Generalizações do conceito de distância, i-distâncias, distâncias intervalares e topologia

In this dissertation we present some generalizations for the concept of distance by using more general value spaces, such as: fuzzy metrics, probabilistic metrics and generalized metrics. We show how such generalizations may be useful due to the possibility that the distance between two objects could carry more information about the objects than in the case where the distance is represented just by a real number. Also in this thesis we propose another generalization of distance which encompasses the notion of interval metric and generates a topology in a natural way. Several properties of this generalization are investigated, and its links with other existing generalizations

Analysis and functional annotation of an expressed sequence tag collection for tropical crop sugarcane

To contribute to our understanding of the genome complexity of sugarcane, we undertook a large-scale expressed sequence tag (EST),program. More than 260,000 cDNA clones were partially sequenced from 26 standard cDNA libraries generated from different sugarcane tissues. After the processing of the sequences, 237,954 high-quality ESTs were identified. These ESTs were assembled into 43,141 putative transcripts. of the assembled sequences, 35.6% presented no matches with existing sequences in public databases. A global analysis of the whole SUCEST data set indicated that 14,409 assembled sequences (33% of the total) contained at least one cDNA clone with a full-length insert. Annotation of the 43,141 assembled sequences associated almost 50% of the putative identified sugarcane genes with protein metabolism, cellular communication/signal transduction, bioenergetics, and stress responses. Inspection of the translated assembled sequences for conserved protein domains revealed 40,821 amino acid sequences with 1415 Pfam domains. Reassembling the consensus sequences of the 43,141 transcripts revealed a 22% redundancy in the first assembling. This indicated that possibly 33,620 unique genes had been identified and indicated that >90% of the sugarcane expressed genes were tagged.

Weight and neuro-psycho-motor development in children discharged from neonatal intensive care unit

Background: Low birth weight affects child growth and development, requiring the intensive use of health services. There are conversely proportional associations between prematurity and academic performance around the world. In this study we evaluated factors involved in weight and neuropsychomotor profile in one and two years old discharged from Intensive Care Units (ICU).Methods/Design: We investigated 203 children from the ICU who were followed for 24 +/- 4 months. The research was conducted by collecting data from medical records of patients in a Follow-up program. We investigated the following variables: inadequate weight at one year old; inadequate weight at two years old and a severe neurological disorder at two years old.Results: We observed increase of almost 20% in the proportion of children which weighted between the 10th and 90th percentiles and decrease of around 40% of children below the 15th percentile, from one to two years old. In almost 60% of the cases neuropsychomotor development was normal at 2 years old, less than 15% of children presented abnormal development. Variables that remained influential for clinical outcome at 1 and 2 years old were related to birth weight and gestational age, except for hypoglycemia. Neurological examination was the most influential variable for severe neurological disturbance.Conclusion: Hypoglycemia was considered a new fact to explain inadequate weight. The results, new in Brazil and difficult in terms of comparison, could be used to identify risk factors and for a better approach of newborn discharged from ICUs.

Aplicação de ontologias para métodos de negociação de um sistema multiagente para o reconhecimento de padrões

The use of intelligent agents in multi-classifier systems appeared in order to making the centralized decision process of a multi-classifier system into a distributed, flexible and incremental one. Based on this, the NeurAge (Neural Agents) system (Abreu et al 2004) was proposed. This system has a superior performance to some combination-centered methods (Abreu, Canuto, and Santana 2005). The negotiation is important to the multiagent system performance, but most of negotiations are defined informaly. A way to formalize the negotiation process is using an ontology. In the context of classification tasks, the ontology provides an approach to formalize the concepts and rules that manage the relations between these concepts. This work aims at using ontologies to make a formal description of the negotiation methods of a multi-agent system for classification tasks, more specifically the NeurAge system. Through ontologies, we intend to make the NeurAge system more formal and open, allowing that new agents can be part of such system during the negotiation. In this sense, the NeurAge System will be studied on the basis of its functioning and reaching, mainly, the negotiation methods used by the same ones. After that, some negotiation ontologies found in literature will be studied, and then those that were chosen for this work will be adapted to the negotiation methods used in the NeurAge.

Utilizando mapas de conectividade fuzzy no desenvolvimento de algoritmos reparadores de imagens binárias 3D

A 3D binary image is considered well-composed if, and only if, the union of the faces shared by the foreground and background voxels of the image is a surface in R3. Wellcomposed images have some desirable topological properties, which allow us to simplify and optimize algorithms that are widely used in computer graphics, computer vision and image processing. These advantages have fostered the development of algorithms to repair bi-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) images that are not well-composed. These algorithms are known as repairing algorithms. In this dissertation, we propose two repairing algorithms, one randomized and one deterministic. Both algorithms are capable of making topological repairs in 3D binary images, producing well-composed images similar to the original images. The key idea behind both algorithms is to iteratively change the assigned color of some points in the input image from 0 (background)to 1 (foreground) until the image becomes well-composed. The points whose colors are changed by the algorithms are chosen according to their values in the fuzzy connectivity map resulting from the image segmentation process. The use of the fuzzy connectivity map ensures that a subset of points chosen by the algorithm at any given iteration is the one with the least affinity with the background among all possible choices

Uma análise experimental de algoritmos exatos aplicados ao problema da árvore geradora multiobjetivo

The Multiobjective Spanning Tree Problem is NP-hard and models applications in several areas. This research presents an experimental analysis of different strategies used in the literature to develop exact algorithms to solve the problem. Initially, the algorithms are classified according to the approaches used to solve the problem. Features of two or more approaches can be found in some of those algorithms. The approaches investigated here are: the two-stage method, branch-and-bound, k-best and the preference-based approach. The main contribution of this research lies in the fact that no research was presented to date reporting a systematic experimental analysis of exact algorithms for the Multiobjective Spanning Tree Problem. Therefore, this work can be a basis for other research that deal with the same problem. The computational experiments compare the performance of algorithms regarding processing time, efficiency based on the number of objectives and number of solutions found in a controlled time interval. The analysis of the algorithms was performed for known instances of the problem, as well as instances obtained from a generator commonly used in the literature

Segmentação fuzzy de imagens e vídeos

Image segmentation is the process of subdiving an image into constituent regions or objects that have similar features. In video segmentation, more than subdividing the frames in object that have similar features, there is a consistency requirement among segmentations of successive frames of the video. Fuzzy segmentation is a region growing technique that assigns to each element in an image (which may have been corrupted by noise and/or shading) a grade of membership between 0 and 1 to an object. In this work we present an application that uses a fuzzy segmentation algorithm to identify and select particles in micrographs and an extension of the algorithm to perform video segmentation. Here, we treat a video shot is treated as a three-dimensional volume with different z slices being occupied by different frames of the video shot. The volume is interactively segmented based on selected seed elements, that will determine the affinity functions based on their motion and color properties. The color information can be extracted from a specific color space or from three channels of a set of color models that are selected based on the correlation of the information from all channels. The motion information is provided into the form of dense optical flows maps. Finally, segmentation of real and synthetic videos and their application in a non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) toll are presented

Treatment of Endometriosis with Local Acetylsalicylic Acid Injection: Experimental Study in Rabbits

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Caracterização de sorotipos em linhagens do gênero Salmonella isoladas de diferentes afecções em animais domésticos

Foram caracterizados os sorotipos, o perfil de sensibilidade microbiana e os achados clínico-epidemiológicos em 53 linhagens do gênero Salmonella isoladas de 41 cães, nove equinos e três bovinos, acometidos por diferentes manifestações clínicas entre 1997 e 2007. Salmonella Typhimurium (45,3%), Salmonella enterica (22,6%), Salmonella Enteritidis (7,5%), Salmonella enterica subsp enterica 4,5,12i (5,7%), Salmonella Newport (5,7%), Salmonella Dublin (3,8%), Salmonella Agona (3,8%), Salmonella Glostrup (3,8%), Salmonella Saintpaul (1,8%) foram os sorotipos encontrados. Ciprofloxacina (100,0%), norfloxacina (100,0%) e gentamicina (100,0%) foram os antimicrobianos mais efetivos, enquanto a maior resistência das linhagens foi observada para ceftiofur (28,5%) e florfenicol (7,0%). As linhagens foram isoladas de animais com enterite, infecção do trato urinário, septicemia, piometra, pneumonia e conjuntivite. Ressalta-se para o predomínio do sorovar Typhimurium nas diferentes manifestações da salmonelose nos animais. Destaca-se, também, a identificação de sorotipos nos animais que também são observados em casos de salmonelose em humanos

Mannheimiose pulmonar experimental em bezerros: swab nasal e nasofaringeano como auxílio diagnóstico

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Climate and acute/subacute paracoccidioidomycosis in a hyper-endemic area in Brazil

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

First Description of a Cluster of Acute/Subacute Paracoccidioidomycosis Cases and Its Association with a Climatic Anomaly

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Associação entre doença arterial coronariana e as pregas lobular diagonal e anterotragal em homens

FUNDAMENTOS: Diversas alterações dermatológicas foram associadas à doença arterial coronariana, representando achados de fácil constatação que podem contribuir na estratificação não invasiva do risco cardíaco. OBJETIVOS: Avaliar comparativamente a prevalência de certos achados dermatológicos em pacientes com ou sem doença arterial coronariana. MÉTODOS: Estudo caso/controle envolvendo pacientes do sexo masculino submetidos à cineangiocoronariografia. Foram considerados aqueles casos com obstrução de mais de 50% em pelo menos uma coronária. Avaliou-se a presença da prega lobular diagonal, prega anterotragal, alopecia e presença de pêlos no tórax nos dois grupos. Os resultados foram ajustados para os fatores de risco: tabagismo, hipertensão, diabetes, idade, dislipidemia e índice de massa corporal. RESULTADOS: Analisaram-se 110 pacientes (80 casos e 30 controles). A prevalência da prega lobular diagonal nos casos (60,0%) foi maior do que no grupo controle (30,0%) (p<0,05). Alopecia androgenética e distribuição de pêlos no tórax não demonstraram associação positiva com coronariopatia neste estudo. O Odds Ratio (IC 95%), da prega lobular diagonal foi de 3,1 (1,2-8,3) e para prega anterotragal foi de 5,5 (1,9-16,3). A verificação simultânea da prega lobular diagonal e prega anterotragal representou valor preditivo positivo de 90%. CONCLUSÕES: Detectou-se associação positiva entre a presença da prega lobular diagonal bilateral e prega anterotragal bilateral com doença arterial coronariana, sendo que a presença simultânea das duas pregas apresenta alta preditividade para doença arterial coronariana.

Inflamação de queratoses seborreicas múltiplas induzida por quimioterapia com gencitabina

São diversos e comuns os efeitos mucocutâneos dos quimioterápicos, alguns por ação citotóxica, outros por hipersensibilidade ao fármaco. Os autores relatam a ocorrência de inflamação em múltiplas queratoses seborreicas pré-existentes, após terapia citorredutora com gencitabina, em paciente sob tratamento para neoplasia de pâncreas. Discutem, ainda, a benignidade do evento e alertam para a necessidade de adequada identificação dos efeitos cutâneos decorrentes da quimioterapia sistêmica.

Interleukin-6 treatment enhances human monocyte permissiveness for Paracoccidioides brasiliensis growth by modulating cytokine production

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)