Effect of shellfish culture on phytodetritus vertical fluxes in tropical waters: southern Brazil

Mussel culture is an expanding activity in shallow and sheltered bays along the coast of Santa Catarina, southern Brazil. Although mussel culture generates benefits, several environmental impacts are associated with this kind of activity. Its success depends on. factors which inc1ude the environmental impact and the carrying capacity of the system. One conspicuous effect of mussel culture is the enhancement of vertical particle flux to the bottom sediment and depletion of water column phytoplankton biomass. Phytodetritus vertical fluxes was evaluated in a mussel culture area by collecting partic1es with sediment traps and analysing plant pigment by high performance liquid chromatography (RF-HPLC). Results showed that mussel culture, in average, enhances almost 5 times the vertical phytodetritus flux as compared to the reference site. Pheophorbide like pigments were the main chlorophyll-a degradation products collected by the traps. Given the high phytodetritus production, compared to the low water column phytoplankton biomass observed, it is suggested that allocthonous phytoplankton advected to the cultured area is an important process to sustain the mussel growth in the area.O cultivo de moluscos ao longo da costa de Santa Catarina tem crescido de forma acelerada nos últimos anos. Embora os benefícios sejam muitos, vários tipos de impactos ambientais podem ser decorrentes do cultivo de moluscos. Desta forma, o sucesso da atividade depende de fatores que envolvem a capacidade suporte do meio e do grau que o ambiente é impactado. Um dos mais evidentes impactos associados ao cultivo de moluscos marinhos é o aumento da taxa de fluxo vertical de partículas associado a redução da biomassa fitoplanctônica na coluna de água. O fluxo vertical de fitodetritos produzidos em uma área de cultivo foi avaliado por meio de análise por cromatografia líquida de alta eficiência (CLAE) de pigmentos fotossintéticos e produtos de degradação do material coletado por armadilhas de sedimento. Os resultados indicam que o cultivo de moluscos aumenta em média 5 vezes o fluxo vertical de fitodetritos, sendo que a maior parte da degradação da c1orofila-a ocorre na forma de feoforbideos. Dado o expressivo fluxo vertical de fitodetritos, comparado a pequena biomassa na coluna de água, sugere-se que o fitopl ncton a1OOono, trazido por processos advectivos, é importante para a manutenção do crescimento dos moluscos na área estudada

Caso Raro de Quisto do Colédoco Todani Tipo III

rare biliary tree disorders, which are divided in several subtypes according to Todani classification. Type III choledochal cyst is one of the rarest subtype. Symptoms are almost always associated with complications such as cholangitis or pancreatitis, usually due to biliary stasis, choledocholithiasis, recurrent infection or inflammatory events. This article describes a case of a patient who presented to the emergency department due to fever and abdominal pain, owing to Todani type III cystic obstruction with representative findings in the computed tomography study and endoscopic confirmation.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

HEP-Frame: A software engineered framework to aid the development and efficient multicore execution of scientific code

This communication presents an evolutionary soft- ware prototype of a user-centered Highly Efficient Pipelined Framework, HEP-Frame, to aid the development of sustainable parallel scientific code with a flexible pipeline structure. HEP- Frame is the result of a tight collaboration between computational scientists and software engineers: it aims to improve scientists coding productivity, ensuring an efficient parallel execution on a wide set of multicore systems, with both HPC and HTC techniques. Current prototype complies with the requirements of an actual scientific code, includes desirable sustainability features and supports at compile time additional plugin interfaces for other scientific fields. The porting and development productivity was assessed and preliminary efficiency results are promising.This work was supported by FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia) within Project Scope (UID/CEC/00319/2013), by LIP (Laboratório de Instrumentação e Física Experimental de Partículas) and by Project Search-ON2 (NORTE-07-0162- FEDER-000086), co-funded by the North Portugal Regional Operational Programme (ON.2 - O Novo Norte), under the National Strategic Reference Framework, through the European Regional Development Fund

Revisões de próteses da anca: Reconstrução das lises ósseas com enxertos alógenos

O desprendimento ou "descolamento" asséptico das próteses totais da anca e a lise óssea do leito da prótese, são as complicações mais frequentes das artroplastias da anca. Factores mecânicos, biológicos e, sobretudo, reacções do organismo às partículas de desgaste dos diferentes componentes das próteses estão, com certeza, envolvidos neste processo. As lises ósseas acetabulares e femurais podem revestir características e intensidades variáveis, obrigando a estratégias de reconstrução diferentes. Com base na gravidade das lises ósseas considerámos três graus para o acetábulo e igualmente três graus para o fémur. Para preenchimento das lises ósseas recorremos a enxertos alógenos, do Banco de Ossos dos Hospitais da Universidade de Coimbra, colhidos e conservados segundo as normas internacionalmente aceites. Nas lises acetabulares do grau I e grau II utilizámos enxerto esponjoso sob a forma de pequenos fragmentos ou grânulos e nas lises do grau III enxertos maciços talhados na extremidade distal do fémur. Como implantes temos utilizado cúpulas "primárias" ou anéis metálicos de reforço acetabular nas lises do grau I anéis metálicos nas lises do grau II e, cúpulas cimentadas directamente no enxerto maciço ou anéis metálicos cujos parafusos transfixam o enxerto, nas lises do grau III. Nas lises femurais temos utilizado enxerto esponjoso para preenchimento das perdas de substância óssea e como implante as hastes de Wagner, de forma quase sistemática. Como vias de abordagem da anca utilizámos a via postero-externa ou a via transfemoral. Esta metodologia tem-nos permitido a recolocação de nova prótese, mesmo em situações de extrema fragilidade e perda de substância óssea. De Outubro de 1990 a Dezembro de 1994 a mesma equipa tratou, segundo estes critérios, 185 ancas, sendo a lise óssea acetabular classificada do grau I em 35 casos, do grau II em 128 casos e do grau III em 16. A lise femoral foi do grau I em 38 casos, do grau II em 75 e do grau III em 47. O tempo de evolução pós-operatório variou entre o máximo de 4 anos e 9 meses e o mínimo de 6 meses, sendo a média de 2 anos e 11 meses. Como complicações mais significativas referimos 5 casos de infecção, 23 de luxação da prótese, 1 de reabsorção marcada do enxerto maciço com desprendimento do componente acetabular, 5 de afundamento da haste de Wagner que foi necessário substituir por outra de maior calibre e 3 casos de ausência de consolidação da "janela" óssea extensa (via transfemoral) sem repercussões clínicas. Os resultados clínicos foram considerados satisfatórios, pois que, segundo os critérios de Harris, pré-operatoriamente os doentes tinham em média uma pontuação de 40 e na última avaliação uma média de 76. Segundo a opinião do doente, 58°/o encontram-se entusiasmados com o resultado, 36% satisfeitos e apenas 6°/o decepcionados

The Role of Ophthalmic Imaging in Central Nervous System Degeneration in Systemic Lupus Erythematosus

Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is an autoimmune connective tissue disorder that can involve any organ system. Central nervous system involvement can be a severe life threatening complication, ultimately resulting in severe neurodegenerative changes. Magnetic resonance imaging suggests that neurodegeneration, which may have deleterious effects on brain function, may occur early in SLE and experimental models suggest that neuroprotection may be feasible and beneficial. The retina is an extension of the brain. Recent ophthalmic imaging technologies are capable of identifying early changes in retinal and choroidal morphology and circulation that may reflect CNS degeneration. However, their utility in monitoring CNS involvement in SLE has been poorly studied as these have only been performed in small cohorts, in a cross-sectional design, non-quantitatively and without correlation to disease activity. The authors aim to review the current understanding of neurodegeneration associated with SLE, with particular focus on the visual pathway. We describe the neuropathology of the visual system in SLE and the evidence for retinal and choroidal neurodegenerative and microvascular changes using optical coherence tomography technology. We aim to describe the potential role of optical imaging modalities in NPSLE diagnosis and their likely impact on the study of neuronal function.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Depth of cure of bulk-fill light cured composite resins with different initiators

Poster presented at the 3rd International Congress of CiiEM - Research and Innovation in Human and Health Sciences, Monte da Caparica, Portugal, 20-22 June 2018N/

Tuning pipelined scientific data analyses for efficient multicore execution

Scientific data analyses often apply a pipelined sequence of computational tasks to independent datasets. Each task in the pipeline captures and processes a dataset element, may be dependent on other tasks in the pipeline, may have a different computational complexity and may be filtered out from progressing in the pipeline. The goal of this work is to develop an efficient scheduler that automatically (i) manages a parallel data reading and an adequate data structure creation, (ii) adaptively defines the most efficient order of pipeline execution of the tasks, considering their inter-dependence and both the filtering out rate and the computational weight, and (iii) manages the parallel execution of the computational tasks in a multicore system, applied to the same or to different dataset elements. A real case study data analysis application from High Energy Physics (HEP) was used to validate the efficiency of this scheduler. Preliminary results show an impressive performance improvement of the pipeline tuning when compared to the original sequential HEP code (up to a 35x speedup in a dual 12-core system), and also show significant performance speedups over conventional parallelization approaches of this case study application (up to 10x faster in the same system).Project Search-ON2 (NORTE-07-0162- FEDER-000086), co-funded by the North Portugal Regional Operational Programme (ON.2 - O Novo Norte), under the National Strategic Reference Framework, through the European Regional Development Fund

Removing inefficiencies from scientific code : the study of the Higgs boson couplings to top quarks

Publicado em "Computational science and its applications – ICCSA 2014 : proceedings", Series : Lecture notes in computer science, vol. 8582This paper presents a set of methods and techniques to remove inefficiencies in a data analysis application used in searches by the ATLAS Experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. Profiling scientific code helped to pinpoint design and runtime inefficiencies, the former due to coding and data structure design. The data analysis code used by groups doing searches in the ATLAS Experiment contributed to clearly identify some of these inefficiencies and to give suggestions on how to prevent and overcome those common situations in scientific code to improve the efficient use of available computational resources in a parallel homogeneous platform.This work is funded by National Funds through the FCT - Fundaçãoo para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) within project PEst-OE/EEI/UI0752/2014, by LIP (Laborat ́orio de Instrumentação e Física Experimental de Partículas), and the SeARCH cluster (REEQ/443/EEI/2005)