Developing a Low SNR Resistant, Text Independent Speaker Recognition System for Intercom Solutions - A Case Study

This article presents a case study on the development of a biometric voice verification system for an intercom solution, utilizing the DeepSpeaker neural network architecture. Despite the variety of solutions available in the literature, there is a noted lack of evaluations for text-independent systems under real conditions and with varying distances between the speaker and the microphone. This article aims to bridge this gap. The study explores the impact of different types of parameterizations on network performance, the effects of signal augmentation, and the results obtained under conditions of low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) and reverberation. The findings indicate a significant need for further research, as they suggest substantial room for improvement

Platelet-Based Liquid Biopsies through the Lens of Machine Learning

Liquid biopsies offer minimally invasive diagnosis and monitoring of cancer disease. This biosource is often analyzed using sequencing, which generates highly complex data that can be used using machine learning tools. Nevertheless, validating the clinical applications of such methods is challenging. It requires: (a) using data from many patients; (b) verifying potential bias concerning sample collection; and (c) adding interpretability to the model. In this work, we have used RNA sequencing data of tumor-educated platelets (TEPs) and performed a binary classification (cancer vs. no-cancer). First, we compiled a large-scale dataset with more than a thousand donors. Further, we used different convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and boosting methods to evaluate the classifier performance. We have obtained an impressive result of 0.96 area under the curve. We then identified different clusters of splice variants using expert knowledge from the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG). Employing boosting algorithms, we identified the features with the highest predictive power. Finally, we tested the robustness of the models using test data from novel hospitals. Notably, we did not observe any decrease in model performance. Our work proves the great potential of using TEP data for cancer patient classification and opens the avenue for profound cancer diagnostics