to exacerbate the shortage of skilled educators and healthcare workers in emerging economies by recruiting their staff; second, they must offer educational opportunities at an economic rate. Governments need to lead on developing initiatives to attract, support and retain a competent workforce.

The construction of a juridical ontology

The need for the representation of both semantics and common sense and its organization in a lexical database or knowledge base has motivated the development of large projects, such as Wordnets, CYC and Mikrokosmos. Besides the generic bases, another approach is the construction of ontologies for specific domains. Among the advantages of such approach there is the possibility of a greater and more detailed coverage of a specific domain and its terminology. Domain ontologies are important resources in several tasks related to the language processing, especially in those related to information retrieval and extraction in textual bases. Information retrieval or even question and answer systems can benefit from the domain knowledge represented in an ontology. Besides embracing the terminology of the field, the ontology makes the relationships among the terms explicit. Copyright 2007 ACM.

Social Panorama of Latin America 2010

Includes bibliography

Economic growth with equity: challenges for Latin America

Includes bibliography

Latin America and the Caribbean and the European Union: striving for a renewed partnership

Includes bibliography

Sustainable human settlements development in Latin America and the Caribbean

Includes bibliography

Nuevas experiencias de concertación público-privada: las corporaciones para el desarrollo local: estudio de casos en las comunas de Santiago y Huechuraba, Area Metropolitana de Santiago de Chile

Incluye Bibliografía

Servicios públicos urbanos y gestión local en América Latina y el Caribe: problemas, metodologías y políticas

Incluye Bibliografía

Old and new forms of citizenship

Includes bibliography

Social and environmental indexes to determine the impacts of closed neighbourhoods in Brazil

São Paulo State, in Brazil, is getting increasingly crowded, like in other third world countries around the world, so should give great importance to city development. This work considered the phenomenon of closed neighbourhoods (CN) as an important factor to city planning, papers report many impacts of this model of neighbourhoods in other countries, but in Brazil its impacts are not yet well listed in the literature. The aim of this work was to determine indicators to achieve the social and environmental performances and verify their applicability on three different closed neighbourhoods in São Paulo state, Brazil. The indicators were condensed on indexes: water management, waste management, energy and emissions, legal compliance, environment and buildings, risk management, health and education and governance. The preliminary results indicated several social and environmental problems in all indexes. © 2013 WIT Press.

Women in the digital economy: breaking through the equality threshold

Prepared by ECLAC for the twelfth session of the Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean, this document systematizes and describes various dimensions that shape the way the region's women participate in the labour market and how they access and use the different elements of the digital economy. Information and communications technologies (ICTs); provide essential support across all economic, political, cultural and social activity, as well as being a production sector in their own right. As such, they are potential allies in the drive to achieve equality by helping reduce the gender inequities which constitute not only a gender digital gap but also a social divide. Public policies on gender equality must take into account the key and interconnected dimensions of economy, well-being and technology if they are to be capable of providing an ambitious and innovative response to the challenges of today's society. The core argument in the reflection on ICTs and gender equality thus has to do with how women engage in processes of change and sustainable development in the countries, which cannot be achieved without equal participation by men and women. From this perspective, the gender digital gap offers a specific opportunity to tackle gender inequalities in the region.

Women in the digital economy: breaking through the equality threshold. Summary

Prefacio Prepared by ECLAC for the twelfth session of the Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean, this document systematizes and describes various dimensions that shape the way the region's women participate in the labour market, and how they access and use the different elements of the digital economy. Information and communications technologies (ICTs) provide essential support across all economic, political, cultural and social activity, as well as being a production sector in their own right. As such, they are potential allies in the drive to achieve equality by helping reduce the gender inequities which constitute not only a gender digital gap but also a social divide. Public policies on gender equality must take into account the key and interconnected dimensions of economy, well-being and technology if they are to be capable of providing an ambitious and innovative response to the challenges of today's society. The core argument in the reflection on ICTs and gender equality thus has to do with how women engage in processes of change and sustainable development in the countries, which cannot be achieved without equal participation by men and women. From this perspective, the gender digital gap offers a specific opportunity to tackle gender inequalities in the region.

Unsupervised segmentation method for cuboidal cell nuclei in histological prostate images based on minimum cross entropy

This paper presents a novel segmentation method for cuboidal cell nuclei in images of prostate tissue stained with hematoxylin and eosin. The proposed method allows segmenting normal, hyperplastic and cancerous prostate images in three steps: pre-processing, segmentation of cuboidal cell nuclei and post-processing. The pre-processing step consists of applying contrast stretching to the red (R) channel to highlight the contrast of cuboidal cell nuclei. The aim of the second step is to apply global thresholding based on minimum cross entropy to generate a binary image with candidate regions for cuboidal cell nuclei. In the post-processing step, false positives are removed using the connected component method. The proposed segmentation method was applied to an image bank with 105 samples and measures of sensitivity, specificity and accuracy were compared with those provided by other segmentation approaches available in the specialized literature. The results are promising and demonstrate that the proposed method allows the segmentation of cuboidal cell nuclei with a mean accuracy of 97%. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Estimativas da radiação global incidente em superfícies inclinadas com base na razáo de insolação

Estimating equations of global radiation based on the sunshine duration were proposed for horizontal surface and with inclination of 12.85, 22.85 and 32.85° facing the North in Botucatu, SP, Brazil, in monthly, seasonal and annual groupings of data. Simple linear correlations were applied (for definition of the linear and angular coefficients of Angstrom-Prescott model), in a database measured in all three inclinations in different periods (22.85°: 04/1998 to 07/2001; 12.85°: 08/2011 to 02/2003; and 32.85°: 03/2003 to 12/2007) concomitant with horizontal measures and sunshine duration. The statistical performance of the model was analysed by the means absolute error (MBE), the square root of the mean square error (RMSE) and the index adjustment (d). The minimum global radiation transmissivity varied from 14.35% in August (12.85°) to 27.86% in December (32.85°) and the maximum transmissivity ranged between 62.10% and 78.90%, for June (32.85°) and December (12.85°). Increasing the angle of inclination surface increased the scattering and decreased the index of adjustment and performance. The worst results were found for application of the seasonal and annual models in the months of autumn and winter for 32.85° (RMSE below 42.93% and adjustment superior to 0.4693).