Successful Treatment of Cutaneous Blastomycosis in a Renal Transplant Patient With BK Virus Infection: A Case Report

This is the first case report from Turkey to describe a renal transplant complicated by subcutaneous blastomycosis and BK infection. The cutaneous lesions were successfully treated with amphotericin B and fluconazole. The presence of BK infection led to graft failure. Infections with uncommonly seen organisms should be kept in mind due to the impaired T-cell immunity in transplantation

A New Method to Represent Speech Signals Via Predefined Signature and Envelope Sequences

A novel systematic procedure referred to as “SYMPES” to model speech signals is introduced. The structure of SYMPES is based on the creation of the so-called predefined “signature S={SR(n)} and envelope E={EK(n)}” sets. These sets are speaker and language independent. Once the speech signals are divided into frames with selected lengths, then each frame sequence Xi(n) is reconstructed by means of the mathematical form Xi(n)=CiEK(n)SR(n). In this representation, Ci is called the gain factor, SR(n) and EK(n) are properly assigned from the predefined signature and envelope sets, respectively. Examples are given to exhibit the implementation of SYMPES. It is shown that for the same compression ratio or better, SYMPES yields considerably better speech quality over the commercially available coders such as G.726 (ADPCM) at 16 kbps and voice excited LPC-10E (FS1015) at 2.4 kbps