BACKGROUND C ardiac sympathetic signals play an important role in the regulation of myocardial perfusion. We hypothesized that sympathetically mediated myocardial blood flow would be impaired in diabetics with autonomic neuropathy. METHODS AND RESULTS We studied 28 diabetics (43+/-7 years old) and 11 age-matched healthy volunteers. PET was used to delineate cardiac sympathetic innervation wit...

We present minimum Bayes-risk system combination, a method that integrates consensus decoding and system combination into a unified multi-system minimum Bayes-risk (MBR) technique. Unlike other MBR methods that re-rank translations of a single SMT system, MBR system combination uses the MBR decision rule and a linear combination of the component systems’ probability distributions to search for ...

The MARAPUR concept is a biological wastewater treatment process based on the MBR functional principle. The ultrafiltration of activated sludge takes place in pressure-driven hollow fiber membranes. The vertical membrane modules are installed compactly in a MEGAMODUL. The permeate extraction is accomplished in the cross-flow, which is supported by rinsing aeration. The main process advantages a...

Recognition performance decreases when recognition systems are used over the telephone network, especially wireless network and noisy environments. It appears that non-efficient speech/non-speech detection (SND) is an important source of this degradation. Therefore, speech detection robustness to noise is a challenging problem to be examined, in order to improve recognition performance for the ...

In our recently published paper [1], we presented a risk-based lattice cutting procedure to segment ASR word lattices into smaller sub-lattices as a means to to improve the efficiency of Minimum Bayes-Risk (MBR) rescoring. In the experiments reported [1], some of the hypotheses in the original lattices were inadvertently discarded during segmentation, and this affected MBR performance adversely...

Membrane fouling is one of the most important considerations in the design and operation of membrane systems as it affects pretreatment needs, cleaning requirements, operating conditions, cost and performance. Given that membrane fouling represents the main limitation to membrane process operation, it is unsurprising that the majority of membrane material and process research and development co...

Hypothermia produced by acute cooling prominently alters sympathetic nerve outflow. Skin sympathoexcitatory responses to skin cooling are attenuated in aged compared with young subjects, suggesting that advancing age influences sympathetic nerve responsiveness to hypothermia. However, regulation of skin sympathetic nerve discharge (SND) is only one component of the complex sympathetic nerve res...