Evaluation of atmospheric Poaceae pollen concentration using a neural network applied to a coastal Atlantic climate region.

In the South of Europe an important percentage of population suffers pollen allergies, being the Poaceae pollen the major source. One of aerobiology's objectives is to develop statistical models enabling the short- and long-term prediction of atmospheric pollen concentrations to take preventative measures to protect allergic patients from the severity of the atmospheric pollen season. The implementation of a computational model based on supervised MLP neural network was applied for the prediction of the atmospheric Poaceae pollen concentration. There is a good correlation between the values predicted by the ANN for the training cases in comparison with the real pollen concentrations. A high coefficient of linear regression (R(2)) of 0.9696 was obtained. The accuracy of the neural network developed was tested with data from 2006 and 2007, which was not taken into account to establish the aforementioned models. Neural networks provided us a good tool to forecasting allergenic airborne pollen concentration helping the automation of the prediction system in the aerobiological information diffusion to the population suffering from allergic problems.

[Considerations on interdisciplinarity: theory and practice]. / Consideraciones en Torno a la Interdisciplinariedad: Teoría y Práctica.

The curricular content of undergraduate programs in the health sciences should integrate, in a logical and coherent manner, competencies in general education as well as professional and interdisciplinary competencies. Among the principal obstacles for integration discussed are inflexibility of administrative and accreditation policies and lack of an interdisciplinary vision in curriculum development. This article examines the need to prepare a graduate with competencies to attend patient/client as a holistic human being, thus requiring to make use of psychological, ethical, legal & philosophical knowledge as well as concepts, skill and attitudes of the profession. The program of Bachelor in Health Sciences of the College of Health Related Professions is presented as one of an interdisciplinary nature, in which 23 percent of the total credits are general education courses, 49 percent are professional courses, 17 percent are interdisciplinary courses and 11 percent are elective courses.