Use of Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients for Automatic Pathology Detection on Sustained Vowel Phonations: Mathematical and Statistical Justification

This paper presents a justification for the use of MFCC parameters in automatic pathology detection on speech. While such an application has produced good results up to now, only partial explanations to this good performance had been given before. The herein exposed explanation consists of an interpretation of the mathematical transformations involved in MFCC calculation and a statistical analysis that confirms the conclusions drawn from the theoretical reasoning

Current and future neutrino limits on the abundance of primordial black holes

Primordial black holes (PBHs) formed in the early Universe are sources of neutrinos emitted via Hawking radiation. Such astrophysical neutrinos could be detected at Earth and constraints on the abundance of comet-mass PBHs could be derived from the null observation of this neutrino flux. Here, we consider non-rotating PBHs and improve constraints using Super-Kamiokande neutrino data, as well as we perform forecasts for next-generation neutrino (Hyper-Kamiokande, JUNO, DUNE) and dark matter (DARWIN, ARGO) detectors, which we compare. For PBHs less massive than $\sim \textrm{few} \times 10^{14}$ g, PBHs would have already evaporated by now, whereas more massive PBHs would still be present and would constitute a fraction of the dark matter of the Universe. We consider monochromatic and extended (log-normal) mass distributions, and a PBH mass range spanning from $10^{12}$ g to $\sim 10^{16}$ g. Finally, we also compare our results with previous ones in the literature.Comment: 35 pages, 9 figures, code publicly available at https://github.com/vmmunoza/nuHawkHunte

Use of Cepstrum-based parameters for automatic pathology detection on speech. Analysis of performance and theoretical justification

The majority of speech signal analysis procedures for automatic pathology detection mostly 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

Detección del espacio glotal en imágenes laríngeas mediante transformada Watershed y Merging JND

El presente artículo describe un nuevo método para la detección del espacio glotal en imágenes laríngeas obtenidas de vídeos de alta o baja velocidad. El proceso de detección basa su eficacia en la combinación de varias técnicas de gran relevancia en el campo del tratamiento digital de imágenes. Una de estas técnicas es la transformada Watershed que junto con varios tipos de Merging y un proceso final de predicción lineal, hacen posible la detección automática en un 99% de las imágenes analizadas. La potencia del método se ve incrementada por la ausencia de cualquier tipo de inicialización y por no necesitar condiciones estrictas sobre las características de las imágenes a procesar. Evidentemente es importante que el algoritmo integre información a priori del espacio glotal, pero este conocimiento es bastante relajado comparado con las condiciones impuestas por otros trabajos que también intentan la segmentación

Oxidative stress as a risk factor for osteoporosis in elderly Mexicans as characterized by antioxidant enzymes

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Oxidative stress (OxS) has recently been linked with osteoporosis; however, we do not know the influence of OxS as an independent risk factor for this disease.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We conducted a case-control study in 94 subjects ≥60 years of age, 50 healthy and 44 with osteoporosis. We measured total antioxidant status, plasma lipid peroxides, antioxidant activity of superoxide dismutase and glutathione peroxidase (GPx), and calculated the SOD/GPx ratio. Bone mineral density was obtained at the peripheral DXA in calcaneus using a portable Norland Apollo Densitometer^®. Osteoporosis was considered when subjects had a BMD of 2.5 standard deviations or more below the mean value for young adults.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>GPx antioxidant activity was significantly lower in the group of subjects with osteoporosis in comparison with the group of healthy subjects (<it>p </it>< 0.01); in addition, the SOD/GPx ratio was significantly higher in the group of individuals with osteoporosis (<it>p </it>< 0.05). In logistic regression analysis, we found OxS to be an independent risk factor for osteoporosis (odds ratio [OR] = 2.79; 95% confidence interval [95% CI] = 1.08–7.23; <it>p </it>= 0.034).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our findings suggest that OxS is an independent risk factor for osteoporosis linked to increase of SOD/GPx ratio.</p

ERK5 Is a Major Determinant of Chemical Sarcomagenesis: Implications in Human Pathology.

Abstract: Sarcomas are a heterogeneous group of tumors in which the role of ERK5 is poorly studied. To clarify the role of this MAPK in sarcomatous pathology, we used a murine 3-methyl-cholanthrene (3MC)-induced sarcoma model. Our data show that 3MC induces pleomorphic sarcomas with muscle differentiation, showing an increased expression of ERK5. Indeed, this upregulation was also observed in human sarcomas of muscular origin, such as leiomyosarcoma or rhabdomyosarcoma. Moreover, in cell lines derived from these 3MC-induced tumors, abrogation of Mapk7 expression by using specific shRNAs decreased in vitro growth and colony-forming capacity and led to a marked loss of tumor growth in vivo. In fact, transcriptomic profiling in ERK5 abrogated cell lines by RNAseq showed a deregulated gene expression pattern for key biological processes such as angiogenesis, migration, motility, etc., correlating with a better prognostic in human pathology. Finally, among the various differentially expressed genes, Klf2 is a key mediator of the biological effects of ERK5 as indicated by its specific interference, demonstrating that the ERK5–KLF2 axis is an important determinant of sarcoma biology that should be further studied in human pathology.pre-print9446 K

An error based mathematical module to enhance learning in signals and systems

During the last years, the lecturers at the Circuits and Systems Engineering Department at the E.U.I.T. de Telecomunicación at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid are observing more and more serious mathematical errors in the different exams and exercises taken by the students. Although some of these mistakes can be considered unacceptable in engineering disciplines, it is possible for a student to pass the final exam regardless of these mistakes. In this scenario, and aware that results were getting worse and worse year after year, it was considered convenient, and almost indispensable, to develop math exercises that students must practice if they want to progress following a continuous and formative assessment method along their engineering studies. The first part of this work is to analyze basic mathematical errors in final exam exercises of the course “Signals and Systems”. We present and illustrate the most relevant errors detected during the last two years final exams of that course. The information obtained permits us to identify the main lacks, difficulties and defaults of the students. The second part of this work is to develop a training module in order to the students can practice as many times as they want with simple exercises dealing with the topics where frequent errors are detected. After practicing they must pass an initial test to make sure that students have acquired the adequate basic mathematical background and skills to progress successfully in the mentioned course. The questions and exercises have been written using different formats, most of them to be compatible with Moodle platform requirements

Screening voice disorders with the glottal to noise excitation ratio

This work evaluates the capabilities of the Glottal to Noise Excitation Ratio for the screening of voice disorders. A lot of effort has been made using this parameter to evaluate voice quality, but there do not exist studies that evaluate the discrimination capabilities of this acoustic parameter to classify between normal and pathological voices. A set of 226 speakers (53 normal and 173 pathological) taken from a voice disorders database were used to evaluate the usefulness of this parameter for discriminating normal and pathological voices. In order to evaluate this parameter, the effect of the bandwidth of the Hilbert envelopes and the frequency shift have been analyzed, concluding that a good discrimination is obtained with a bandwidth of 1000 Hz and a frequency shift of 300 Hz. The results confirm that the Glottal to Noise Excitation Ratio provides reliable measurements in terms of discrimination among normal and pathological voices, comparable to other classical long-term noise measurements found in the literature, such as Normalized Noise Energy or Harmonics to Noise Ratio, so this parameter is a good candidate to be used for screening purposes

Scaling corrections: site percolation and Ising model in three dimensions

Using Finite-Size Scaling techniques we obtain accurate results for critical quantities of the Ising model and the site percolation, in three dimensions. We pay special attention in parameterizing the corrections-to-scaling, what is necessary to put the systematic errors below the statistical ones