Automatic Detection of Laryngeal Pathology on Sustained Vowels Using Short-Term Cepstral Parameters: Analysis of Performance and Theoretical Justification

The majority of speech signal analysis procedures for automatic detection of laryngeal pathologies mainly rely on parameters extracted from time domain processing. Moreover, calculation of these parameters often requires prior pitch period estimation; therefore, their validity heavily depends on the robustness of pitch detection. Within this paper, an alternative approach based on cepstral- domain processing is presented which has the advantage of not requiring pitch estimation, thus providing a gain in both simplicity and robustness. While the proposed scheme is similar to solutions based on Mel-frequency cepstral parameters, already present in literature, it has an easier physical interpretation while achieving similar performance standards

Risk accuracy of type 2 diabetes in middle aged adults: Associations with sociodemographic, clinical, psychological and behavioural factors

Objective To identify the proportion of individuals with an accurate perception of their risk of type 2 diabetes (T2D) prior to, immediately after and eight weeks after receiving a personalised risk estimate. Additionally, we aimed to explore what factors are associated with underestimation and overestimation immediately post-intervention. Methods Cohort study based on the data collected in the Diabetes Risk Communication Trial. We included 379 participants (mean age 48.9 (SD 7.4) years; 55.1 women) who received a genotypic or phenotypic risk estimate for T2D. Results While only 1.3 of participants perceived their risk accurately at baseline, this increased to 24.7 immediately after receiving a risk estimate and then dropped to 7.3 at eight weeks. Those who overestimated their risk at baseline continued to overestimate it, whereas those who underestimated their risk at baseline improved their risk accuracy. We did not identify any other characteristics associated with underestimation or overestimation immediately after receiving a risk estimate. Conclusion Understanding a received risk estimate is challenging for most participants with many continuing to have inaccurate risk perception after receiving the estimate. Practice implications Individuals who overestimate or underestimate their T2D risk before receiving risk information might require different approaches for altering their risk perception. © 2017 The Author

Spousal influence on physical activity in middle-aged and older adults

Low physical activity levels are a public health concern. Few studies have assessed the concordance of physical activity change among spouses. We studied this concordance during a 6-year period (baseline: 1987-1989; follow-up: 1993-1995) in 3,261 spousal pairs from the US-based Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) Study. Linear regression was used to examine the association between change in individuals' sport/exercise and leisure physical activity indices (ranging from 1 (low) to 5 (high)) and change in his or her spouse's indices. The association between individual and spousal changes in meeting physical activity recommendations was assessed with logistic regression. Individual changes in the sport/exercise and leisure indices were positively associated with spousal changes. For every standard deviation increase in their wives' sport/exercise index, men's exercise index increased by 0.09 (95% confidence interval: 0.05, 0.12) standard deviation; for every standard deviation increase in their wives' leisure index, men's leisure index increased by 0.08 standard deviation. Results were similar for women. Individuals had higher odds of meeting physical activity recommendations if their spouse met recommendations at both visits or just follow-up. In conclusion, changes in an individual's physical activity are positively associated with changes in his or her spouse's physical activity. Physical activity promotion efforts should consider targeting couples

Predicting Survival after Allogeneic Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation in Myelofibrosis : Performance of the Myelofibrosis Transplant Scoring System (MTSS) and Development of a New Prognostic Model

Accurate prognostic tools are crucial to assess the risk/benefit ratio of allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation (allo-HCT) in patients with myelofibrosis (MF). We aimed to evaluate the performance of the Myelofibrosis Transplant Scoring System (MTSS) and identify risk factors for survival in a multicenter series of 197 patients with MF undergoing allo-HCT. After a median follow-up of 3.1 years, 47% of patients had died, and the estimated 5-year survival rate was 51%. Projected 5-year risk of nonrelapse mortality and relapse incidence was 30% and 20%, respectively. Factors independently associated with increased mortality were a hematopoietic cell transplantation-specific comorbidity index (HCT-CI) ≥3 and receiving a graft from an HLA-mismatched unrelated donor or cord blood, whereas post-transplant cyclophosphamide (PT-Cy) was associated with improved survival. Donor type was the only parameter included in the MTSS model with independent prognostic value for survival. According to the MTSS, 3-year survival was 62%, 66%, 37%, and 17% for low-, intermediate-, high-, and very high-risk groups, respectively. By pooling together the low- and intermediate-risk groups, as well as the high- and very high-risk groups, we pinpointed 2 categories: standard risk and high risk (25% of the series). Three-year survival was 62% in standard-risk and 25% in high-risk categories (P <.001). We derived a risk score based on the 3 independent risk factors for survival in our series (donor type, HCT-CI, and PT-Cy). The corresponding 5-year survival for the low-, intermediate-, and high-risk categories was 79%, 55%, and 32%, respectively (P <.001). In conclusion, the MTSS model failed to clearly delineate 4 prognostic groups in our series but may still be useful to identify a subset of patients with poor outcome. We provide a simple prognostic scoring system for risk/benefit considerations before transplantation in patients with MF

Improved Gait Speed Calculation via Modulation Spectral Analysis of Noisy Accelerometer Data

Chronic diseases among older adults carry a heavy burden on a country's healthcare system and economy. As such, there is a critical need for the development of cost-effective, technology-based tools that can be scaled to meet the needs of older adults. Gait speed, for example, is an important predictor of change in functional status and health outcomes in older adults. There is no universally accepted method for measuring gait speed in clinical practice and research, and differences in methods may influence the observed associations between gait speed and health. Moreover, existing methods are sensitive to artifacts, which are present in burgeoning low-cost wearable devices. To overcome this limitation, this paper proposes an artifact-robust gait speed calculation method using spectrooral signal processing of accelerometer data. To this end, a new so-called modulation domain gait speed (MD-GS) metric is proposed and tested on data collected from forty older adults performing a 400-meter walk test with a sensor placed on a waist-worn belt. Average gait speed calculation is performed for each participant. Experimental results showed the proposed method achieved very high correlation ( ρ =0.98 ) with ground truth gait speeds, as well as low errors and error variability (0.05±0.14) m/s, thus substantially outperforming gait speed calculation using a well-known kinematic model. The increased robustness against artifacts, make it a promising solution for aging-in-home applications based on low-cost wearable devices. © 2001-2012 IEEE