I immensely enjoyed the contribution by Finsterer and Bersano [1], published in the September 2015 issue of the Journal, about seizures, Takotsubo syndrome (TTS), and sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP). The authors carried out a review of the heretofore reported cases of TTS triggered by seizures, with particular intension of evaluating fatal outcome. Among the reported 74 patients (86...

Loud sound exposure exacerbates aminoglycoside ototoxicity, increasing the risk of permanent hearing loss and degrading the quality of life in affected individuals. We previously reported that loud sound exposure induces temporary threshold shifts (TTS) and enhances uptake of aminoglycosides, like gentamicin, by cochlear outer hair cells (OHCs). Here, we explore mechanisms by which loud sound e...

Dot blot hybridization and PCR amplification of 14 Ara(+) and 8 Ara(-) Burkholderia pseudomallei strains showed that type III secretion (TTS) genes were present in all the Ara(-) strains but absent from all but one of the Ara(+) strains. The link between TTS genes and an Ara(-) phenotype suggests a role for TTS in virulence.

OBJECTIVE To examine the effects of coordination training with and without stochastic resonance (SR) stimulation on dynamic postural stability. DESIGN Experimental with repeated measures. SETTING Research Laboratory. PARTICIPANTS Thirty subjects with functional ankle instability (FAI) and 30 healthy subjects. INTERVENTIONS Subjects were assigned to a conventional coordination training g...

This paper describes a comprehensive usability evaluation of an automated telephone banking system which employs text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis in offering additional detail on customers’ account transactions. The paper describes a series of four experiments in which TTS was employed to offer an extra level of detail to recent transactions listings within an established banking service which ot...

Since almost 20 y it is known that seizures may trigger Takotsubo syndrome (TTS). Since then it has been repeatedly proposed that TTS could be the cause of sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP). A review of the so far reported cases of seizure-triggered TTS was carried out to see how often seizure-triggered TTS is fatal. Altogether 59 papers were identified which reported altogether 74 pa...

We present a study on the relation between fundamental frequency (F0) and its perceptual effect in the context of text-tospeech (TTS) synthesis. Features that essentially capture the intonational (macro-prosodic) properties of spoken speech are introduced and analysed with regard to the following questions: (i) How does the prosodic variation of TTS signals differ from natural speech? (ii) Is t...

Tarsal Tunnel Syndrome (TTS) is an entrapment neuropathy of tibial nerve which is compressed in the tarsal tunnel, an anatomic structure formed between bones (medial wall of calcaneus, talus and distal tibia) and flexor retinaculum. The cases are usually idiopathic whereas occasionally TTS occurs secondary to space occupying lesions such as ganglia, tumors, bony protrusions [1-8]. Tarsal coalit...

In this MA-project a Dutch TTS system based on Festival, NeXTeNS, has been changed step by step into a Frisian system. As for many minority languages, Frisian too has very few digital resources. So, the challenge of this project is to make the system as intelligible as possible with minimal resources. The resulting TTS system is called FRYSS. At the end of the thesis period an evaluation was ca...

This paper deals with how to construct Text To Speech (TTS) systems for Chinese dialects. The proposed method adapts Chinese Mandarin TTS system to dialects TTS systems through representing dialect phonology by Mandarin phonology using phonology mappings, and adding dialect vocabulary in the front end to handle lexical difference. But not all Chinese dialects are suitable for applying this adap...