Deep Neural Networks for the Recognition and Classification of Heart Murmurs Using Neuromorphic Auditory Sensors

Auscultation is one of the most used techniques for detecting cardiovascular diseases, which is one of the main causes of death in the world. Heart murmurs are the most common abnormal finding when a patient visits the physician for auscultation. These heart sounds can either be innocent, which are harmless, or abnormal, which may be a sign of a more serious heart condition. However, the accuracy rate of primary care physicians and expert cardiologists when auscultating is not good enough to avoid most of both type-I (healthy patients are sent for echocardiogram) and type-II (pathological patients are sent home without medication or treatment) errors made. In this paper, the authors present a novel convolutional neural network based tool for classifying between healthy people and pathological patients using a neuromorphic auditory sensor for FPGA that is able to decompose the audio into frequency bands in real time. For this purpose, different networks have been trained with the heart murmur information contained in heart sound recordings obtained from nine different heart sound databases sourced from multiple research groups. These samples are segmented and preprocessed using the neuromorphic auditory sensor to decompose their audio information into frequency bands and, after that, sonogram images with the same size are generated. These images have been used to train and test different convolutional neural network architectures. The best results have been obtained with a modified version of the AlexNet model, achieving 97% accuracy (specificity: 95.12%, sensitivity: 93.20%, PhysioNet/CinC Challenge 2016 score: 0.9416). This tool could aid cardiologists and primary care physicians in the auscultation process, improving the decision making task and reducing type-I and type-II errors.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TEC2016-77785-

There are black, do noy say, there is racism which disguise: African migrants ans afrodescendants in argentina press

Este artículo surge de un estudio antropológico y comunicacional de las representaciones actuales de migrantes africanos y de afrodescendientes en la sociedad argentina, donde estos grupos han sido históricamente invisibilizados.Aquí exponemos resultados de un análisis de discurso aplicado sobre artículos que tratan cuestiones referidas a afrodescendientes (de Argentina y de otros países) y a migrantes africanos publicados durante los años 2010 y 2011 en tres medios de prensa nacionales (Clarín, Página/12 y El Día). El análisis, basado principalmente en categorías del Análisis Crítico del Discurso, se orientó a través de la pregunta: ¿Qué representaciones acerca de los migrantes africanos y de los afrodescendientes ?circulan? o ?se ponen en juego? en los discursos de los medios de prensa locales? Planteamos que en las representaciones mediáticas de estos grupos sociales se observan algunos enfoques singulares. En las representaciones de los migrantes africanos en Argentina registramos casos de exotismo y de criminalización. Situación que se modifica cuando la prensa se refiere al fenómeno de esta migración hacia Europa, pues en ese caso se victimiza a los migrantes y se denuncia el problema del racismo en las sociedades europeas. Mientras que en las representaciones de los afroargentinos, y de los afrodescendientes en general, observamos un evitamiento de la mención de ?lo racial?; y una referencia casi exclusiva a la marca étnica de identificación. También detectamos algunos rasgos discursivos que se repiten en los distintos medios, como un uso ?políticamente correcto? de la terminología denominativa, que vinculamos con la hegemonía de las ideologías multiculturalistas contemporáneas.This article stems from an anthropological and communicational study on the current representations of African migrants and Afrodescendants in argentine society, where these groups were historically invisible. Here we present results of a critical discourse analysis of newspaper articles about Afrodescendants (of Argentina and other countries) and African migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, published in 2010 and 2011 in national newspapers (Clarín, Página / 12, El Día). The analysis, based primarily on categories of critical discourse analysis is guided by the question: What representations about African migrants and Afrodescendants "circulating" or "come into play" in the discourses of media press? We propose that media representations of these social groups are observed some specific approaches. In the representations of African migrants in Argentina we recorded cases of exoticism and criminalization. This situation changes when the press refers to this phenomenon of migration in Europe because in that case it victimizes migrants; and the problem of racism is also complaint. While the representations of Afroargentines and Afrodescendants in general, we see a mention avoidance of "the race"; and an exclusive reference to ethnic identification mark. We also detected some discursive characteristics that recur in different media, such as use "politically correct" of terminology that we associate with the hegemony of contemporary multiculturalist ideology.Fil: Morales, Orlando Gabriel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mendoza; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de La Plata; Argentin

NAVIS: Neuromorphic Auditory VISualizer Tool

This software presents diverse utilities to perform the first post-processing layer taking the neuromorphic auditory sensors (NAS) information. The used NAS implements in FPGA a cascade filters architecture, imitating the behavior of the basilar membrane and inner hair cells and working with the sound information decomposed into its frequency components as spike streams. The well-known neuromorphic hardware interface Address-Event-Representation (AER) is used to propagate auditory information out of the NAS, emulating the auditory vestibular nerve. Using the information packetized into aedat files, which are generated through the jAER software plus an AER to USB computer interface, NAVIS implements a set of graphs that allows to represent the auditory information as cochleograms, histograms, sonograms, etc. It can also split the auditory information into different sets depending on the activity level of the spike streams. The main contribution of this software tool is that it allows complex audio post-processing treatments and representations, which is a novelty for spike-based systems in the neuromorphic community and it will help neuromorphic engineers to build sets for training spiking neural networks (SNN).Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TEC2012-37868-C04-0

Impact of social media in political debate

Este artículo analiza el impacto de las redes sociales sobre el debate político, a partir del análisis del debate sobre el estado de la nación de 2013 en España. Se definen los contenidos predominantes en las conversaciones que se mantienen en Twitter durante la semana en la que se desarrolla el debate: del lunes 18 de febrero al domingo 24 de febrero, y se compara el grado de interés de los usuarios en relación con otros asuntos. A continuación, se examina la dimensión y el alcance del debate en esta red social. Se analiza la valoración de los usuarios sobre el Gobierno, las reacciones ante el diagnóstico del presidente del Gobierno sobre la situación del país y el sentido de los mensajes de los usuarios respecto al líder de la oposición. También se explora el tono de los mensajes y se comprueba si la conversación sobre el debate en Twitter gira en torno a los mismos temas y problemas que los ciudadanos consideran más relevantes según los datos que ofrece el Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas. Los resultados contribuyen a comprender más adecuadamente el impacto de Twitter en la configuración de la opinión pública.Based on an analysis of the debate on the state of the nation in 2013 in Spain, this article analyzes the impact of social networks on political debate. The predominant content in conver¬sations on Twitter during the week in which the debate takes place (Monday 18 February to Sunday 24 February) are defined, and the degree of interest of users with regard to other matters is compared. Then, the size and scope of the discussion in this social network is examined. User ratings of the government are analyzed, as are reactions to the evaluation of the prime minister on the situation and the meaning of user messages to the opposition leader. The study also explores the tone of the messages and checks to see if the debate on Twitter revolves around the same issues and problems that citizens consider most relevant according to data provided by the Center for Sociological Research. The results contribute to a better understanding of the impact of Twitter on public opinion

Opportunistic renegotiation of infraestructure concessions as rent seeking : the effect of legal systems

This paper examines the problem of renegotiation of infrastructure conces-sions in Latin America using a model of litigation with an application to in-centive contracts. Opportunistic renegotiation is here defined as a rent seeking game, to show the effect of the legal system characteristics in the probability of renegotiation. A main conclusion is that legal systems where each party pays for their own legal expenses, such as the American, are more prone to opportunistic renegotiation. On the other hand, systems, such as the British, that concentrates legal expenses in one party might discourage opportunistic behavior by making it more costly.tablas.Incluye referencias bibliográficas (páginas 45-46)

Stereo Matching in Address-Event-Representation (AER) Bio-Inspired Binocular Systems in a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)

In stereo-vision processing, the image-matching step is essential for results, although it involves a very high computational cost. Moreover, the more information is processed, the more time is spent by the matching algorithm, and the more ine cient it is. Spike-based processing is a relatively new approach that implements processing methods by manipulating spikes one by one at the time they are transmitted, like a human brain. The mammal nervous system can solve much more complex problems, such as visual recognition by manipulating neuron spikes. The spike-based philosophy for visual information processing based on the neuro-inspired address-event-representation (AER) is currently achieving very high performance. The aim of this work was to study the viability of a matching mechanism in stereo-vision systems, using AER codification and its implementation in a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). Some studies have been done before in an AER system with monitored data using a computer; however, this kind of mechanism has not been implemented directly on hardware. To this end, an epipolar geometry basis applied to AER systems was studied and implemented, with other restrictions, in order to achieve good results in a real-time scenario. The results and conclusions are shown, and the viability of its implementation is proven.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TEC2016-77785-

Pulsations in M dwarf stars

We present the results of the first theoretical non-radial non-adiabatic pulsational study of M dwarf stellar models with masses in the range 0.1 to 0.5M_solar. We find the fundamental radial mode to be unstable due to an \epsilon mechanism caused by deuterium (D-) burning for the young 0.1 and 0.2M_solar models, by non-equilibrium He^3 burning for the 0.2 and 0.25M_solar models of 10^4Myr, and by a flux blocking mechanism for the partially convective 0.4 and 0.5M_solar models once they reach the age of 500Myr. The periods of the overstable modes excited by the D-burning are in the range 4.2 to 5.2h for the 0.1M_solar models and is of order 8.4h for the 0.2M_solar models. The periods of the modes excited by He^3 burning and flux blocking are in the range 23 to 40min. The more massive and oldest models are more promising for the observational detection of pulsations, as their ratio of instability e-folding time to age is more favourable.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables. Accepted for publication in MNRAS Letters on 2011 October 11 Version 2 is the accepted manuscript with changes in boldfac

Image Features Extraction Using Proportional-Integral Filters

This document aims to demonstrate that features generated as a side effect of using Proportional-Integral filters, with explicit or implicit Euler discretization, could be viable for imaging Machine Learning applications. This thesis delves into how the Proportional-Integral and Super-Twisting filters are defined, how they are discretized with the Forward and Backward Euler method, which results in the need to calculate an error or difference scaled with a step size (discrete derivative), and how these features are used in an image classification problem with two different datasets, using a convex machine learning method (Support Vector Classifier). These results are compared with a commonly used kernel for extracting an image's differences or edges, called the Sobel operator. With the PI and ST robustness and stability in mind and their implicit low-pass filter from their formulation as a continuous output signal, two tests involving adding artificial uniform and Gaussian noise are realized. The features derived from the automatic control algorithms prove to be viable but more valuable in situations where noise exists

Efficient DMA transfers management on embedded Linux PSoC for Deep-Learning gestures recognition: Using Dynamic Vision Sensor and NullHop one-layer CNN accelerator to play RoShamBo

This demonstration shows a Dynamic Vision Sensor able to capture visual motion at a speed equivalent to a highspeed camera (20k fps). The collected visual information is presented as normalized histogram to a CNN accelerator hardware, called NullHop, that is able to process a pre-trained CNN to play Roshambo against a human. The CNN designed for this purpose consist of 5 convolutional layers and a fully connected layer. The latency for processing one histogram is 8ms. NullHop is deployed on the FPGA fabric of a PSoC from Xilinx, the Zynq 7100, which is based on a dual-core ARM computer and a Kintex-7 with 444K logic cells, integrated in the same chip. ARM computer is running Linux and a specific C++ controller is running the whole demo. This controller runs at user space in order to extract the maximum throughput thanks to an efficient use of the AXIStream, based of DMA transfers. This short delay needed to process one visual histogram, allows us to average several consecutive classification outputs. Therefore, it provides the best estimation of the symbol that the user presents to the visual sensor. This output is then mapped to present the winner symbol within the 60ms latency that the brain considers acceptable before thinking that there is a trick.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TEC2016-77785-

Effectiveness of foot orthosis in patients with rheumatoid arthritis related to quality of life and pain. A systematic review and meta-analysis

Foot pain and deformity is almost ubiquitous in RA and results in considerable physical and psychosocial impairment. Epidemiological studies consistently suggest a 90% prevalence of foot pain despite advances in pharmacological therapy. Mechanical and other non-pharmacological interventions such as orthoses and footwear, have an important role in managing foot pathology in patients with their systemic disease controlled. The effectiveness of treatment with insoles, especially in early periods, was studied in a randomized controlled trial, which results suggested an immediate clinical improvement, reducing foot pain, disability and limited functionality.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech