ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS TO ESTIMATE THE SORPTION AND DESORPTION OF THE HERBICIDE LINURON IN BRAZILIAN SOILS.

Generally, herbicides used in Brazil follow manufacturer's recommendations, which often do not consider soil attributes. Statistical models that include the physicochemical properties of the soil involved in herbicide retention processes could enable greater precision in herbicide dose decision-making. This study evaluated the potential of artificial neural networks (ANNs) to predict the sorption and desorption of the herbicide linuron in Brazilian soils with different attributes.

Multifactorial evaluation of an ultra-fast process for electrospinning of recycled expanded polystyrene to manufacture high-efficiency membranes for nanoparticle air filtration.

The increased production of polystyrene waste has led to the need to find efficient ways to dispose of it. One possibility is the use of solid waste to produce filter media by the electrospinning technique. The aim of this work was to develop an ultra-fast electrospinning process applied to recycled polystyrene, with statistical evaluation of the influence of polymeric solution parameters (polymer concentration and percentage of DL-limonene) and process variables (flow rate, voltage, and type of support) on nanoparticle collection efficiency, air permeability, and fiber diameter.

Sensitivity and antioxidant response of forest species seedlings to the atrazine under simulated conditions of subsurface water contamination.

Atrazine is an herbicide with a high soil leaching capacity, contaminating subsurface water sources. Once the water table is contaminated, riparian species can be exposed to atrazine. In this way, understanding the impacts of this exposure must be evaluated for planning strategies that minimize the effects of this herbicide on native forest species.

Herbicide Leaching in Soil with Different Properties: Perspectives from Commercial Formulations and Analytical Standards.

The leaching of herbicides into the soil is essential to control germinating seeds and parts of vegetative weeds. However, herbicide transportation to deeper soil layers can result in groundwater contamination and, consequently, environmental issues. In this research, our objective was to investigate differences in herbicide leaching between commercial formulations and analytical standards using three different soils.

ACUTE ABDOMEN IN INTENSIVE CARE UNIT: ETIOLOGY, COMORBIDITY AND SEVERITY OF 1,523 PATIENTS.

Background: Clinical features and outcomes of patients admitted to the intensive care unit due to acute abdomen are important to be investigated.

Aims: To evaluate the outcomes of critically ill subjects with acute abdomen according to etiology, comorbidity and severity.

Methods: Outcomes of 1,523 patients (878 women, mean age 66±18 years) consecutively admitted to a specialized gastrointestinal intensive care unit with different causes of acute abdomen from January 2012 to December 2019, were retrospectively evaluated according to etiology, comorbidity and severity.

Understanding the combining ability of nutritional, agronomic and industrial traits in soybean F progenies.

Obtaining soybean genotypes that combine better nutrient uptake, higher oil and protein levels in the grains, and high grain yield is one of the major challenges for current breeding programs. To avoid the development of unpromising populations, selecting parents for crossbreeding is a crucial step in the breeding pipeline. Therefore, our objective was to estimate the combining ability of soybean cultivars based on the F generation, aiming to identify superior segregating parents and populations for agronomic, nutritional and industrial traits.

Boundary-aware glomerulus segmentation: Toward one-to-many stain generalization.

The growing availability of scanned whole-slide images (WSIs) has allowed nephropathology to open new possibilities for medical decision-making over high-resolution images. Diagnosis of renal WSIs includes locating and identifying specific structures in the tissue. Considering the glomerulus as one of the first structures analyzed by pathologists, we propose here a novel convolutional neural network for glomerulus segmentation.

Interaction between herbicides applied in mixtures alters the conception of its environmental impact.

Herbicide mixtures have often been used to control weeds in crops worldwide, but the behavior of these mixtures in the environment is still poorly understood. Laboratory and greenhouse tests have been conducted to study the interaction of the herbicides diuron, hexazinone, and sulfometuron-methyl which have been applied alone and in binary and ternary mixtures in the processes of sorption, desorption, half-life, and leaching in the soil. A new index of the risk of leaching of these herbicides has also been proposed.

Comparison of General and Liver-Specific Prognostic Scores in Their Ability to Predict Mortality in Cirrhotic Patients Admitted to the Intensive Care Unit.

Introduction: Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation (APACHE) II and III and Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) are prognostic scores commonly used in the intensive care unit (ICU). Their accuracy in predicting mortality has not been adequately evaluated in comparison to prognostic scores commonly used in critically ill cirrhotic patients with acute decompensation (AD) or acute-on-chronic liver failure (ACLF).

Aims: This study was conducted to evaluate the performance of prognostic scores, including APACHE II, SOFA, Chronic Liver Failure Consortium (CLIF-C) SOFA, Child-Turcotte-Pugh (CPS), Model for End-Stage Liver Disease (MELD), MELD-Na, MELD to serum sodium ratio (MESO) index, CLIF-C organ failure (CLIF-C OF), CLIF-C ACLF, and CLIF-C AD scores, in predicting mortality of cirrhotic patients admitted to the ICU.

Sorption kinetics of sulfometuron-methyl in different Brazilian soils.

The speed of the sorption reaction alters the bioavailability of herbicides in the soil and, consequently, the transport and transformation processes of the molecule in the environment. In this research, the sorption kinetics of sulfometuron-methyl was evaluated in different Brazilian soils in which sugarcane is grown. The sorption speed was carried out by the batch equilibrium method.

Remedial capacity of diclosulam by cover plants in different edaphoclimatic conditions.

Pre-emergent herbicides have been developed for their long residual effect; however, they can make sensitive successor cultures unfeasible. Waste remediation techniques are needed for sustainable agricultural systems; for this, the edaphoclimatic asymmetries in the country must be considered. This study aimed to evaluate the remedial capacity of the herbicide diclosulam by covering crops under different edaphoclimatic conditions.

A Real-World Approach on the Problem of Chart Recognition Using Classification, Detection and Perspective Correction.

Data charts are widely used in our daily lives, being present in regular media, such as newspapers, magazines, web pages, books, and many others. In general, a well-constructed data chart leads to an intuitive understanding of its underlying data. In the same way, when data charts have wrong design choices, a redesign of these representations might be needed.

Classification of glomerular hypercellularity using convolutional features and support vector machine.

Glomeruli are histological structures of the kidney cortex formed by interwoven blood capillaries, and are responsible for blood filtration. Glomerular lesions impair kidney filtration capability, leading to protein loss and metabolic waste retention. An example of lesion is the glomerular hypercellularity, which is characterized by an increase in the number of cell nuclei in different areas of the glomeruli.

Multivariate analysis and multiple linear regression as a tool to estimate the behavior of hexazinone in Brazilian soils.

Weed control efficiency and the environmental contamination potential of herbicides depend on soil sorption and desorption. Among the indexes that evaluate the soil adsorption processes, the coefficients sorption (Kf) and desorption (Kf) obtained by Freundlich isotherms can provide accurate information about the behavior of an herbicide in the soil. The values of Kf and Kf of an herbicide vary according to the physicochemical characteristics of the soil, so it is possible to estimate these coefficients with high precision if good predictive mathematical models are constructed.

Core-sheath nanostructured chitosan-based nonwovens as a potential drug delivery system for periodontitis treatment.

Core-sheath nanofibers were successfully prepared via coaxial electrospinning by using chitosan with well-defined structural characteristics as the shell layer and poly (vinyl alcohol) (PVA) containing tetracycline hydrochloride (TH) as the core layer. The effects of the average degree of deacetylation (DD‾) of chitosan and the post-electrospinning genipin crosslinking on physicochemical and biological properties of resulting nonwovens were evaluated. Defect-free and geometrically uniform nanofibers with diameters predominantly in the range of 100-300 nm were prepared, and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) revealed the core-sheath structures and its preservation after crosslinking.

Multivariate analysis reveals significant diuron-related changes in the soil composition of different Brazilian regions.

Sorption and desorption determine the amount of an herbicide in soil solution. Therefore, knowledge of the sorption and desorption coefficients in different soils is an essential factor to estimate the potential for environmental contamination by herbicides. We evaluated the feasibility of multivariate and linear discriminant analyses to predict the sorption and desorption capacity of a soil for diuron, one of the most used herbicides on sugarcane plantations.