Cycloserine Plus Ethionamide Plus Pyrazinamide in the Treatment of Patients Excreting Isoniazid-resistant Tubercle Bacilli following Previous Chemotherapy

The results of treatment with a daily triple-drug regimen of cycloserine plus ethionamide plus pyrazinamide in 62 patients with chronic drug-resistant pulmonary tuberculosis are described. Of 51 patients who could be assessed, 37 (73 per cent) had a favourable bacteriological response at 1 year; 2 had a bacteriological relapse by 36 months. Drug toxicity requiring clinical action occurred in 22 (35 per cent) of the 62 patients. Ethionamide was the main drug accounting for toxicity and had to be terminated in 7 patients

A four-year follow-up of patients with quiescent pulmonary tuberculosis at end of a year of chemotherapy with twice-weekly isoniazid plus streptomycin or daily isoniazid plus PAS

This report describes the progress over a four-year period of follow-up of 119 patients who had bacteriologically quiescent pulmonary tuberculosis at the end of a year of chemotherapy with either a fully supervised twice-weekly regimen of isoniazid plus streptomycin (SHTW, 66 patients) or a standard self-administered daily regimen of isoniazid plus PAS (PH, 53 patients). (In the second year, that is in the first year of the follow-up, half the patients, selected at random, received maintenance chemotherapy with isoniazid and the other half a placebo.) The condition of the patients in the SHTW and PH series was similar, both at the time of their initial admission to treatment and at the start of the period of follow-up. One patient (PH) died of tuberculosis in the fiftienth month, having had a bacteriological relapse in the fourteenth month. Nine others (five SHTW, four PH) died of non-tuberculous causes. The radiographic progress over the four-year period was similar in the SHTW and the PH series. On average, 42 cultures per patient were examined during the four-year period. A bacteriological relapse occurred in eight SHTW and eight PH patients; however, retreatment became necessary in only three (5 %) SHTW and five (10 %) PH patients, the others having had a spontaneous sputum conversion. Most of the relapses occurred with drug-sensitive cultures. It is concluded that bacteriological quiescence attained with a year of twice-weekly isoniazid plus streptomycin is at least as stable, over a four-year period of follow-up, as that attained with a year of daily isoniazid plus PAS

Rāga Recognition based on Pitch Distribution Methods

Rāga forms the melodic framework for most of the music of the Indian subcontinent. Thus automatic rāga recognition is a fundamental step in the computational modeling of the Indian art-music traditions. In this work, we investigate the properties of rāga and the natural processes by which people identify it. We bring together and discuss the previous computational approaches to rāga recognition correlating them with human techniques, in both Karṇāṭak (south Indian) and Hindustānī (north Indian) music traditions. Thee approaches which are based on first-order pitch distributions are further evaluated on a large comprehensive dataset to understand their merits and limitations. We outline the possible short and mid-term future directions in this line of work.This research was partly funded by the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Program, as part of the CompMusic project (ERC grant agreement 267583)

In search of automatic rhythm analysis methods for Turkish and Indian art music

The aim of this paper is to identify and discuss various methods in computational rhythm description of Carnatic and Hindustani music of India, and Makam music of Turkey. We define and describe three relevant rhythm annotation tasks for these cultures—beat tracking, meter estimation, and downbeat detection. We then evaluate several methodologies from the state of the art in Music Information Retrieval (MIR) for these tasks, using manually annotated datasets of Turkish and Indian music. This evaluation provides insights into the nature of rhythm in these cultures and the challenges to automatic rhythm analysis. Our results indicate that the performance of evaluated approaches is not adequate for the presented tasks, and that methods that are suitable to tackle the culture specific challenges in computational analysis of rhythm need to be developed. The results from the different analysis methods enable us to identify promising directions for an appropriate exploration of rhythm analysis in Turkish, Carnatic and Hindustani music.This work is partly supported by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program, as part of the CompMusic project (ERC grant agreement 267583)