Proper randomisation rests on adequate allocation concealment. An allocation concealment process keeps clinicians and participants unaware of upcoming assignments. Without it, even properly developed random allocation sequences can be subverted. Within this concealment process, the crucial unbiased nature of randomised controlled trials collides with their most vexing implementation problems. P...

Calcium channel blockers depress atrioventricular (AV) nodal properties in vivo in a frequency-dependent manner, suggesting that selective drug action during supraventricular arrhythmias may result from use-dependent properties. The present study was designed to examine whether or not the rate-dependent actions of diltiazem account for its therapeutic effects during atrial fibrillation. The det...

Scalable Video Coding (SVC) provides a way to encapsulate several video layers with increasing quality and resolution in a single bitstream. Thus it is particularly adapted to address heterogeneous networks and a wide variety of decoding devices. In this paper, we evaluate the interest of SVC in a different context, which is error concealment after transmission on networks subject to packet los...

Adaptive muting method using an optimized parametric shaping function as a part of the ITU-T G.722 Appendix IV packet loss concealment algorithm is proposed. The packet loss concealment algorithm incorporating an adaptive muting scheme is known to prevent the generation of unpleasant sounds during packet loss concealment. However, original muting uses a piece-wise linear muting curve according ...

Existing spatial shape-error concealment techniques are broadly based upon either parametric curves that exploit geometric information concerning a shape’s contour or object shape statistics using a combination of Markov random fields and maximum a posteriori estimation. Both categories are to some extent, able to mask errors caused by information loss, provided the shape is considered independ...

ABSTRACT This paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we formulate the proposed UMPC method for modeling nonstationary and multi-modal data. Both MPC and UPC are shown to be special cases of the proposed UMPC model. We apply UMPC to error concealment in Section 3. The experiment results in Section 4 show the performance of UMPC for error concealment over conventional methods. We then concl...

Error concealment is of crucial importance when transmitting digital video material over error-prone channels. Indeed, loss of information can result in severe degradation of the video quality if precautions are not taken to contain the effect and propagation of errors. In this paper, we present an error concealment mechanism that supports quality scalability in packet-based transmission of vid...

The present study aimed to determine the level of felt stigma, overprotection, concealment, and concerns related to epilepsy in different life domains by using culturally-specific scales for Turkish individuals with epilepsy. Also, it aimed to detect relations among the study variables and to determine the variables which predict felt stigma. For this purpose, felt stigma scale, overprotection ...

This paper presents a nonnegative subspace approach for packet loss concealment problem. The magnitude spectrogram of speech signal is projected onto nonnegative subspace using nonnegative matrix factorization algorithm. Consequently, packet loss concealment problem is transformed to linear interpolation of the projective coefficients in nonnegative subspace. Simulation examples, objective test...