63 research outputs found
Melting and Crystallization Behaviors of Biodegradable Polymers Enzymatically Coalesced from Their Cyclodextrin Inclusion Complexes
Reversible Thickening/Thinning Phenomena Observed for Polymer Blend Films in Water Media
Supramolecular Gene Delivery Vectors Showing Enhanced Transgene Expression and Good Biocompatibility
Adversarial Speaker Disentanglement Using Unannotated External Data for Self-supervised Representation Based Voice Conversion
Nowadays, recognition-synthesis-based methods have been quite popular with
voice conversion (VC). By introducing linguistics features with good
disentangling characters extracted from an automatic speech recognition (ASR)
model, the VC performance achieved considerable breakthroughs. Recently,
self-supervised learning (SSL) methods trained with a large-scale unannotated
speech corpus have been applied to downstream tasks focusing on the content
information, which is suitable for VC tasks. However, a huge amount of speaker
information in SSL representations degrades timbre similarity and the quality
of converted speech significantly. To address this problem, we proposed a
high-similarity any-to-one voice conversion method with the input of SSL
representations. We incorporated adversarial training mechanisms in the
synthesis module using external unannotated corpora. Two auxiliary
discriminators were trained to distinguish whether a sequence of
mel-spectrograms has been converted by the acoustic model and whether a
sequence of content embeddings contains speaker information from external
corpora. Experimental results show that our proposed method achieves comparable
similarity and higher naturalness than the supervised method, which needs a
huge amount of annotated corpora for training and is applicable to improve
similarity for VC methods with other SSL representations as input.Comment: Accepted by ICME 202
Micellar carriers based on block copolymers of poly(epsilon-caprolactone) and poly(ethylene glycol) for doxorubicin delivery
Abstract Diblock copolymers of poly(q-caprolactone) (PCL) and monomethoxy poly(ethylene glycol) (MPEG) with various compositions were synthesized. The amphiphilic block copolymers self-assembled into nanoscopic micelles and their hydrophobic cores encapsulated doxorubicin (DOX) in aqueous solutions. The micelle diameter increased from 22.9 to 104.9 nm with the increasing PCL block length (2.5 -24.7 kDa) in the copolymer composition. Hemolytic studies showed that free DOX caused 11% hemolysis at 200 Ag ml À 1 , while no hemolysis was detected with DOX-loaded micelles at the same drug concentration. An in vitro study at 37 jC demonstrated that DOX-release from micelles at pH 5.0 was much faster than that at pH 7.4. Confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM) demonstrated that DOX-loaded micelles accumulated mostly in cytoplasm instead of cell nuclei, in contrast to free DOX. Consistent with the in vitro release and CLSM results, a cytotoxicity study demonstrated that DOX-loaded micelles exhibited time-delayed cytotoxicity in human MCF-7 breast cancer cells
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