Comparative study of hormonal counterregulation during GCIIS-guided hypoglycemia tests using human Proinsulin and Human Insulin (recombinant DNA)

Schlechte Scanvorlage

Comparative Analysis of the wav2vec 2.0 Feature Extractor

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems typically use handcrafted feature extraction pipelines. To avoid their inherent information loss and to achieve more consistent modeling from speech to transcribed text, neural raw waveform feature extractors (FEs) are an appealing approach. Also the wav2vec 2.0 model, which has recently gained large popularity, uses a convolutional FE which operates directly on the speech waveform. However, it is not yet studied extensively in the literature. In this work, we study its capability to replace the standard feature extraction methods in a connectionist temporal classification (CTC) ASR model and compare it to an alternative neural FE. We show that both are competitive with traditional FEs on the LibriSpeech benchmark and analyze the effect of the individual components. Furthermore, we analyze the learned filters and show that the most important information for the ASR system is obtained by a set of bandpass filters.Comment: Accepted at ITG 202

A Systematic Comparison of Tropical Waves over Northern Africa. Part II: Dynamics and Thermodynamics

This study presents the first systematic comparison of the dynamics and thermodynamics associated with all major tropical wave types causing rainfall modulation over northern tropical Africa: the Madden–Julian oscillation (MJO), equatorial Rossby waves (ERs), tropical disturbances (TDs, including African easterly waves), Kelvin waves, mixed Rossby–gravity waves (MRGs), and eastward inertio-gravity waves (EIGs). Reanalysis and radiosonde data were analyzed for the period 1981–2013 based on space–time filtering of outgoing longwave radiation. The identified circulation patterns are largely consistent with theory. The slow modes, MJO and ER, mainly impact precipitable water, whereas the faster TDs, Kelvin waves, and MRGs primarily modulate moisture convergence. Monsoonal inflow intensifies during wet phases of the MJO, ERs, and MRGs, associated with a northward shift of the intertropical discontinuity for MJO and ERs. This study reveals that MRGs over Africa have a distinct dynamical structure that differs significantly from AEWs. During passages of vertically tilted imbalanced wave modes, such as the MJO, TDs, Kelvin waves, and partly MRG waves, increased vertical wind shear and improved conditions for up- and downdrafts facilitate the organization of mesoscale convective systems. The balanced ERs are not tilted, and rainfall is triggered by large-scale moistening and stratiform lifting. The MJO and ERs interact with intraseasonal variations of the Indian monsoon and extratropical Rossby wave trains. The latter causes a trough over the Atlas Mountains associated with a tropical plume and rainfall over the Sahara. The presented results unveil which dynamical processes need to be modeled realistically to represent the coupling between tropical waves and rainfall in northern tropical Afric

Potential of infrared thermography to detect insect stages and defects in young trees

In den vergangenen Jahren wurden in den EU-Mitgliedstaaten lebende Stadien des Citrusbockkäfers (CLB), Anoplophora chinensis, im Rahmen der Importkontrolle an Jungbäumen festgestellt. Die in dem Durchführungsbeschluss 2012/138/EG festgelegten Einfuhrvorschriften der Europäischen Union fordern derzeit eine zerstörende Prüfung einer bestimmten Anzahl der Pflanzen. Hintergrund ist, dass trotz Befall mit dem CLB äußerlich keine Symptome vorhanden sind, die bei einer reinen visuellen Inspektion festgestellt werden können. Im Rahmen des EUPHRESCO-Projektes ANOPLORISK wurde in der vorliegenden Untersuchung aus einer Reihe von zerstörungsfreien Prüfverfahren die Infrarotthermographie als zerstörungsfreies Prüfverfahren angewandt. Aus Quarantänegründen wurde mit heimischen Weidenbohrerlarven, Cossus cossus L. (Modellorganismen), die den CLB-Larven in Größe und Fraßbild ähneln, gearbeitet. Mittels standardisierter Prüfkörper und präparierter Bohrlöcher wurden drei Thermographiekamera-Typen untersucht. Weder passive noch aktive Thermographieverfahren konnten ausreichende Temperaturkontraste darstellen, um Larven, Bohrlöcher oder Bohrspäne innerhalb des Holzes zu identifizieren. Infrarotthermographie scheint kein geeignetes Verfahren zur Aufspürung von Insektenstadien und -schäden in Jungbäumen zu sein. DOI: 10.5073/JfK.2013.09.01, https://doi.org/10.5073/JfK.2013.09.01Living stages of the quarantine pest Anoplophora chinensis Forster, the so called Citrus Longhorned Beetle (CLB), have been detected repeatedly during import inspections of young trees in several European Union member states. CLB infested plants show almost no external symptoms for identification by visual inspection. Therefore, according to the European Union plant health legislation (EU-Commission-Implementing Decision 2012/138/EG), destructive sampling of the plants at random is required. Infrared thermography has been assessed as alternative, non-destructive testing method. Due to the quarantine status of CLB, the native goat moth, Cossus cossus L., was used as surrogate for the studies. Three types of ther­mography cameras have been tested using standardized wooden samples during two long-term measurements. Neither passive nor active thermographic methods were able to visualize enough differences in temperatures to detect larvae, boreholes or boredust inside of wooden samples. Therefore infrared thermography with its currently available technology seems to be no appropriate technique for detecting insect stages or defects in young trees. DOI: 10.5073/JfK.2013.09.01, https://doi.org/10.5073/JfK.2013.09.0

Efficient Utilization of Large Pre-Trained Models for Low Resource ASR

Unsupervised representation learning has recently helped automatic speech recognition (ASR) to tackle tasks with limited labeled data. Following this, hardware limitations and applications give rise to the question how to take advantage of large pre-trained models efficiently and reduce their complexity. In this work, we study a challenging low resource conversational telephony speech corpus from the medical domain in Vietnamese and German. We show the benefits of using unsupervised techniques beyond simple fine-tuning of large pre-trained models, discuss how to adapt them to a practical telephony task including bandwidth transfer and investigate different data conditions for pre-training and fine-tuning. We outperform the project baselines by 22% relative using pretraining techniques. Further gains of 29% can be achieved by refinements of architecture and training and 6% by adding 0.8 h of in-domain adaptation data.Comment: Accepted at ICASSP SASB 202

Effect of encainide and flecainide on chronic ectopic atrial tachycardia

In the treatment of chronic ectopic atrial tachycardia, standard antiarrhythmic therapy has been shown to be ineffective in the majority of patients. The intravenous and oral effects of two class IC antiarrhythmic drugs, encainide and flecainide, in five patients with chronic ectopic atrial tachycardia were studied using exercise testing, 24 hour long-term electrocardiography and programmed electrical stimulation. All patients had been treated unsuccessfully with at least four antiarrhythmic drugs. In two patients tachycardia was persistent, and in three patients tachycardia occurred intermittently for more than 12 hours/day.Intravenous encainide and flecainide at doses ranging from 0.3 to 2.0 mg/kg and from 0.5 to 1.5 mg/kg body weight, respectively, terminated atrial ectopic tachycardia in all patients. Oral encainide, 150 to 225 mg/day, completely suppressed ectopic atrial activity in four patients during a mean follow-up period of 8 ± 3 months. In the remaining patient encainide markedly reduced the number of episodes of tachycardia. In three patients encainide had to be withdrawn because of intolerable side effects. These patients were well controlled with oral flecainide, 200 to 300 mg/day, without side effects.On the basis of these results, the efficacy of encainide and flecainide in the treatment of chronic ectopic atrial tachycardia appears to be not drug-specific but rather a general class IC property

The speciation of the proteome

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Introduction</p> <p>In proteomics a paradox situation developed in the last years. At one side it is basic knowledge that proteins are post-translationally modified and occur in different isoforms. At the other side the protein expression concept disclaims post-translational modifications by connecting protein names directly with function.</p> <p>Discussion</p> <p>Optimal proteome coverage is today reached by bottom-up liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry. But quantification at the peptide level in shotgun or bottom-up approaches by liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry is completely ignoring that a special peptide may exist in an unmodified form and in several-fold modified forms. The acceptance of the protein species concept is a basic prerequisite for meaningful quantitative analyses in functional proteomics. In discovery approaches only top-down analyses, separating the protein species before digestion, identification and quantification by two-dimensional gel electrophoresis or protein liquid chromatography, allow the correlation between changes of a biological situation and function.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>To obtain biological relevant information kinetics and systems biology have to be performed at the protein species level, which is the major challenge in proteomics today.</p