Improving healthcare delivery with new interactive visualization methods

Over the last years, the implementation and evolution of computer resources in hospital institutions has been improving both the financial and temporal efficiency of clinical processes, as well as the security in the transmission and maintenance of their data, also ensuring the reduction of clinical risk. Diagnosis, treatment and prevention of human illness are some of the most information-intensive of all intellectual tasks. Health providers often do not have or cannot find the information they need to respond quickly and appropriately to patient’s medical problems. Failure to review and follow up on patient’s test results in a timely manner, for example, represents a patient’s safety and malpractice concern. Therefore, it was sought to identify problems in a medical exams results management system and possible ways to improve this system in order to reduce both clinical risks and hospital costs. In this sense, a new medical exams visualization platform (AIDA-MCDT) was developed, specifically in the Hospital Center of Porto (CHP), with several new functionalities in order to make this process faster, intuitive and efficient, always guaranteeing the confidentiality and protection of patients’ personal data and significantly improving the usability of the system, leading to a better health care delivery.FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (UID/CEC/00319/2019

Extension of non-minimal derivative coupling theory and Hawking radiation in black-hole spacetime

We study the greybody factor and Hawking radiation with a non-minimal derivative coupling between the scalar field and the curvature in the background of the slowly rotating Kerr-Newman black hole. Our results show that both the absorption probability and luminosity of Hawking radiation of the scalar field increase with the coupling. Moreover, we also find that for the weak coupling $\eta<\eta_c$, the absorption probability and luminosity of Hawking radiation decrease when the black hole's Hawking temperature decreases; while for stronger coupling $\eta>\eta_c$, the absorption probability and luminosity of Hawking radiation increase on the contrary when the black hole's Hawking temperature decreases. This feature is similar to the Hawking radiation in a $d$-dimensional static spherically-symmetric black hole surrounded by quintessence \cite{chensong}.Comment: 17 pages, 6 figures, 1 table, Title changed, Appendix changed, accepted by JHE

Linearized stability analysis of gravastars in noncommutative geometry

In this work, we find exact gravastar solutions in the context of noncommutative geometry, and explore their physical properties and characteristics. The energy density of these geometries is a smeared and particle-like gravitational source, where the mass is diffused throughout a region of linear dimension $\sqrt{(\alpha)}$ due to the intrinsic uncertainty encoded in the coordinate commutator. These solutions are then matched to an exterior Schwarzschild spacetime. We further explore the dynamical stability of the transition layer of these gravastars, for the specific case of $\beta=M^2/\alpha<1.9$, where M is the black hole mass, to linearized spherically symmetric radial perturbations about static equilibrium solutions. It is found that large stability regions exist and, in particular, located sufficiently close to where the event horizon is expected to form.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure

Genes Suggest Ancestral Colour Polymorphisms Are Shared across Morphologically Cryptic Species in Arctic Bumblebees

email Suzanne orcd idCopyright: © 2015 Williams et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

Chikungunya virus entry is strongly inhibited by phospholipase A2 isolated from the venom of Crotalus durissus terrificus

Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) is the etiologic agent of Chikungunya fever, a globally spreading mosquito-borne disease. There is no approved antiviral or vaccine against CHIKV, highlighting an urgent need for novel therapies. In this context, snake venom proteins have demonstrated antiviral activity against several viruses, including arboviruses which are relevant to public health. In particular, the phospholipase A2CB (PLA2CB), a protein isolated from the venom of Crotalus durissus terrificus was previously shown to possess anti-inflammatory, antiparasitic, antibacterial and antiviral activities. In this study, we investigated the multiple effects of PLA2CB on the CHIKV replicative cycle in BHK-21 cells using CHIKV-nanoluc, a marker virus carrying nanoluciferase reporter. The results demonstrated that PLA2CB possess a strong anti-CHIKV activity with a selectivity index of 128. We identified that PLA2CB treatment protected cells against CHIKV infection, strongly impairing virus entry by reducing adsorption and post-attachment stages. Moreover, PLA2CB presented a modest yet significant activity towards post-entry stages of CHIKV replicative cycle. Molecular docking calculations indicated that PLA2CB may interact with CHIKV glycoproteins, mainly with E1 through hydrophobic interactions. In addition, infrared spectroscopy measurements indicated interactions of PLA2CB and CHIKV glycoproteins, corroborating with data from in silico analyses. Collectively, this data demonstrated the multiple antiviral effects of PLA2CB on the CHIKV replicative cycle, and suggest that PLA2CB interacts with CHIKV glycoproteins and that this interaction blocks binding of CHIKV virions to the host cells