Surgical treatment of left ventricular fibroma accompanied with ventricular septal defect in an infant: a case report

Competition in the banking sector is different from the competition in the other sectors. Banks can compete only on the basis of banking products. Also, banks are dependent on each other – actions of every market participant may strongly affect the others. Problems of one bank may encourage distrust of the entire banking system. Analysis of Lithuanian banking sector has showed that country’s banking sector can be divided into three groups – the biggest banks, smaller and medium-sized banks and foreign banks branches. The largest part of banking sector is concentrated in activity of the three banks. All these banks are owned by Scandinavian capital. Lithuanian banking sector is highly concentrated. In 2005-2012 years the average mean of three banks concentration index (CR3) in deposits, assets and loans markets was 68 percent. According to these high values of concentration rates, Lithuanian banking sector can be characterized as oligopoly

Methylprednisolone as Adjunct to Endovascular Thrombectomy for Large-Vessel Occlusion Stroke

Importance It is uncertain whether intravenous methylprednisolone improves outcomes for patients with acute ischemic stroke due to large-vessel occlusion (LVO) undergoing endovascular thrombectomy. Objective To assess the efficacy and adverse events of adjunctive intravenous low-dose methylprednisolone to endovascular thrombectomy for acute ischemic stroke secondary to LVO. Design, Setting, and Participants This investigator-initiated, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial was implemented at 82 hospitals in China, enrolling 1680 patients with stroke and proximal intracranial LVO presenting within 24 hours of time last known to be well. Recruitment took place between February 9, 2022, and June 30, 2023, with a final follow-up on September 30, 2023.InterventionsEligible patients were randomly assigned to intravenous methylprednisolone (n = 839) at 2 mg/kg/d or placebo (n = 841) for 3 days adjunctive to endovascular thrombectomy. Main Outcomes and Measures The primary efficacy outcome was disability level at 90 days as measured by the overall distribution of the modified Rankin Scale scores (range, 0 [no symptoms] to 6 [death]). The primary safety outcomes included mortality at 90 days and the incidence of symptomatic intracranial hemorrhage within 48 hours. Results Among 1680 patients randomized (median age, 69 years; 727 female [43.3%]), 1673 (99.6%) completed the trial. The median 90-day modified Rankin Scale score was 3 (IQR, 1-5) in the methylprednisolone group vs 3 (IQR, 1-6) in the placebo group (adjusted generalized odds ratio for a lower level of disability, 1.10 [95% CI, 0.96-1.25]; P = .17). In the methylprednisolone group, there was a lower mortality rate (23.2% vs 28.5%; adjusted risk ratio, 0.84 [95% CI, 0.71-0.98]; P = .03) and a lower rate of symptomatic intracranial hemorrhage (8.6% vs 11.7%; adjusted risk ratio, 0.74 [95% CI, 0.55-0.99]; P = .04) compared with placebo. Conclusions and Relevance Among patients with acute ischemic stroke due to LVO undergoing endovascular thrombectomy, adjunctive methylprednisolone added to endovascular thrombectomy did not significantly improve the degree of overall disability.Trial RegistrationChiCTR.org.cn Identifier: ChiCTR210005172

XIMERA: A New TTS from ATR Based on Corpus-Based Technologies

This paper describes a new concatenative TTS system under development at ATR. The system, named XIMERA, is based on corpus-based technologies, as was the case for the preceding TTS systems from ATR, namely -talk and CHATR. The prominent features of XIMERA are (1) large corpora (a 110hours corpus of a Japanese male, a 60-hours corpus of a Japanese female, and a 20-hours corpus of a Chinese female), (2) HMM-based generation of prosodic parameters, and (3) a cost function for segment selection optimized based on perceptual experiments. A perception test that evaluated the naturalness of synthetic speech for XIMERA and 10 TTS products, including CHATR, showed that XIMERA outperformed the other ten

USTC95--- A PUTONGHUA CORPUS

A large Putonghua corpus is introduced, which is primarily designed to support research in Chinese speech recognition, analysis and recognition system evaluation. This corpus consists of four major sub-corpora corresponding to isolated syllables, multi-syllable words, sentences, and telephone speech. With an elaborate design, the corpus encompasses all the phones and mono-syllables, as well as the co-articulation effects in the Putonghua; besides, keeps as little redundancy as possible. This parsimonious corpus makes it possible to acquire acoustic-phonetic knowledge for isolated words recognition and continuous Chinese recognition, to provide speech data for training telephone speech recognizer, also to provide a common test base for the performance assessment of recognizer. 1

The NICT/ATR speech synthesis system for the Blizzard Challenge 2008

This paper describes the development of the NICT/ATR speech synthesizer for the Blizzard Challenge 2008 and discuss the official results. The submitted system is based on the hidden Markov model speech synthesis technology and utilizes an improved excitation approach based on residual modeling, in order to remove artifacts related to the parametric way in which speech is synthesized. Although development time was limited, the results show that the system in question achieves good performance in terms of naturalness and intelligibility. Index Terms: speech synthesis, statistical parametric speech synthesis, Blizzard Challenge