The Text Mining Technique Applied to the Analysis of Health Interventions to Combat Congenital Syphilis in Brazil: The Case of the "Syphilis No!" Project

Congenital syphilis (CS) remains a threat to public health worldwide, especially in developing countries. To mitigate the impacts of the CS epidemic, the Brazilian government has developed a national intervention project called "Syphilis No." Thus, among its range of actions is the production of thousands of writings featuring the experiences of research and intervention supporters (RIS) of the project, called field researchers. In addition, this large volume of base data was subjected to analysis through data mining, which may contribute to better strategies for combating syphilis. Natural language processing is a form of knowledge extraction. First, the database extracted from the "LUES Platform" with 4,874 documents between 2018 and 2020 was employed. This was followed by text preprocessing, selecting texts referring to the field researchers' reports for analysis. Finally, for analyzing the documents, N-grams extraction (N = 2,3,4) was performed. The combination of the TF-IDF metric with the BoW algorithm was applied to assess terms' importance and frequency and text clustering. In total, 1019 field activity reports were mined. Word extraction from the text mining method set out the following guiding axioms from the bigrams: "confronting syphilis in primary health care;" "investigation committee for congenital syphilis in the territory;" "municipal plan for monitoring and investigating syphilis cases through health surveillance;" "women's healthcare networks for syphilis in pregnant;" "diagnosis and treatment with a focus on rapid testing." Text mining may serve public health research subjects when used in parallel with the conventional content analysis method. The computational method extracted intervention activities from field researchers, also providing inferences on how the strategies of the "Syphilis No" Project influenced the decrease in congenital syphilis cases in the territory

Metodolgia para a avaliação e melhoria contínua da sustentabilidade

Documentos apresentados no âmbito do reconhecimento de graus e diplomas estrangeiro

Interface argamassa-suporte: análise das características físicas com base em várias campanhas experimentais

Os revestimentos de paredes mais usados em Portugal, e mesmo ano âmbito europeu e mundial, continuam sendo as argamassas de revestimento, quer sejam à base de cal ou de cimento, quer sejam tradicionais, feitas em obra ou pré-doseadas. De acordo com a normalização disponível, o estudo de desempenho dessas argamassas é realizado sobre provetes produzidos em laboratório, com medidas normalizadas e em condições de cura e de ensaio pré-estabelecidas. No entanto, quando as argamassas são aplicadas sobre os suportes reais o seu comportamento final não será exatamente o mesmo. As dimensões, as condições de aplicação e as condições de cura são distintas. Assim, é consensual dizer que as características finais dos rebocos aplicados em condições reais de exposição serão distintas das obtidas em laboratório. O estudo que se pretende apresentar faz parte de uma investigação mais alargada no âmbito do projeto IF Mortar, em que se pretende analisar a influência das características de diversos suportes nas características de diferentes tipos de argamassa, para se prever, de forma mais rigorosa, qual o comportamento final das argamassas após sua aplicação. Neste artigo são apresentados alguns dos resultados já obtidos em campanhas experimentais, relativos às características físicas de diversas argamassas aplicadas sobre distintos suportes

Use of Interrupted Time Series Analysis in Understanding the Course of the Congenital Syphilis Epidemic in Brazil

To fight against the rising incidence of syphilis, the Brazilian Ministry of Health (MoH) launched the “Syphilis No!” Project (SNP), with specific resources funded by a parliamentary amendment. Then, in 2018, a national rapid response started to be implemented on the Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS, Sistema Único de Saúde) in two strategic lines (1) to reinforce SUS's universal actions and (2) to implement specific ones to 100 municipalities chosen by the MoH as priorities for syphilis congenital response. In 2015, such localities represented 6895% of congenital syphilis cases in Brazil. In this context, SNP has implemented actions to strengthen epidemiological surveillance of acquired syphilis and congenital syphilis by instituting an integrated and collaborative response through health services networks and reinforcing interstate relations. Methods: A quasi-experimental study using time series analysis was conducted to assess immediate impacts and changes to the trend in national congenital syphilis before and after the project, from September 2016 to December 2019. Data were assessed considering rates of congenital syphilis per 1,000 live births in all priority municipalities (n=100) covered by the project and in non-priority municipalities (n=5,470) from all five macro-regions of Brazil. Findings: Priority municipalities showed a greater reduction (change in trend) in comparison to non-priority. The linear regression model revealed trend changes after the intervention, with both groups of municipalities showing a drop in the average monthly number of cases per 1,000 live births, with a reduction of -0·21 (CI 95% -0·33 to -0·09; p=0·0011) in priority municipalities and of -0·10 (CI 95% -0.19 to -0.02; p=0·0216) in non-priority municipalities. Interpretation: The study using ITS provides important evidence on the direction, timing, and magnitude of the effects of interventions introduced as part of the SNP on congenital syphilis in Brazil. Our results suggest that the Syphilis No! Project influenced the trends of congenital syphilis in Brazil from 2018, with higher reductions achieved in the priority municipalities. Funding: The research is funded by a grant to the Syphilis No! Project from Brazilian Ministry of Health (Project Number: 54/2017). The funders had no role in study design, analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript