Publications by authors named "N R D Costa"

Low accessibility to mainstream psychosocial services disadvantages culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) populations, resulting in delayed care and high rates of unsupported psychological distress. Non-clinical interventions may play an important role in improving accessibility to psychosocial support, but what characterises best practice in this space remains unclear. This critical rapid review addressed this gap by searching for, and critically analysing, existing research on non-clinical psychosocial support services, drawing from a critical realist framework and Brossard and Chandler's (Brossard and Chandler, Explaining mental illness: Sociological perspectives, Bristol University Press, 2022) taxonomy of positions on culture and mental health.

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This article conducts a comparative study of the complexity reduction of neural network (NN) models for nonlinearity compensation used in digital subcarrier multiplexing (DSCM)-based optical communication systems. We employ the NN model based on bi-directional long short-term memory (biLSTM) and 1D-convolutional NN (1D-CNN) layers. To reduce the computation complexity of the proposed solution, weight clustering is applied to the NN.

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Unlabelled: Exacerbations of existing low back pain (LBP) or new LBP episodes are colloquially referred to as "flares". Although the experience of flares is common to many people with LBP, few validated measures enable people to self-report if they are experiencing a flare. This study examined the convergent validity of a person-dependent definition of flares ("a worsening of your low back pain that lasts from hours to weeks") as compared to (1) LBP intensity, (2) LBP-related pain interference, and (3) analgesic use, in a large, prospective research study of Veterans with LBP.

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Leishmaniasis is a neglected tropical disease caused by a protozoan of the genus Leishmania, which has visceral and cutaneous forms. The symptoms of leishmaniasis include high fever and weakness, and the cutaneous infection also causes lesions under the skin. The drugs used to treat leishmaniasis have become less effective due to the resistance mechanisms of the protozoa.

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Objective: The burden of chronic low back pain (CLBP) is increasing rapidly along with the global population ageing. Such an increase will occur more rapidly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Yet, few studies have explored the experiences of older adults with CLBP, and these are primarily conducted in high-income countries.

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