Application of a computer-assisted structure elucidation program for the structural determination of a new terpenoid aldehyde with an unusual skeleton.

The structure of a novel compound from Adansonia digitata has been elucidated, and its H and C NMR spectra have been assigned employing a variety of one-dimensional and two-dimensional NMR techniques without degradative chemistry. The Advanced Chemistry Development ACD/Structure Elucidator software was important for determining part of this structure that contained a fused bicyclic system with very few hydrogen atoms, which in turn, exhibited essentially no discriminating HMBC connectivities throughout that portion of the molecule. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A corroborative study on improving pitch determination by time-frequency cepstrum decomposition using wavelets.

A new wavelet-based method is presented in this work for estimating and tracking the pitch period. The main idea of the proposed new approach consists in extracting the cepstrum excitation signal and applying on it a wavelet transform whose resulting approximation coefficients are smoothed, for a better pitch determination. Although the principle of the algorithms proposed has already been considered previously, the novelty of our methods relies in the use of powerful wavelet transforms well adapted to pitch determination.

Robust monitoring of hypovolemia in intensive care patients using photoplethysmogram signals.

The paper presents a fingertip photoplethysmography based technique to assess patient fluid status that is robust to waveform artifacts and health variability in the underlying patient population. The technique is intended for use in intensive care units, where patients are at risk for hypovolemia, and signal artifacts and inter-patient variations in health are common. Input signals are preprocessed to remove artifact, then a parameter-invariant statistic is calculated to remove effects of patient-specific physiology.

A preliminary study on improving the recognition of esophageal speech using a hybrid system based on statistical voice conversion.

In this paper, we propose a hybrid system based on a modified statistical GMM voice conversion algorithm for improving the recognition of esophageal speech. This hybrid system aims to compensate for the distorted information present in the esophageal acoustic features by using a voice conversion method. The esophageal speech is converted into a "target" laryngeal speech using an iterative statistical estimation of a transformation function.

Bedside nurses' perceptions of intensive care unit telemedicine.

Background: Intensive care unit telemedicine is an innovative approach to providing critical care services for a broad geographic area, but its success may depend on acceptance by bedside providers.

Objectives: To determine critical care nurses' attitudes toward and perceptions about the use of telemedicine in critical care.

Methods: A total of 179 nurses in 3 critical care units in 2 university-affiliated academic hospitals that use telemedicine intensivists and nurses were surveyed via the Internet about their practice and perceptions of telemedicine.