Universidade de Pernambuco

About: Universidade de Pernambuco is a education organization based out in Recife, Brazil. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Medicine. The organization has 6147 authors who have published 6948 publications receiving 73648 citations.

Spirituality in patient care under palliative care: A study with nurses

Abstract: Objective: To understand spirituality from the point of view of nurses who care for patients under palliative care. Methods: This is a qualitative field study, conducted with ten nurses working at a hospital in Joao Pessoa (PB). The empirical material was collected through semi-structured interviews and analyzed using the content analysis technique. Results: The results showed that nurses consider spirituality as a source of strength, comfort and faith, and that when cultivated by patients under palliative care, it helps to improve their condition and accept the dying process. Family support, forgiveness, love, belief, faith and hope were identified as the spiritual needs of these patients, which can be met using various strategies. Conclusion: It is evident that nurses recognize the importance of the spiritual dimension in the palliative care of patients, however, there is still unpreparedness to deal with spiritual matters.

A Four Dimension Graph Model for Automatic Text Summarization.

Abstract: Text summarization is the process of automatically creating a shorter version of one or more text documents. In this context, word-based, sentence-based and graph-based methods approaches are largely used. Among these, graph based methods for automatic text summarization produce summaries based on the relationships between sentences. These relationships may also support the creation of several text processing applications such as extractive and abstractive summaries, question-answering and information retrieval systems, among others. A new graph model for text processing applications is proposed in this paper. It relies on four dimensions (similarity, semantic similarity, co reference, discourse information) to create the graph. The rationale behind the proposal presented here is resorting to more dimensions than previous works, and taking into account co reference resolution, taking into account to the role of pronouns in connecting the sentences. Co reference was not used in any previous graph based summarization technique. An experiment was performed using the Text Rank algorithm with the presented approach, on the CNN corpus. The results show that the model proposed here outperforms the current approaches both quantitatively and qualitatively.

On the influence of the swimming operators in the Fish School Search algorithm

Abstract: Real world engineer problems sometimes involve high dimensional spaces. It makes them hard to compute. A common approach to tackle such challenges is to apply swarm based or evolutionary algorithms. Fish School Search (FSS) is one of such techniques that excels on difficult search problems. As FSS is a recent technique and only output results were investigated so far. This paper analyzes the influence of the FSS operators on the performance of the algorithm in six benchmark functions. We assessed the influence of each swimming operator separately. We found that the volitive mechanism is the operator that affords most of the exploration abilities during the search process. The carried out assessment has also shown that, in average, the best results are obtained only when all the FSS operators are actived. It means that all operators are fairly relevant and complementary. Moreover, we compared FSS results with some PSO variations and showed that FSS outperformed these PSO algorithms in some cases.

Pyriproxyfen and the microcephaly epidemic in Brazil: an ecological approach to explore the hypothesis of their association

Abstract: The microcephaly epidemic in Brazil generated intense debate regarding its causality, and one hypothesised cause of this epidemic, now recognised as congenital Zika virus syndrome, was the treatment of drinking water tanks with pyriproxyfen to control Aedes aegypti larvae We present the results of a geographical analysis of the association between the prevalence of microcephaly confirmed by Fenton growth charts and the type of larvicide used in the municipalities that were home to the mothers of the affected newborns in the metropolitan region of Recife in Pernambuco, the state in Brazil where the epidemic was first detected The overall prevalence of microcephaly was 82 per 10,000 live births in the three municipalities that used the larvicide Bti (Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis) instead of pyriproxyfen, and 69 per 10,000 live births in the eleven municipalities that used pyriproxyfen The difference was not statistically significant Our results show that the prevalence of microcephaly was not higher in the areas in which pyriproxyfen was used In this ecological approach, there was no evidence of a correlation between the use of pyriproxyfen in the municipalities and the microcephaly epidemic