objectives: the purpose of this study was to develop and test a new tool for radiographic densitometry by combining periapical films and aluminum step wedge. materials and methods: we reviewed 50 kodak e-speed intraoral films. an aluminum step wedge consisting of 16 steps was constructed. each step was 1mmx3mx10mm. the step wedge was exposed to varying exposure times, ranging from 0.05 second t...

Both research and practice indicate that traditional universal DBMS architecture hardly satisfies new trends in data processing, particularly in the context of cloud computing and Big Data problems. New database architectures and their basic features will be described, particularly their horizontal scalability and concurrency model, which is mostly weaker than ACID transactions in relational SQ...

New insights into the intrarenal renin-angiotensin (Ang) system have modified our traditional view of the system. However, many finer details of this network of peptides and associated peptidases remain unclear. We hypothesized that a computational systems biology approach, applied to peptidomic data, could help to unravel the network of enzymatic conversions. We built and refined a Bayesian ne...

The great expansion of communication networks has made available to users a huge number of heterogeneous and autonomous data repositories that present different structures/organizations, query languages and data semantics. In that context it is clear that new information retrieval techniques with a strategy that focuses on information content and semantics are needed. We propose to use domain s...

Segmentation of blood vessels in retinal images is an important part in retinal image analysis for diagnosis and treatment of eye diseases for large screening systems. In this paper, we addressed the problem of background and noise extraction from retinal images. Blood vessels usually have central light reflex and poor local contrast, hence the results yield by blood vessel segmentation algorit...

This study investigated the physicochemical characteristics of black garlic (BG) after different thermal processing steps. Compared with fresh garlic (FG), the moisture content and pH in BG decreased significantly, while the ash content and browning intensity increased during thermal processing. The total mineral and the free sugar contents were significantly higher than that of the BG2 and BG4...

The production of chicken feet is primarily intended for foreign markets, and there is still no specific legislation in Brazil that determines the quality standard of these products. The bacteriological quality of chicken feet was evaluated as a product for human consumption at different steps of the technological processes. Eighty broiler feet from 20 lots at 4 steps of processing were collect...