321 research outputs found
Cell-free Circulating miRNA Biomarkers in Cancer.
Considerable attention and an enormous amount of resources have been dedicated to cancer biomarker discovery and validation. However, there are still a limited number of useful biomarkers available for clinical use. An ideal biomarker should be easily assayed with minimally invasive medical procedures but possess high sensitivity and specificity. Commonly used circulating biomarkers are proteins in serum, most of which require labor-intensive analysis hindered by low sensitivity in early tumor detection. Since the deregulation of microRNA (miRNA) is associated with cancer development and progression, profiling of circulating miRNAs has been used in a number of studies to identify novel minimally invasive miRNA biomarkers. In this review, we discuss the origin of the circulating cell-free miRNAs and their carriers in blood. We summarize the clinical use and function of potentially promising miRNA biomarkers in a variety of different cancers, along with their downstream target genes in tumor initiation and development. Additionally, we analyze some technical challenges in applying miRNA biomarkers to clinical practice
M-SpeechCLIP: Leveraging Large-Scale, Pre-Trained Models for Multilingual Speech to Image Retrieval
This work investigates the use of large-scale, pre-trained models (CLIP and
HuBERT) for multilingual speech-image retrieval. For non-English speech-image
retrieval, we outperform the current state-of-the-art performance by a wide
margin when training separate models for each language, and show that a single
model which processes speech in all three languages still achieves retrieval
scores comparable with the prior state-of-the-art. We identify key differences
in model behavior and performance between English and non-English settings,
presumably attributable to the English-only pre-training of CLIP and HuBERT.
Finally, we show that our models can be used for mono- and cross-lingual
speech-text retrieval and cross-lingual speech-speech retrieval, despite never
having seen any parallel speech-text or speech-speech data during training.Comment: Submitted to ICASSP 202
Time-Domain Multi-modal Bone/air Conducted Speech Enhancement
Previous studies have proven that integrating video signals, as a
complementary modality, can facilitate improved performance for speech
enhancement (SE). However, video clips usually contain large amounts of data
and pose a high cost in terms of computational resources and thus may
complicate the SE system. As an alternative source, a bone-conducted speech
signal has a moderate data size while manifesting speech-phoneme structures,
and thus complements its air-conducted counterpart. In this study, we propose a
novel multi-modal SE structure in the time domain that leverages bone- and
air-conducted signals. In addition, we examine two ensemble-learning-based
strategies, early fusion (EF) and late fusion (LF), to integrate the two types
of speech signals, and adopt a deep learning-based fully convolutional network
to conduct the enhancement. The experiment results on the Mandarin corpus
indicate that this newly presented multi-modal (integrating bone- and
air-conducted signals) SE structure significantly outperforms the single-source
SE counterparts (with a bone- or air-conducted signal only) in various speech
evaluation metrics. In addition, the adoption of an LF strategy other than an
EF in this novel SE multi-modal structure achieves better results.Comment: multi-modal, bone/air-conducted signals, speech enhancement, fully
convolutional networ
implications for health and disease
Many aspects of human physiology and behavior display rhythmicity with a
period of approximately 24 h. Rhythmic changes are controlled by an endogenous
time keeper, the circadian clock, and include sleep-wake cycles, physical and
mental performance capability, blood pressure, and body temperature.
Consequently, many diseases, such as metabolic, sleep, autoimmune and mental
disorders and cancer, are connected to the circadian rhythm. The development
of therapies that take circadian biology into account is thus a promising
strategy to improve treatments of diverse disorders, ranging from allergic
syndromes to cancer. Circadian alteration of body functions and behavior are,
at the molecular level, controlled and mediated by widespread changes in gene
expression that happen in anticipation of predictably changing requirements
during the day. At the core of the molecular clockwork is a well-studied
transcription-translation negative feedback loop. However, evidence is
emerging that additional post-transcriptional, RNA-based mechanisms are
required to maintain proper clock function. Here, we will discuss recent work
implicating regulated mRNA stability, translation and alternative splicing in
the control of the mammalian circadian clock, and its role in health and
disease
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