Aplicações

Allan Felipe Fattori Alves, Ana Luiza Menegatti Pavan, Guilherme Giacomini, Caio Cesar Quini, Sergio Marrone Ribeiro, Rozemeire Garcia Marquez, Maria Regina Bentlin, André Petean Trindade, José Ricardo de Arruda Miranda, Diana Rodrigues de Pina

Jornal de Pediatria, available online 3 July 2018

ABSTRACT

Objectives

The objective of this study was to develop and validate a computational tool to assist radiological decisions on necrotizing enterocolitis.

Methodology

Patients that exhibited clinical signs and radiographic evidence of Bell’s stage 2 or higher were included in the study, resulting in 64 exams. The tool was used to classify localized bowel wall thickening and intestinal pneumatosis using full-width at half-maximum measurements and texture analyses based on wavelet energy decomposition. Radiological findings of suspicious bowel wall thickening and intestinal pneumatosis loops were confirmed by both patient surgery and histopathologicalanalysis. Two experienced radiologists selected an involved bowel and a normal bowel in the same radiography. The full-width at half-maximum and wavelet-based texture feature were then calculated and compared using the Mann–Whitney U test. Specificity, sensibility, positive and negative predictive values were calculated.

Results

The full-width at half-maximum results were significantly different between normal and distended loops (median of 10.30 and 15.13, respectively). Horizontal, vertical, and diagonal wavelet energy measurements were evaluated at eight levels of decomposition. Levels 7 and 8 in the horizontal direction presented significant differences. For level 7, median was 0.034 and 0.088 for normal and intestinal pneumatosis groups, respectively, and for level 8 median was 0.19 and 0.34, respectively.

Conclusions

The developed tool could detect differences in radiographic findings of bowel wall thickening and IP that are difficult to diagnose, demonstrating the its potential in clinical routine. The tool that was developed in the present study may help physicians to investigate suspicious bowel loops, thereby considerably improving diagnosis and clinical decisions.

DOI:10.1016/j.jped.2018.05.017

Ádria Barros de Oliveira, Gennaro Severino Rodrigues, Fernanda Lima Kastensmidt, Nemitala Added,
Eduardo L. A. Macchione, Vitor A. P. Aguiar, Nilberto H. Medina , and Marcilei A. G. Silveira

IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science PP(99):1-1 · July 2018
ABSTRACT

This paper presents a Dual-Core LockStep (DCLS) implementation to protect hard-core processors against radiationinduced soft errors. The proposed DCLS is applied to an ARM Cortex-A9 embedded processor. Different software optimizations were evaluated to assess their impact on performance and fault tolerance. Heavy ions experiments and fault injection emulation were performed to analyze the system susceptibility to errors and the DCLS performance. Results show that the approach is able to decrease the system cross-section and achieve high protection against errors. The DCLS successfully protects the system from up to 78% of the injected faults. The execution performance analysis shows that by reducing the number of verifications and augmenting the block partition execution time it is possible to increase the system reliability with minimal performance losses.

DOI:110.1109/TNS.2018.2852606

E.I. Jussiani, M.V. Colaço, L. Kuplich, F. Carrerete, R. Pinto, R. Cély Barroso, C.R. Appoloni and L. Parreiras Nogueira

Journal of Instrumentation, Volume 13, June 2018

ABSTRACT

Urinary stone is a common clinical problem whose most frequent chemical compositions are calcium oxalate, calcium phosphate, uric acid and cystine. In this work we propose a new method for quantification of urinary stones using single-energy computed tomography (SECT). The results were validated with X-ray powder diffraction (XRPD). The proposed SECT method consists of obtaining a calibration curve that relates the gray levels of the sample with its density and effective atomic number. XRPD results showed that one of the samples is purely composed of uracite, another is a mixed stone composed of hydroxyapatite and struvite, and the last one is composed of hydroxyapatite and calcium oxalate monohydrate (whewellite). X-ray computed microtomography (micro-CT) results showed that the standard samples presented an excellent correlation. The gray levels of the studied samples were determined theoretically through the calibration curve and its values agreed with the experimental results. The XRPD results reinforced the data obtained by micro-CT.

10.1088/1748-0221/13/06/C06008

L. A. Tambara, F. L. Kastensmidt, P. Rech, F. Lins, N. H. Medina, N. Added, V. A. P. Aguiar, and M. A. G. Silveira

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NUCLEAR SCIENCE – VOL. 65, NO. 8. Data: 02 July 2018

ABSTRACT

All programmable system-on-chip (APSoC) devices provide higher system performance and programmable flexibility at lower costs compared to standalone field-programmable gate array devices and processors. Unfortunately, it has been demonstrated that the high complexity and density of APSoCs increase the system’s susceptibility to radiation-induced errors. This paper investigates the effects of soft errors on APSoCs at design level through reliability and performance analyses. We explore 28 different hardware and software co-designs varying the workload distribution between hardware and software. We also propose a reliability analysis flow based on fault injection (FI) to estimate the reliability trend of hardware-only and software-only designs and hardware-software co-designs. Results obtained from both radiation experiments and FI campaigns reveal that performance and reliability can be improved up to 117× by offloading the workload of an APSoC-based system to its programmable logic core. We also show that the proposed flow is a precise method to estimate the reliability trend of system designs on APSoCs before radiation experiments.

10.1109/TNS.2018.2844250

T. L. A. L. Carmo, V. C. Azevedo, P. R. Siqueira, T.D. Galvão, F. A. Santos, C. B. R. Martinez, C. R. Appoloni and M. N. Fernandes

Environmental Science and Pollution Research. Volume 25, p. 22963–22976, August 2018.

Abstract

This study investigated the action of titanium dioxide nanoparticles (TiO2-NPs), on the gills and kidneys of Neotropical freshwater fish, Prochilodus lineatus, with emphasis on reactive oxygen species (ROS) production, antioxidant responses, and morphological changes. Fish were exposed to 1, 5, 10, and 50 mg L-1 nominal TiO2-NPs suspended into water for 2 or 14 days. In gills, ROS decreased and glutathione (GSH) increased after 2 days, while ROS and GSH increased and superoxide dismutase activity decreased after 14 days. In kidneys, GSH and lipoperoxidation increased after 2 days and catalase activity decreased after 14 days. Common histopathologies in gills were epithelium hyperplasia, cellular hypertrophy, proliferation of mitochondria-rich cells (MRC), and lamellar stasis; in kidneys, there were cellular and nuclear hypertrophy, focal tubule degeneration, necrosis, and melanomacrophage (MM) proliferation. Although environmentally unlikely, high-dose exposures clarified biological effects of TiO2-NPs, such as ROS formation and MRC responses in the gills, which may impair ionic balance. It was also found that MM are likely responsible for eliminating NPs in the kidney. These findings will help to regulate TiO2-NP disposal, but longer-term studies are still needed.

10.1007/s11356-018-2393-4

R. Y. Miyahara, F. L.Melquiades, E. Ligowski, A. Santos, S. L. Fávaro and O. R. Antunes Junior

Polímeros vol.28 nº 2 São Carlos Apr./June 2018.

Abstract

This study presents the preparation and characterization of composite materials using Plastic Waste from Hydrapulper (PWH) from paper industries extruded with sugar cane fiber residues from ethanol industries. The factorial design showed that composite material with 40% of sugar cane fiber, pressed with 5 ton was the optimized condition. The main findings attested that the composite is resistant up to 250 °C and its hardness is increased compared to the raw PWH. The material presented woodsy aspect although water absorption has increased. So, this study offers a good alternative for the use of plastic waste generated as a by-product of recycled paper industry as well as a destination to the sugar cane bagasse.

10.1590/0104-1428.12216