Cookies Policy
The website need some cookies and similar means to function. If you permit us, we will use those means to collect data on your visits for aggregated statistics to improve our service. Find out More
Accept Reject
  • Menu
Publications

2021

Recreating a TransMedia Architectural Location In-Game via Modular Environment Assets

Authors
Statham, N; Jacob, J; Fridenfalk, M; Rodrigues, R;

Publication
ICEC

Abstract
Existing architectural locations are often recreated in games using unique “hero” meshes instead of modular assets, which in these cases are commonly perceived as too limited or inaccurate. This applies to real-world locations or, as in this case study, transmedia locations. This study proposes that hero meshes are not always necessary and that modular assets have the potential to recreate even complex architecture. The paper presents a set of development steps for modular assets for game environment art according to a game design lifecycle, and proceeds to demonstrate its potential via a case study. The case study focuses on planning and designing steps; these preliminary results indicate that, when well-designed, modular assets have the potential to recreate complex architectural locations without requiring extensive use of hero meshes. Adopting modular assets instead of hero meshes could potentially reduce the cost and development time of environment art for transmedia games and games featuring real-world architectural locations, as well as increase the reusability of such assets.

2021

Effectiveness of prehospital nursing interventions in stabilizing trauma victims [Eficácia da intervenção da enfermagem pré-hospitalar na estabilização das vítimas de trauma] [Eficacia de la intervención de enfermería prehospitalaria en la estabilización de víctimas de traumatismos]

Authors
Mota, M; Cunha, M; Santos, E; Figueiredo, Â; Silva, M; Campos, R; Santos, MR;

Publication
Revista de Enfermagem Referencia

Abstract
Background: Trauma is a public health issue with a significant social and economic impact. However, national data on its characterization and the role of nursing in its management is still scarce. Objective: To assess the effectiveness of prehospital nursing interventions in stabilizing trauma victims provided by nurses of Immediate Life Support Ambulances in Portugal. Methodology: Observational, prospective, and descriptive-correlational study. Data were collected by nurses of the Immediate Life Support Ambulances in mainland Portugal, from 01/03/2019 to 30/04/2020, and the Azores, from 01/10/2019 to 30/04/2020. Trauma severity indices were assessed before and after the nursing interventions. Results: This study included 606 cases (79.4% blunt trauma; 40.8% road accidents) reported by 171 nurses. Nurses performed mostly interventions for hemodynamic support (88.9%) and non-pharma-cological pain control (90.6%) of trauma victims. The nursing interventions improved the Revised Trauma Score and the Shock Index (p<0.001). Conclusion: Prehospital nursing interventions improve trauma victims’ clinical status.

2021

Immune Response Model Fitting to CD4 + T Cell Data in Lymphocytic Choriomeningitis Virus LCMV infection

Authors
Afsar, A; Martins, F; Oliveira, BMPM; Pinto, AA;

Publication
Springer Proceedings in Mathematics and Statistics

Abstract
We make two fits of an ODE system with 5 equations that model immune response by CD4 + T cells with the presence of regulatory T cells (Tregs). We fit the simulations to data regarding gp61 and NP309 epitopes from mice infected with lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus LCMV. We optimized parameters relating to: the T cell maximum growth rate; the T cell capacity; the T cell homeostatic level; and the ending time of the immune activation phase after infection. We quantitatively and qualitatively compare the obtained results with previous fits in the literature using different ODE models and we show that we are able to calibrate the model and obtain good fits describing the data. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

2021

A Review on Deep Learning Methods for Chest X-Ray based Abnormality Detection and Thoracic Pathology Classification

Authors
Rocha J.; Mendonça A.M.; Campilho A.;

Publication
U.Porto Journal of Engineering

Abstract
Backed by more powerful computational resources and optimized training routines, Deep Learning models have proven unprecedented performance and several benefits to extract information from chest X-ray data. This is one of the most common imaging exams, whose increasing demand is reflected in the aggravated radiologists’ workload. Consequently, healthcare would benefit from computer-aided diagnosis systems to prioritize certain exams and further identify possible pathologies. Pioneering work in chest X-ray analysis has focused on the identification of specific diseases, but to the best of the authors’ knowledge no paper has specifically reviewed relevant work on abnormality detection and multi-label thoracic pathology classification. This paper focuses on those issues, selecting the leading chest X-ray based deep learning strategies for comparison. In addition, the paper discloses the current annotated public chest X-ray databases, covering the common thorax diseases.

2021

Refactoring the Whitby Intelligent Tutoring System for Clean Architecture

Authors
Brown, PS; Dimitrova, V; Hart, G; Cohn, AG; Moura, P;

Publication
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF LOGIC PROGRAMMING

Abstract
Whitby is the server-side of an Intelligent Tutoring System application for learning SystemTheoretic Process Analysis (STPA), a methodology used to ensure the safety of anything that can be represented with a systems model. The underlying logic driving the reasoning behind Whitby is Situation Calculus, which is a many-sorted logic with situation, action, and object sorts. The Situation Calculus is applied to Ontology Authoring and Contingent Scaffolding: the primary activities within Whitby. Thus many fluents and actions are aggregated in Whitby from these two sub-applications and from Whitby itself, but all are available through a common situation query interface that does not depend upon any of the fluents or actions. Each STPA project in Whitby is a single situation term, which is queried for fluents that include the ontology, and to determine what pedagogical interventions to offer. Initially Whitby was written in Prolog using a module system. In the interest of a cleaner architecture and implementation with improved code reuse and extensibility, the initial application was refactored into Logtalk. This refactoring includes decoupling the Situation Calculus reasoner, Ontology Authoring framework, and Contingent Scaffolding framework into third-party libraries that can be reused in other applications. This extraction was achieved by inverting dependencies via Logtalk protocols and categories, which are reusable interfaces and components that provide functionally cohesive sets of predicate declarations and predicate definitions. In this paper the architectures of two iterations of Whitby are evaluated with respect to the motivations behind the refactor: clean architecture enabling code reuse and extensibility.

2021

Identifying and ranking super spreaders in real world complex networks without influence overlap

Authors
Maji, G; Dutta, A; Malta, MC; Sen, S;

Publication
EXPERT SYSTEMS WITH APPLICATIONS

Abstract
In the present-days complex networks modeled on real-world data contain millions of nodes and billions of links. Identifying super spreaders in such an extensive network is a challenging task. Super spreaders are the most important or influential nodes in the network that play the central role during an infection spreading or information diffusion process. Depending on the application, either the most influential node needs to be identified, or a set of initial seed nodes are identified that can maximize the collective influence or the total spread in the network. Many centrality measures have been proposed to rank nodes in a complex network such as 'degree', 'closeness', 'betweenness', 'coreness' or 'k-shell' centrality, among others. All have some kind of inherent limitations. Mixed degree decomposition or m-shell is an improvement over k-shell that yields better ranking. Many researchers have employed single node identification heuristics to select multiple seed nodes by considering top-k nodes from the ranked list. This approach does not results in the optimal seed nodeset due to the considerable overlap in total spreading influence. Influence overlap occurs when multiple nodes from the seed nodeset influence a specific node, and it is counted multiple times during total collective influence computation. In this paper, we exploit the 'node degree', 'closeness' and 'coreness' among the nodes and propose novel heuristic template to rank the super spreaders in a network. We employ k-shell and m-shell as a coreness measure in two variants for a comparative evaluation. We use a geodesic-based constraint (enforcing a minimum distance between seed nodes) to select an initial seed nodeset from that ranked nodes for influence maximization instead of selecting the top-k nodes naively. All models and metrics are updated to avoid overlapping influence during total spread computation. Experimental simulation with the SIR (Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered) spreading model and an evaluation with performance metrics like spreadability, monotonicity of ranking, Kendall's rank correlation on some benchmark real-world networks establish the superiority of the proposed methods and the improved seed node selection technique.

  • 1113
  • 4387