Sequence-aware multimodal page classification of Brazilian legal documents

The Brazilian Supreme Court receives tens of thousands of cases each semester. Court employees spend thousands of hours to execute the initial analysis and classification of those cases -- which takes effort away from posterior, more complex stages of the case management workflow. In this paper, we explore multimodal classification of documents from Brazil's Supreme Court. We train and evaluate our methods on a novel multimodal dataset of 6,510 lawsuits (339,478 pages) with manual annotation assigning each page to one of six classes. Each lawsuit is an ordered sequence of pages, which are stored both as an image and as a corresponding text extracted through optical character recognition. We first train two unimodal classifiers: a ResNet pre-trained on ImageNet is fine-tuned on the images, and a convolutional network with filters of multiple kernel sizes is trained from scratch on document texts. We use them as extractors of visual and textual features, which are then combined through our proposed Fusion Module. Our Fusion Module can handle missing textual or visual input by using learned embeddings for missing data. Moreover, we experiment with bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (biLSTM) networks and linear-chain conditional random fields to model the sequential nature of the pages. The multimodal approaches outperform both textual and visual classifiers, especially when leveraging the sequential nature of the pages.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures. This preprint, which was originally written on 8 April 2021, has not undergone peer review or any post-submission improvements or corrections. The Version of Record of this article is published in the International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, and is available online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10032-022-00406-7 and https://rdcu.be/cRvv

Técnicas cirúrgicas para correção de aneurisma de Aorta : Surgical techniques for aortic aneurysm repair

O aneurisma de aorta abdominal é definido como uma dilatação segmentar maior que 50% do diâmetro normal, podendo variar, entre vários fatores, principalmente com a idade, sexo e hábitos de vida, necessitando de acompanhamento ambulatorial e, em casos selcionados, de intervenção cirúrgica. A grande maioria dos pacientes são assintomáticos, podendo em poucos casos apresentar sintomas inespecíficos como dor abdominal ou até mesmo massa abdominal pulsátil. Foram apresentados os fatores de risco, epidemiologia, etiologia, fisiopatologia, rastreamento, diagnóstico e possibilidades de tratamento cirúrgico e endovascular, bem como prognóstico. O Objetivo do artigo foi avaliar o melhor método intervencionista para tratamento de aneurisma de aorta abdominal de acordo com os diferentes tipos de pacientes que envolvem suas determinadas comorbidades, propiciando adequado tratamento sendo este endovascular ou cirúrgico convencional. Foram analisadas as taxas de complicações, necessidade de reintervenções, morbimortalidade e tempo de internação pós procedimento, além do prognóstico

Vivência e práticas para uma alimentação saudável na merenda escolar da rede municipal de Araguatins - TO

Trabalho apresentado no II Congresso Nacional do PROJETO RONDON, realizado em Florianópolis, SC, no período de 23 a 25 de setembro de 2015 - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina.A Segurança Alimentar e Nutricional significa garantir, a todos, condições de acesso a alimentos básicos de qualidade, em quantidade suficiente, com base em práticas alimentares saudáveis, contribuindo, assim, para uma existência digna com desenvolvimento integral da pessoa humana. Este trabalho busca fazer uma reflexão sobre a realidade vivenciada pela equipe participante do Projeto Rondon, Operação Itacaíunas que atuou no município de Araguatins-TO. Com as oficinas oferecidas por ambas as Universidades no município e também por meio das refeições oferecidas no alojamento da equipe no período da Operação, percebeu-se a necessidade de uma abordagem mais efetiva sobre o alto consumo de açúcar, sal e gordura e seus reflexos na saúde. No contexto da promoção das práticas alimentares saudáveis, estavam programadas duas oficinas direcionadas para as merendeiras da rede municipal de ensino. Uma das oficinas visava apresentar as Boas Práticas de Manipulação de Alimentos para que fossem aplicadas no preparo da merenda escolar de forma a minimizar o risco de contaminações. A segunda apontava alternativas para o aproveitamento, de forma atrativa e nutritiva, de partes de alimentos normalmente descartados, além de apresentar novas alternativas para enriquecer o cardápio da merenda escolar. Percebeu-se também, por meio da oficina de higiene bucal, que muitas crianças e adultos apresentavam problemas de cárie dentária, possivelmente em consequência dos hábitos de alimentação. A partir da problemática vivenciada pela equipe, se discutiu a necessidade em ampliar as oficinas propostas às merendeiras e inserir, além dos alunos da área de alimentos, alunos da área de odontologia, medicina e farmácia, com o objetivo de conscientizar a respeito destes hábitos alimentares. Para que a atividade fosse mais efetiva foram apresentados alguns alimentos comerciais amplamente consumidos, e juntamente a sua embalagem foram apresentadas embalagens contento a quantidade de açúcar ou sal contida neste alimento. Assim, as oficinas foram expandidas e atuaram alunos de ambas as Universidades de forma integrada e interdisciplinar. Esta estratégia foi aplicada para que ocorra uma construção de práticas alimentares saudáveis na merenda escolar a partir da conscientização das merendeiras, que estão diretamente envolvidas neste processo. Finalmente, foi observado que nos dias seguintes à oficina o teor de açúcar contido nos alimentos fornecidos no alojamento da equipe foi menor. Também foi observado que nos momentos de intervalo das oficinas foi disponibilizado café sem açúcar, atitude esta que foi voluntária por parte das merendeiras envolvidas

The pace of life for forest trees.

Tree growth and longevity trade-offs fundamentally shape the terrestrial carbon balance. Yet, we lack a unified understanding of how such trade-offs vary across the world's forests. By mapping life history traits for a wide range of species across the Americas, we reveal considerable variation in life expectancies from 10 centimeters in diameter (ranging from 1.3 to 3195 years) and show that the pace of life for trees can be accurately classified into four demographic functional types. We found emergent patterns in the strength of trade-offs between growth and longevity across a temperature gradient. Furthermore, we show that the diversity of life history traits varies predictably across forest biomes, giving rise to a positive relationship between trait diversity and productivity. Our pan-latitudinal assessment provides new insights into the demographic mechanisms that govern the carbon turnover rate across forest biomes

Overactive bladder – 18 years – part I

ABSTRACT Traditionally, the treatment of overactive bladder syndrome has been based on the use of oral medications with the purpose of reestablishing the detrusor stability. The recent better understanding of the urothelial physiology fostered conceptual changes, and the oral anticholinergics – pillars of the overactive bladder pharmacotherapy – started to be not only recognized for their properties of inhibiting the detrusor contractile activity, but also their action on the bladder afference, and therefore, on the reduction of the symptoms that constitute the syndrome. Beta-adrenergic agonists, which were recently added to the list of drugs for the treatment of overactive bladder, still wait for a definitive positioning – as either a second-line therapy or an adjuvant to oral anticholinergics. Conservative treatment failure, whether due to unsatisfactory results or the presence of adverse side effects, define it as refractory overactive bladder. In this context, the intravesical injection of botulinum toxin type A emerged as an effective option for the existing gap between the primary measures and more complex procedures such as bladder augmentation. Sacral neuromodulation, described three decades ago, had its indication reinforced in this overactive bladder era. Likewise, the electric stimulation of the tibial nerve is now a minimally invasive alternative to treat those with refractory overactive bladder. The results of the systematic literature review on the oral pharmacological treatment and the treatment of refractory overactive bladder gave rise to this second part of the review article Overactive Bladder – 18 years, prepared during the 1st Latin-American Consultation on Overactive Bladder

In COVID-19 Health Messaging, Loss Framing Increases Anxiety with Little-to-No Concomitant Benefits: Experimental Evidence from 84 Countries

The COVID-19 pandemic (and its aftermath) highlights a critical need to communicate health information effectively to the global public. Given that subtle differences in information framing can have meaningful effects on behavior, behavioral science research highlights a pressing question: Is it more effective to frame COVID-19 health messages in terms of potential losses (e.g., "If you do not practice these steps, you can endanger yourself and others") or potential gains (e.g., "If you practice these steps, you can protect yourself and others")? Collecting data in 48 languages from 15,929 participants in 84 countries, we experimentally tested the effects of message framing on COVID-19-related judgments, intentions, and feelings. Loss- (vs. gain-) framed messages increased self-reported anxiety among participants cross-nationally with little-to-no impact on policy attitudes, behavioral intentions, or information seeking relevant to pandemic risks. These results were consistent across 84 countries, three variations of the message framing wording, and 560 data processing and analytic choices. Thus, results provide an empirical answer to a global communication question and highlight the emotional toll of loss-framed messages. Critically, this work demonstrates the importance of considering unintended affective consequences when evaluating nudge-style interventions

Sensitivity of South American tropical forests to an extreme climate anomaly

The tropical forest carbon sink is known to be drought sensitive, but it is unclear which forests are the most vulnerable to extreme events. Forests with hotter and drier baseline conditions may be protected by prior adaptation, or more vulnerable because they operate closer to physiological limits. Here we report that forests in drier South American climates experienced the greatest impacts of the 2015–2016 El Niño, indicating greater vulnerability to extreme temperatures and drought. The long-term, ground-measured tree-by-tree responses of 123 forest plots across tropical South America show that the biomass carbon sink ceased during the event with carbon balance becoming indistinguishable from zero (−0.02 ± 0.37 Mg C ha −1 per year). However, intact tropical South American forests overall were no more sensitive to the extreme 2015–2016 El Niño than to previous less intense events, remaining a key defence against climate change as long as they are protected