A combined cepstral distance method for emotional speech recognition

Affective computing is not only the direction of reform in artificial intelligence but also exemplification of the advanced intelligent machines. Emotion is the biggest difference between human and machine. If the machine behaves with emotion, then the machine will be accepted by more people. Voice is the most natural and can be easily understood and accepted manner in daily communication. The recognition of emotional voice is an important field of artificial intelligence. However, in recognition of emotions, there often exists the phenomenon that two emotions are particularly vulnerable to confusion. This article presents a combined cepstral distance method in two-group multi-class emotion classification for emotional speech recognition. Cepstral distance combined with speech energy is well used as speech signal endpoint detection in speech recognition. In this work, the use of cepstral distance aims to measure the similarity between frames in emotional signals and in neutral signals. These features are input for directed acyclic graph support vector machine classification. Finally, a two-group classification strategy is adopted to solve confusion in multi-emotion recognition. In the experiments, Chinese mandarin emotion database is used and a large training set (1134 + 378 utterances) ensures a powerful modelling capability for predicting emotion. The experimental results show that cepstral distance increases the recognition rate of emotion sad and can balance the recognition results with eliminating the over fitting. And for the German corpus Berlin emotional speech database, the recognition rate between sad and boring, which are very difficult to distinguish, is up to 95.45%

Treatment of Post Traumatic Internal Carotid Artery Pseudo Aneurysm with Intravascular Coil Embolization

Introduction: Vascular complications such as bleeding and pseudoaneurysm following an endoscopic trans-sphenoidal approach for the basal skull pathology are rare but when it occurs it brings a significant risk of morbidity and mortality along with it. Intraoperative bleeding can be managed with manual packing and in case of pseudoaneurysm formation, it can be successfully managed with endovascular coiling.Case presentation: One month after an endoscopic sphenoidal resection of mucocele. A 49-year-old female presented with massive left sided epistaxis due to formation and rupture of pseudoaneurysm at left cavernous segment of internal carotid artery. She was managed with multiple coil embolization of pseudoaneurysm.Conclusion: A patient with pseudoaneurysm formation following an endoscopic trans-sphenoidal approach for a mucocele resection was successfully managed by the emergency endovascular coiling, with complete obliteration of the aneurysm and bleeding while maintaining the vessel patency. This approach is less invasive, quick as well as safe and do not require long term anticoagulation. However, long term follow and larger sample are required to evaluate its efficacy

The signal transduction pathway of PKC/NF-κB/c-fos may be involved in the influence of high glucose on the cardiomyocytes of neonatal rats

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>High glucose could induce structure and function change in cardiomyocytes, PKC plays a core effect in the onset and progression of diabetic cardiomyopathy, but its underlying downstream signal transduction pathway is still not completely understood.</p> <p>Objectives</p> <p>To study the influence of high glucose on the structure, function and signal transduction pathway of PKC (Protein Kinase C)/NF-κB(Nuclear factor-κB)/c-fos in cultured cardiomyocytes.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Using cultured cardiomyocytes of neonatal Sprague-Dawley rats as a model, groups were divided into: control group (glucose: 5 mmol/L); high glucose group (glucose: 10 mmol/L, 15 mmol/L, 20 mmol/L, 25.5 mmol/L); equimolar mannital group (5 mmol/L glucose + 20.5 mmol/L maninital); high glucose(25.5 mmol/L) add PKC inhibitor (Ro-31-8220, 50 nmol/L); high glucose (25.5 mmol/L) add NF-κB inhibitor (BAY11-7082, 5 μmol/L). The cellular contracting frequency and volumes were measured and the expression of PKC-α, PKC-β2, p-PKC-α, p-PKC-β2, NF-κB, p-NF-κB, TNF-α (tumor necrosis factor-α) and c-fos were measured by western blot or RT-PCR.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Cardiomyocytes cultured in high glucose level, but not iso-osmotic mannital, showed an increased pulsatile frequency and higher cellular volumes consistent with the increased glucose levels, and also higher expression of PKC-α, PKC-β2, p-PKC-α, p-PKC-β2, NF-κB, p-NF-κB, TNF-α and c-fos. The addition of Ro-31-8220 and BAY11-7082 could partly reverse these changes induced by high glucose level.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>High glucose significantly increased the pulsatile frequency and cellular volumes of cultured cardiomyocytes via PKC/NF-κB/c-fos pathway, which might lead to diabetic cardiomyopathy.</p

Adaptive Admittance Control Strategy for a Robotic Knee Exoskeleton With a Nonlinear Variable Stiffness Actuator

This article presents the design and control of a robotic knee exoskeleton for gait rehabilitation of patients with knee joint impairments. First, the hardware design of the exoskeleton is presented, including the mechanical structure, actuator design and configuration, and electronic system. Based on the nonlinear characteristics of human muscles, a nonlinear variable stiffness actuator (NLVSA) is designed for the actuation system of the exoskeleton. Next, the modeling of the NLVSA is described. In addition, an adaptive admittance control strategy comprising a sparrow search optimization algorithm-based long short-term memory neural network model and an adaptive admittance control algorithm based on the radial basis function neural network (RBFAAC) is proposed for the exoskeleton. Finally, a pilot study is conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the robotic knee exoskeleton. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of the designed NLVSA, and the exoskeleton has the potential for human knee rehabilitation by providing effective assistance with the proposed control strategy. With the proposed RBFAAC algorithm, the average root mean square error between the reference and actual knee joint angles is 1.24° at different walking speeds

Tracking differentiator based back-stepping control for valve-controlled hydraulic actuator system

Back-stepping design method is widely used in high-performance tracking control tasks As is known to all, the controller based on back-stepping design will become complex as the model order increases, which is the so called “explosion of terms” problem. In this paper, a tracking differentiator (TD) based back-stepping controller is proposed to handle the “explosion of terms” problem. Instead of calculating the derivatives of intermediate control variables through tedious analytical expressions, for the proposed method, the tracking differentiator is embedded into each recursive procedure to generate the substitute derivative signal for every intermediate control variable. As a result, the complexity of implementation procedure of back-stepping controller is significantly reduced. The discrepancies between the derivative substitutes and the real derivatives are considered. And the effects on control performances caused by the discrepancies are analyzed. In addition to giving the theoretical results and the stability proofs with Lyapunov methods, the developed controller design method is evaluated through a series of experiments with a hydraulic robot arm position serve system. The control performance of the proposed controller is verified by the experiments results.</p