BACKGROUND The use of prehospital chest tube thoracostomy (TT) remains controversial because of presumed increased complication risks. This study analyzed infectious complication rates for physician-performed prehospital and emergency department (ED) TT. METHODS Over a 40-month period, all consecutive trauma patients with TT performed by the flight physician at the accident scene were compare...

The design of robust new interfaces that process conversational speech is a challenging research direction largely because users’ spoken language is so variable, which is especially true of children. The present research explored whether children’s response latencies before initiating a conversational turn converge with those heard in the text-to-speech (TTS) of a computer partner. A study was ...

This paper develops a bilingual Thai-English TTS system from two monolingual HMM-based TTS systems. An English Nagoya HMM-based TTS system (HTS) provides correct pronunciations of English words but the voice is different from the voice in a Thai HTS system. We apply a CSMAPLR adaptation technique to make the English voice sounds more similar to the Thai voice. To overcome a phone mapping proble...

For the past 25 years there has been an accelerating stream of literature reports on a pathological entity, called Takotsubo syndrome (TTS) (2,882 items in Pubmed, in response to the MeSH term “takotsubo”, as of 4/5/16),1 a term coined by Sato et al,2 and Dote and al,3 when they described in 1990 and 1991 respectively a transient left ventricular (LV) dysfunctional state, which make the angiogr...

[Purpose] Cerebral palsy is a disorder that affects balance in the sitting position. Cerebral palsy patients need trunk muscle strengthening and balance training. In order to improve trunk control sensory-motor control training is carried out on an unstable surface. We have developed a Trunk Training System (TTS) that can provide visual feedback using a tilt sensor for balance training in the s...

Tunneling nanotubes and epithelial bridges are recently discovered new forms of intercellular communication between remote cells allowing their electrical synchronization, transfer of second messengers and even membrane vesicles and organelles. In the present study, we demonstrate for the first time in primary cell cultures prepared from human laryngeal squamous cell carcinoma (LSCC) samples th...

Feed-forward, Deep neural networks (DNN)-based text-tospeech (TTS) systems have been recently shown to outperform decision-tree clustered context-dependent HMM TTS systems [1, 4]. However, the long time span contextual effect in a speech utterance is still not easy to accommodate, due to the intrinsic, feed-forward nature in DNN-based modeling. Also, to synthesize a smooth speech trajectory, th...

This study was performed in a climatic chamber to evaluate the combined effects of noise intensity, heat stress, workload, and exposure duration on both noise-induced temporary threshold shift (TTS) and the recovery time by adopting Taguch's method. Fourteen subjects without previous significant noise exposure and smoking history were recruited to participate in this study. All hearing threshol...

Temporary threshold shift (TTS) after loud noise exposure was investigated in a male and a female beluga whale (Delphinapterus leucas). The thresholds were evaluated using the evoked-potential technique, which allowed for threshold tracing with a resolution of ~1 min. The fatiguing noise had a 0.5 octave bandwidth, with center frequencies ranging from 11.2 to 90 kHz, a level of 165 dB re. 1 μPa...