HISTOPLASMIN SURVEY IN HIV-POSITIVE PATIENTS: RESULTS FROM AN ENDEMIC AREA IN NORTHEASTERN BRAZIL

SUMMARY Background. Disseminated histoplasmosis is common in AIDS patients with advanced immunosuppression in Ceará, Northeastern Brazil. The goal of this study was to determine the prevalence of Histoplasma infection in patients with HIV/AIDS living in Fortaleza, the capital of Ceará. Methods. Intradermal tests with histoplasmin (mycelial phase) were performed in 161 HIV patients with CD4 ≥ 350 cells/mm 3 . Evidence of recent illness was evaluated with immunodiffusion (ID) tests in 76 of these individuals. Results. A total of 11.8% of patients reacted to histoplasmin and 2.63% had ID test positive to Histoplasma. The presence of mango trees (Mangifera indica) in the patient neighborhood (OR = 2.870; 95% CI = 1.081-7.617; p = 0.040) and past activity involving soil (OR = 2.834; 95% CI = 1.045-7.687; p = 0.045) or visits to a farm (OR = 3.869; 95% CI = 1.189-12.591; p = 0.033) were significantly associated with Histoplasma infection. Conclusions. Patients with HIV living in Fortaleza have an expressive prevalence of infection with Histoplasma.

Spatial analysis and investigation of fire events occurrences in the Valencian Community, Spain

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies.

Automated segmentation, tracking and evaluation of bacteria in microscopy images

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Biomédica

Classificação de sons urbanos usando motifs e MFCC

A classificação automática de sons urbanos é importante para o monitoramento ambiental. Este trabalho apresenta uma nova metodologia para classificar sons urbanos, que se baseia na descoberta de padrões frequentes (motifs) nos sinais sonoros e utiliza-los como atributos para a classificação. Para extrair os motifs é utilizado um método de descoberta multi-resolução baseada em SAX. Para a classificação são usadas árvores de decisão e SVMs. Esta nova metodologia é comparada com outra bastante utilizada baseada em MFCC. Para a realização de experiências foi utilizado o dataset UrbanSound disponível publicamente. Realizadas as experiências, foi possível concluir que os atributos motif são melhores que os MFCC a discriminar sons com timbres semelhantes e que os melhores resultados são conseguidos com ambos os tipos de atributos combinados. Neste trabalho foi também desenvolvida uma aplicação móvel para Android que permite utilizar os métodos de classificação desenvolvidos num contexto de vida real e expandir o dataset.

Insights into the role of almond CBF transcription factors in the environmental control of cold acclimation and dormancy break

Dissertation presented to obtain the Ph.D degree in Biology

American Society of Anesthesiologists Score: Still Useful After 60 Years? Results of the EuSOS Study

OBJECTIVE: The European Surgical Outcomes Study described mortality following in-patient surgery. Several factors were identified that were able to predict poor outcomes in a multivariate analysis. These included age, procedure urgency, severity and type and the American Association of Anaesthesia score. This study describes in greater detail the relationship between the American Association of Anaesthesia score and postoperative mortality. METHODS: Patients in this 7-day cohort study were enrolled in April 2011. Consecutive patients aged 16 years and older undergoing inpatient non-cardiac surgery with a recorded American Association of Anaesthesia score in 498 hospitals across 28 European nations were included and followed up for a maximum of 60 days. The primary endpoint was in-hospital mortality. Decision tree analysis with the CHAID (SPSS) system was used to delineate nodes associated with mortality. RESULTS: The study enrolled 46,539 patients. Due to missing values, 873 patients were excluded, resulting in the analysis of 45,666 patients. Increasing American Association of Anaesthesia scores were associated with increased admission rates to intensive care and higher mortality rates. Despite a progressive relationship with mortality, discrimination was poor, with an area under the ROC curve of 0.658 (95% CI 0.642 - 0.6775). Using regression trees (CHAID), we identified four discrete American Association of Anaesthesia nodes associated with mortality, with American Association of Anaesthesia 1 and American Association of Anaesthesia 2 compressed into the same node. CONCLUSION: The American Association of Anaesthesia score can be used to determine higher risk groups of surgical patients, but clinicians cannot use the score to discriminate between grades 1 and 2. Overall, the discriminatory power of the model was less than acceptable for widespread use.

Epidemiologic studies of chagas' disease in the urban zone of Teresina. State of Piauí, northeastern Brazil

The triatomine species Rhodnius nasutus and Triatoma pseudomaculata were captured on palm trees Orbignya martiana "babaçu ", in the urban zone of Teresina. This kind of palm tree is largely distributed in Piauí State. The predominant species was R. nasutus; the young in stars predominated. The infestation index of palm trees and the infection index of triatomines by flagellates were 96.0 ana 29.1%, respectively. Marsupiais, bats and a rodent were captured in palm trees. The flagellates found in both triatomines ana marsupiais were morphologically and biologically indistinguishable from Trypanosoma cruzi. Forty seven percent (481/1,025) of triatomines were found concentrated in six palm trees where marsupiais circulated. Of the total of 1,025 triatomines 230 (22%) were infected by flagellates and 53.0% (123/230) of these infected triatomines were present in the same six palm trees. No evidence of triatomine domiciliation or human transmission was observed in the houses in the vicinity of palm trees. The results suggest that marsupiais play an important role in the life-cycle of T. cruzi in this region. The natural focus of Chagas' disease, demonstrated in the present study could represent a potential epidemiological threat.

The palm tree Copernicia cerifera (carnaúba) as an ecotope of Rhodnius nasutus in rural areas of the State of Piauí Northeastern Brazil

The C. cerifera palm tree (carnaúba) is widely distributed in the Northeastem Brazil, including the State of Piauí. This investigation revealed that R. nasutus is the ortly triatomine species captured on that palm tree, in five different localities. 78% of palm trees were infested with triatomines, and 4.0% were infected with flagellates morphologically and biologically indistinguishable from Trypanosoma cruzi. Birds, rodents and marsupials were found as major blood meai sources for R. nasutus.

Geospatial assessment of pest-induced forest damage through the use of UAV-bases NIR imaging and Gi-technology

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies.

Child programming: an adequate domain specific language for programming specific robots

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática

Landscape composition and climatic parameters significant in the spread of an invasive species (Pine wood Nematode)

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia do Ambiente

The Triplaria tree (Triplaris spp) and Pseudomyrmex ants: a symbiotic relationship with risks of attack for humans

The authors report a massive attack by Pseudomyrmex ants on a human who touched a Triplaria - novice tree (Triplaris spp). The ants naturally live in these trees and their stings cause intense pain and discrete to moderate local inflammation. The problem is common in some Brazilian regions and can be prevented by identifying the trees.

Creation of a web application for smart park system and parking prediction study for system integration

In the last few years, we have observed an exponential increasing of the information systems, and parking information is one more example of them. The needs of obtaining reliable and updated information of parking slots availability are very important in the goal of traffic reduction. Also parking slot prediction is a new topic that has already started to be applied. San Francisco in America and Santander in Spain are examples of such projects carried out to obtain this kind of information. The aim of this thesis is the study and evaluation of methodologies for parking slot prediction and the integration in a web application, where all kind of users will be able to know the current parking status and also future status according to parking model predictions. The source of the data is ancillary in this work but it needs to be understood anyway to understand the parking behaviour. Actually, there are many modelling techniques used for this purpose such as time series analysis, decision trees, neural networks and clustering. In this work, the author explains the best techniques at this work, analyzes the result and points out the advantages and disadvantages of each one. The model will learn the periodic and seasonal patterns of the parking status behaviour, and with this knowledge it can predict future status values given a date. The data used comes from the Smart Park Ontinyent and it is about parking occupancy status together with timestamps and it is stored in a database. After data acquisition, data analysis and pre-processing was needed for model implementations. The first test done was with the boosting ensemble classifier, employed over a set of decision trees, created with C5.0 algorithm from a set of training samples, to assign a prediction value to each object. In addition to the predictions, this work has got measurements error that indicates the reliability of the outcome predictions being correct. The second test was done using the function fitting seasonal exponential smoothing tbats model. Finally as the last test, it has been tried a model that is actually a combination of the previous two models, just to see the result of this combination. The results were quite good for all of them, having error averages of 6.2, 6.6 and 5.4 in vacancies predictions for the three models respectively. This means from a parking of 47 places a 10% average error in parking slot predictions. This result could be even better with longer data available. In order to make this kind of information visible and reachable from everyone having a device with internet connection, a web application was made for this purpose. Beside the data displaying, this application also offers different functions to improve the task of searching for parking. The new functions, apart from parking prediction, were: - Park distances from user location. It provides all the distances to user current location to the different parks in the city. - Geocoding. The service for matching a literal description or an address to a concrete location. - Geolocation. The service for positioning the user. - Parking list panel. This is not a service neither a function, is just a better visualization and better handling of the information.