Feasibility of Big Data Analytics to Assess Personality Based on Voice Analysis.

(1) Background: As far back as the 1930s, it was already thought that gestures, clothing, speech, posture, and gait could express an individual's personality. Different research programs, some focused on linguistic cues, were launched, though results were inconsistent. The development of new speech analysis technology and the generalization of big data analysis have created an opportunity to test the predictive power of voice features on personality dimensions.

Analysis and interpretation of joint source separation and sound event detection in domestic environments.

In recent years, the relation between Sound Event Detection (SED) and Source Separation (SSep) has received a growing interest, in particular, with the aim to enhance the performance of SED by leveraging the synergies between both tasks. In this paper, we present a detailed description of JSS (Joint Source Separation and Sound Event Detection), our joint-training scheme for SSep and SED, and we measure its performance in the DCASE Challenge for SED in domestic environments. Our experiments demonstrate that JSS can improve SED performance, in terms of Polyphonic Sound Detection Score (PSDS), even without additional training data.

On the timing of overt attention deployment: Eye-movement evidence for the priority accumulation framework.

Most visual-search theories assume that our attention is automatically allocated to the location with the highest priority at any given moment. The Priority Accumulation Framework (PAF) challenges this assumption. It suggests that the priority weight at each location accumulates across sequential events and that evidence for the presence of action-relevant information contributes to determining when attention is deployed to the location with the highest accumulated priority.

Stereoselective Synthesis of Polysubstituted Spiropentanes.

A new approach to polysubstituted spiropentanes is developed through a regio- and diastereoselective carbometalation of sp-disubstituted cyclopropenes. The control of selectivity originates from a combined -facial diastereoselective carbometalation with a regio-directed addition. The regio-controlling element subsequently serves as a leaving group in an intramolecular nucleophilic substitution.

Idiopathic inflammatory myopathies: CT characteristics of interstitial lung disease and their association(s) with myositis-specific autoantibodies.

Objectives: Interstitial lung disease (ILD), one of the most common extramuscular manifestations of idiopathic inflammatory myopathies (IIMs), carries a poor prognosis. Myositis-specific autoantibody (MSA)-positivity is a key finding for IIM diagnosis. We aimed to identify IIM-associated lung patterns, evaluate potential CT-ILD finding-MSA relationships, and assess intra- and interobserver reproducibility in a large IIM population.

COVID-19 in Patients Undergoing Hemodialysis: Prevalence and Asymptomatic Screening During a Period of High Community Prevalence in a Large Paris Center.

Rationale & Objective: Due to extensive comorbid conditions, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has a poor prognosis in people receiving maintenance hemodialysis. In this article, we describe our experience with 200 maintenance hemodialysis patients in a hemodialysis center that used universal reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction testing, including 38 COVID-19-positive patients.

Study Design: Descriptive observational cohort, including the time line of patient diagnoses along with contextual events including precautions, testing, screening algorithms, clinical diagnostics and therapy, and the clinical course of COVID-19-infected patients and their final outcomes.

Factors associated with parathyroid hormone control in haemodialysis patients with secondary hyperparathyroidism treated with cinacalcet in real-world clinical practice: Mimosa study.

Background: Secondary hyperparathyroidism (SHPT) is frequent in haemodialysis (HD) patients. Oral cinacalcet-hydrochloride (HCl) decreases parathyroid hormone (PTH); however, real-life PTH data, according to Kidney Disease: Improving Global Outcomes (KDIGO) guidelines, are still lacking. Our goal is to assess the percentage of cinacalcet-HCl-treated HD patients with controlled SHPT (PTH <9× upper limit of the normal range) after 12 months (M12) of treatment.

Multi-resolution speech analysis for automatic speech recognition using deep neural networks: Experiments on TIMIT.

Speech Analysis for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems typically starts with a Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) that implies selecting a fixed point in the time-frequency resolution trade-off. This approach, combined with a Mel-frequency scaled filterbank and a Discrete Cosine Transform give rise to the Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC), which have been the most common speech features in speech processing for the last decades. These features were particularly well suited for the previous Hidden Markov Models/Gaussian Mixture Models (HMM/GMM) state of the art in ASR.

Obstructive Sleep Apnea in Women: Study of Speech and Craniofacial Characteristics.

Background: Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a common sleep disorder characterized by frequent cessation of breathing lasting 10 seconds or longer. The diagnosis of OSA is performed through an expensive procedure, which requires an overnight stay at the hospital. This has led to several proposals based on the analysis of patients' facial images and speech recordings as an attempt to develop simpler and cheaper methods to diagnose OSA.

An analysis of the influence of deep neural network (DNN) topology in bottleneck feature based language recognition.

Language recognition systems based on bottleneck features have recently become the state-of-the-art in this research field, showing its success in the last Language Recognition Evaluation (LRE 2015) organized by NIST (U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology).

[Common physiological basis for post-traumatic stress disorder and dependence to drugs of abuse: Implications for new therapeutic approaches].

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and addiction to drugs of abuse are two common diseases, showing high comorbidity rates. This review presents a number of evidence showing similarities between these two pathologies, especially the hyper-responsiveness to environmental cues inducing a reactivation of the target memory leading either to re-experiencing (PTSD), or drug craving. Accordingly, PTSD and addiction to drug of abuse might by considered as memory pathologies, underlined by the same physiological process.

Reviewing the connection between speech and obstructive sleep apnea.

Background: Sleep apnea (OSA) is a common sleep disorder characterized by recurring breathing pauses during sleep caused by a blockage of the upper airway (UA). The altered UA structure or function in OSA speakers has led to hypothesize the automatic analysis of speech for OSA assessment. In this paper we critically review several approaches using speech analysis and machine learning techniques for OSA detection, and discuss the limitations that can arise when using machine learning techniques for diagnostic applications.

Repeated amphetamine injections alter behavior and induce a delayed behavioral sensitization modulated by reactivity to novelty: Similarities and differences with trauma consequences.

Supporting our hypothesis of common biological bases for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and addiction, we recently reported that rats exposed to a single prolonged stress (SPS), a PTSD model, develop a delayed behavioral sensitization of the noradrenergic system, similar to that observed in mice after four repeated drug administrations. However, sensitization after trauma was modulated by reactivity to novelty, and this aspect that had not been explored in the addiction model. The first aim of the paper was thus to investigate the influence of reactivity to novelty on delayed behavioral sensitization in rats after four repeated amphetamine injections.

Language Identification in Short Utterances Using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Recurrent Neural Networks.

Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have recently outperformed other state-of-the-art approaches, such as i-vector and Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), in automatic Language Identification (LID), particularly when dealing with very short utterances (∼3s). In this contribution we present an open-source, end-to-end, LSTM RNN system running on limited computational resources (a single GPU) that outperforms a reference i-vector system on a subset of the NIST Language Recognition Evaluation (8 target languages, 3s task) by up to a 26%. This result is in line with previously published research using proprietary LSTM implementations and huge computational resources, which made these former results hardly reproducible.

Speech Signal and Facial Image Processing for Obstructive Sleep Apnea Assessment.

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a common sleep disorder characterized by recurring breathing pauses during sleep caused by a blockage of the upper airway (UA). OSA is generally diagnosed through a costly procedure requiring an overnight stay of the patient at the hospital. This has led to proposing less costly procedures based on the analysis of patients' facial images and voice recordings to help in OSA detection and severity assessment.

Integration of New Information with Active Memory Accounts for Retrograde Amnesia: A Challenge to the Consolidation/Reconsolidation Hypothesis?

Unlabelled: Active (new and reactivated) memories are considered to be labile and sensitive to treatments disrupting the time-dependent consolidation/reconsolidation processes required for their stabilization. Active memories also allow the integration of new information for updating memories. Here, we investigate the possibility that, when active, the internal state provided by amnesic treatments is represented and integrated within the initial memory and that amnesia results from the absence of this state at testing.

Diagnosis and management of congenital hypothyroidism associated with pseudohypoparathyroidism.

Unlabelled: Hypothyroidism is a particular condition observed in pseudohypoparathyroidism (PHP), a rare disorder characterized by parathyroid (PTH) resistance leading to hypocalcemia and hyperphosphatemia associated with a GNAS (guanine nucleotide-binding protein α-subunit) mutation (PHP1A) or epimutation (PHP1B). To determine the presence of hypothyroidism at birth we conducted a retrospective study in our cohort of patients presenting with either PHP1A (n = 116) or PHP1B (n = 99). We also investigated patients presenting at birth with congenital hypothyroidism (CH) and a eutopic thyroid gland for phosphocalcium abnormalities suggesting PTH resistance and PHP.

Left atrial high-grade undifferentiated pleomorphic sarcoma protruding through the mitral valve.

Primary cardiac tumors are uncommon. Malignant neoplasms account for 25%, including 75% of cardiac sarcomas. A 53-year-old female complained of exertional dyspnea and orthopnea.

Reproducible and sustained efficacy of targeted therapy with vemurafenib in patients with BRAF(V600E)-mutated Erdheim-Chester disease.

Purpose: Histiocytoses are rare disorders with heterogeneous prognosis. BRAF(V600E) mutations have been observed in half of patients with Langerhans cell histiocytosis (LCH) and in 50% to 100% of patients with Erdheim-Chester disease (ECD) patients. We recently reported short-term efficacy of a BRAF inhibitor (vemurafenib) in three patients with multisystemic ECD.

Thoracic involvement in systemic primary vasculitis: radiological patterns and follow-up.

Systemic primary vasculitides are rare idiopathic diseases causing an inflammatory injury to the vessel walls. A pulmonary involvement is frequent, and chest-CT is the imaging technique of reference in its assessment. An extremely wide variety of parenchymal, vascular and airways abnormalities, has been described and diagnosis can be challenging: knowledge of clinical data and a close cooperation with the referring physician is often crucial.

Only susceptible rats exposed to a model of PTSD exhibit reactivity to trauma-related cues and other symptoms: an effect abolished by a single amphetamine injection.

The present study had two main goals. First, to investigate whether an animal model of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), single prolonged stress (SPS) leads to one of the main PTSD symptom: avoidance of trauma-related stimuli. Second, to investigate whether a single amphetamine injection delivered 30 days after SPS can reduce these symptoms.

Findings of cardiac magnetic resonance imaging in asymptomatic myocardial ischemic disease in Takayasu arteritis.

Takayasu arteritis (TA) may affect myocardium and cause coronary stenosis. The aim of this study was to assess the prevalence and pattern of myocardial disease in patients with TA, using late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) of cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMRI). Twenty-seven consecutive patients with TA and 80 age- and gender-matched controls without known cardiovascular disease underwent CMRI.

[Focusing on peritoneal dialysis adequacy].

The optimal method to assess the adequacy of peritoneal dialysis therapies is controversial. Today, the adequacy must not be considered as a number or a concept assessed only by two parameters (total KT/V urea and total solute clearance) but defined by many more items. In the absence of data, based on theoretical considerations, the reanalysis of the CANUSA study showed that renal kidney function, rather than peritoneal clearance, was associated with improved survival.