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 & Artificial neural network. The organization has 6147 authors who have published 6948 publications receiving 73648 citations.

An Integrated Approach for Model Driven Process Modeling and Enactment

Abstract: The adoption of MDA in software development is increasing and is widely recognized as an important approach for building software systems. However, there's a lack of standard terminology and notation addressing design aspects of an MDA process. The available MDA tools and environments are particularly focused in defining and executing model transformations, while a development process involves other important definitions which should be carried out during the process enactment. This paper presents an integrated approach for MDA process modeling and enactment based on specializations of some SPEM 2 concepts. To support and evaluate our approach a tool was developed and applied in two case studies.

Association of Catalase and Glutathione Peroxidase 1 Polymorphisms with Chronic Hepatitis C Outcome

Abstract: The hepatic damage caused by hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is associated with the host immune response and viral regulatory factors. Catalase (CAT) and glutathione peroxidase 1 (GPX1) are antioxidant enzymes located in the peroxisomes and mitochondria, respectively, and are responsible for the control of intracellular hydrogen peroxide levels. Polymorphisms in CAT (C-262T) and GPX1 (Pro198Leu) are correlated with serum levels and enzyme activity. This study aimed to investigate the association of genetic polymorphisms of CAT C-262T (rs1001179) and GPX1 Pro198Leu (rs1050450) with different stages of liver fibrosis and development of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). This study included 445 patients with chronic hepatitis C, of whom 139 patients had mild fibrosis (F0-F1), 200 had moderate/severe fibrosis (F2-F4), and 106 had HCC. Genotyping of SNPs was performed by real-time PCR using TaqMan probes. The Pro/Pro genotype of GPX1 was significantly associated with fibrosis severity, HCC, Child Pugh score, and BCLC staging. Additionally, patients carrying both CT+TT genotypes in the CAT gene and the Pro/Pro genotype in the GPX1 gene had higher risk for developing moderate/severe fibrosis or HCC (p = 0.009, OR 2.40 and p = 0.002, OR 3.56, respectively). CAT and GPX1 polymorphisms may be implicated in the severity of liver fibrosis and HCC caused by HCV.

Religious/spiritual coping and level of hope in patients with cancer in chemotherapy

Abstract: Aim: To demonstrate the relationship between religious/spiritual coping and hope in cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. Method: This is a cross-sectional, descriptive study with a quantitative approach performed in a reference outpatient clinic in Caruaru, PE, between August and October 2017. A total of 82 cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy were included in the study, using the brief religious/spiritual coping scale (RCOPE-Brief) and the Herth Hope Scale (HHS). Results: The sample presented mean positive RCOPE scores (3.03 ± 0.41) and the level of hope was considered high (42.7 points ± 3.67). Patients who had a high RCOPE score were found to have a higher mean of Herth’s level of hope (44.12 points). Conclusion: This study becomes relevant to nursing professionals by encouraging care that takes into account the patient’s spiritual dimension in order to stimulate positive mechanisms of religious coping and, consequently, raise the levels of hope.

Assessing Semistructured Merge in Version Control Systems: A Replicated Experiment

Abstract: Context: To reduce the integration effort arising from conflicting changes resulting from collaborative software development tasks, unstructured merge tools try to automatically solve part of the conflicts via textual similarity, whereas structured and semistructured merge tools try to go further by exploiting the syntactic structure of the involved artifacts. Objective: In this study, aiming at increasing the existing body of evidence and assessing results for systems developed under an alternative version control paradigm, we replicate an experiment conducted by Apel et al. to compare the unstructured and semistructured approach with respect to the occurrence of conflicts reported by both approaches. Method: We used both semistructured and unstructured merge in a sample 2.5 times bigger than the original study regarding the number of projects and 18 times bigger regarding the number of merge scenarios, and we compared the occurrence of conflicts. Results: Similar to the original study, we observed that semistructured merge reduces the number of conflicts in 55% of the scenarios of the new sample. However, the observed average conflict reduction of 62% in these scenarios is far superior than what has been observed before. We also bring new evidence that the use of semistructured merge can reduce the occurrence of conflicting merge scenarios by half. Conclusions: Our findings reinforce the benefits of exploiting the syntactic structure of the artifacts involved in code integration. Besides, the reductions observed in the number and size of conflicts suggest that the use of semistructured merge, when compared to the unstructured approach, might decrease integration effort without compromising correctness.

Application of PSO-based clustering algorithms on educational databases

Abstract: This paper performs an investigation on the application of well-known Particle Swarm Optimization based algorithms for clustering tasks, namely, PSOClustering, Hybrid PSOClustering with K-means and Particle Swarm Clustering The case study is to tackle a significant problem related to grouping students of an on-line educational database, aiming to increase their learning process through the recommendation of specific grammar lessons The clustering process is performed based on the type, and the number of errors done by the students The results show that the PSOClustering algorithm can achieve the best performance when compared to the other PSO-based algorithms and the standard K-means algorithm