Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
IS THE CLINICAL PRESENTATION OF THE RUPTURED ANEURYSM ARE DIFFERENT FROM THE UNRUPTURED ANEURYSM – A PROSPECTIVE STUDY

Background: An aneurysm was defined as an abnormal focal bulge or diffuse swelling of the blood vessel wall. It can involve any part of the circulatory system and can be potentially fatal if it ruptures. The incidence of IA is 3–5% in the population. Ruptured and unruptured aneurysms present with varied clinical presentations. Most patients with unruptured IA [UIA] are clinically asymptomatic or present with nonspecific symptoms. The most common presentation of a ruptured aneurysm is thunderclap headache. This study aimed to determine the differences between the clinical characteristics of RIA and UIA in an Indian subset of the population. Aim: To find a difference in clinical characteristics difference between ruptured and unruptured intracranial aneurysms at the time of presentation. Material & Methods: The present prospective observational descriptive study was conducted in Tamil Nadu Government Multi Super Specialty Hospital, Chennai, for a period of 9 months. All patients who visited the hospital with imaging features of intracranial aneurysm during the study period and met the inclusion and exclusion criteria for the study period were included in the study. Results: ? Conclusion: The mean age of the ruptured group was lower than that of the unruptured group. The time interval between the onset of symptoms and presentation was significantly longer in the unruptured group than in the ruptured group
SYLLABLE POSITION EFFECTS WITH FRENCH AND SPANISH /l/

Gradient reduction in coda consonant articulation occurs cross-linguistically. We investigate here the possibility of lesser constriction in French and Spanish lateral codas compared to onsets, conditioned by syllable context and language variety. Anterior and posterior contact in syllable-initial and -final singleton /l/ and in labial-/l/ or /l/-labial clusters produced by four French (2 each from France and Quebec) and seven Spanish speakers (5 Argentine, 1 Cuban, 1 Peninsular) was measured in isolated words and carrier sentences using electro-palatography (EPG). Reduction in anterior contact occured only with the Quebec French speakers. A greater degree of syllable-final posterior contact reduction was observed, consistently for Quebec but not European French speakers and for all Spanish speakers. These findings reveal gradient onset-coda /l/ asymmetries in both languages with Quebec French differing from the other Romance varieties studied in degree of weakening. Furthermore, at least for Spanish, coda /l/ lenition differs from that of other consonants.
PROSODIC CUES OF DISTINGUISHING NEUTRAL AND NON-NEUTRAL YES/NO QUESTIONS IN HUNGARIAN: THE ACOUSTICS OF SURPRISE

Hungarian information-seeking yes/no questions are often realised with a single rising-falling f0 contour throughout the utterance. A common way to indicate surprise in Hungarian is to put an emphasis on more than one lexical unit, which creates multiple rise-fall patterns in questions. This paper compares f0 contours of accent groups (AGs) in non-neutral yes/no questions expressing surprise with neutral information-seeking questions, both consisting of a single intonation phrase including at least two AGs and thus multiple f0 contours. Acoustic analysis was based on f0 parameters of the AG that best represent the difference according to a clustering-based incremental feature selection procedure. Non-neutral AGs were characterised by lower f0, but larger f0 range than those appearing in neutral questions. This is in line with previous perception experiments showing that surprise is encoded in f0 parameters in Hungarian.
L3 NORWEGIAN /ʉː/ and /uː/ IN L1 POLISH/L2 ENGLISH LEARNERS: DIFFERENT PATTERNS OF CROSS-LINGUISTIC INTERACTIONS

The spectral properties of Norwegian /ʉː/ and /uː/ were studied in a population of L1 Polish/L2 English speakers acquiring Norwegian as an L3 in an instructed setting in Poland. The vowel /ʉː/ is a rounded high central vowel, displaying a combination of features nominally absent from the speakers’ L1 and L2. In addition to descriptive formant measurements, two measures of overlap were used to ascertain if a separate category can be argued to develop for /ʉː/. The results indicate that a distinction is formed against Polish /u/ but not necessarily against English /uː/. Change over time is inconclusive at these early stages of acquisition. Interestingly, /uː/ seems to display influence of L2 acoustics and L1 orthography.
Body-based user interfaces 1

The relation between the body and computer interfaces has undergone several shifts since the advent of computing. In early models of interaction, the body was treated as a periphery to the mind, much like a keyboard is peripheral to a computer. The goal of the interface designers was to optimize the information ﬂow between the brain and the computer, using these imperfect peripheral devices. Toward the end of the previous century the social body, as well as the material body and its physical manipulation skills started receiving increased consideration from interaction designers. The goal of the interface designer shifted, requiring the designer to understand the role of the body in a given context, and adapting the interface to respect the social context and to make use of the tacit knowledge that the body has of how the physical world functions. Currently, we are witnessing another shift in the role of the body. It is no longer merely something that requires consideration for interface design. Instead, advances in technology and our understanding of interaction allows the body to become part of the interface. We call these body-based user interfaces. We identify four ways in which the body becomes part of the interface: (1) The interaction might occur on or in the human body, for example using implanted tactile stimulation or touch interfaces on the body. Here the material of the body becomes part of the interface. (2) The interaction changes the morphology of the body and corresponding control structures, for example by providing users with additional skills, such as drawing or playing instruments or additional limbs that help complete complex tasks. Here the shape of the body, or the corresponding ability to act, is affected by the interface. (3) The interaction engages with or modiﬁes how we perceive the world, for example by manipulating the sense of direction in VR or allowing users to experience non-existent stimuli, such as mid-air friction. Here, the idiosyncrasies of multi-modal perception and perceptive acts become part of the user interface. Finally, (4) the interaction might engage with the experience of having a body, for example by manipulating the sense of body ownership, location, or agency. Here the introspective
SYLLABIC REDUCTION IN ITALIAN CONNECTED SPEECH: TOWARDS THE INTEGRATION OF LINGUISTIC AND COMPUTATIONAL APPROACHES

In spontaneous speech, words are normally uttered in continuous chains whereby boundaries are blurred and segments can undergo changes, e.g., vowel centralization, consonant lenition, or deletion, due to structural linguistic factors or contingent sociolinguistic factors. However, such “reduction” processes are often studied by comparing connected speech realizations with isolated words in their expected, phonological forms. This study aims at investigating systematic patterns of phonetic variation in a dataset of spontaneous Italian discourse by considering the syllabifications of the speech chain at the phonological and phonetic levels. Moreover, since phonetic segmentation, based on human perception, implies a discretization of continuous productions, we employ unsupervised computational techniques, namely clustering algorithms, which allow for the observation of patterns emerging from the data without external (human) interference. The linguistic analysis shows systematic reduction processes related to the syllabic structure and lexical stress. The computational representation highlights a convergence of syllables to the non-marked structure in Italian (CV).
STUDY ON RISK STRATIFICATION AND PREDICTION OF 30-DAY MORTALITY RATE OF ICH PATIENTS USING ICH SCORE

Background: Cerebrovascular accidents, including intracerebral haemorrhage (ICH), are a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Despite the progress in the Indian economy, healthcare delivery remains limited. This study aimed to assess patients with intracerebral haemorrhage using the ICH score, substantiating the ease and rapidity of this assessment tool, employing it for risk stratification among patients, and evaluating outcomes regarding the 30-day mortality rate. Material & Methods: The study was conducted at Tirunelveli Medical College, Department of General Medicine, on 50 patients with intracerebral haemorrhage from June 2015 to May 2016. A short history of Epidemiological data, such as age, sex, area of residence, and important risk factors, such as hypertension and diabetes, with a history of stroke were noted. The total ICH score calculation used the Glasgow coma scale, categorised by CT location, intraventricular bleeding, haematoma volume, and age. Results: The predominant risk factors for cardiovascular morbidity were hypertension (43 patients) and diabetes (18 patients). There was a significant difference in GCS scores and ICH volumes between outcomes (p<0.001). There were no significant differences in IVH, site, or age between the outcomes (p>0.05). The ICH score correlated well with the outcome of death. The correlation of the ICH score with the location of the bleeding did not statistically correlate well with the ICH score. Conclusion: In conclusion, the ICH scoring system scale needs to be used for risk stratification of patients to assess treatment risks and benefits and to communicate effectively and precisely to provide families with information about disease and outcomes.
TURNING PODCASTS INTO A TRAINING CORPUS FOR CONVERSATIONAL TEXT-TO-SPEECH SYNTHESIS

Text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) is increasingly used in applications that require a conversational speaking style, such as voice-enabled chatbots. This gives rise to the need to develop standard and affordable solutions for obtaining conversational training data. This paper describes the creation of a three-hour TTS training corpus for Estonian, using found podcast data, existing automatic speech recognition and transcription-editing software, and a simplified transcription-editing protocol. The corpus was evaluated in comparison with a corpus of read-aloud sentences recorded by the host of the podcast. The evaluation results showed that conversational utterances synthesised with the voices based on the podcast corpus were indeed perceived as representing a more spontaneous speaking style than the utterances synthesised with the voices based on the read-aloud data. Perceived spontaneity was increased by the presence of filled pauses and disfluencies in the stimulus utterances.
AKU eCommons

Background: Women in Pakistan suffer from a high rate of depression. The stress of low‑income, illiteracy, exposure to violence and living in a patriarchal society are predisposing vulnerabilities for depression, particularly during and following pregnancy. The resilience of an individual plays a significant role in promoting prenatal mental health, but this has yet to be thoroughly researched. In this article, our objective is to identify the core characteristics of resilience among pregnant women, which will then help us in developing an intervention. Methods: The exploratory‑descriptive study was conducted over 6 months in five different antenatal hospitals in Sindh, Pakistan. A total of 17 semi‑structured interviews were conducted with pregnant women, purposefully selected with heterogeneous characteristics to explore diverse perspectives, while symptoms of depression were quantified by the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale before the interview. Verbatim transcriptions were coded openly and merged into categories and themes. Result: A total of six themes emerged from in‑depth thematic analysis: 1) purpose of life, 2) dealing with emotions, 3) believing in yourself, 4) optimistic approach, 5) strengthening support and relationship and 6) spirituality and human‑ ity. Women agreed that these characteristics could help them improve their mental health. Conclusion: In conclusion, these themes were the core components of pregnant women’s resilience which ulti‑ mately could help to promote prenatal mental health. These pave a pathway towards developing culturally and contextually resilience interventions aimed at enhancing mental health of pregnant women which then may improve neonatal and family mental wellbeing.
NEURAL SPEECH SYNTHESIS WITH CONTROLLABLE CREAKY VOICE STYLE

The use of creaky voice, or vocal fry in speech has been extensively studied for its linguistic, paralinguistic, and sociolinguistic functions. However, much of the existing research on this topic is fragmented and often contradictory. In order to gain a deeper understanding of the communicative functions of creaky voice, we propose the use of comparative perceptual studies with natural sounding speech synthesis. We present a neural speech synthesizer that produces highly natural-sounding synthetic speech with controllable creaky voice styles. In a subjective listening experiment, speech experts were able to identify the presence and intensity of creaky voice produced by the synthesizer. Our results suggest that neural speech synthesis can be a valuable tool in furthering our understanding of the communicative functions of creaky voice.
PHONETIC-PHONOLOGICAL FACTORS IN STUTTERING IN GERMAN

Relating stuttering to phonetic-phonological complexity has a long tradition in clinical and psycho-linguistic research. Some findings point toward a relationship between stuttering and phonetic-articulatory effort, while others emphasize lexical-representational aspects. In our study, we focus on phenomena specifically arising in the transition from phonological to phonetic-articulatory encoding. Here, abstract phonological segments are assembled to form motor plans for articulation by taking various factors into account. We investigated stuttering in a German word-reading-task using words and nonsense-words starting with a [CV]-structure, manipulating manner and place of articulation of word-initial consonants and their distance to adjacent vowels ( transition ), vowel length, controlling for word length , syllable frequency and biphone frequency . Results show word length as a robust predictor of stuttering, while the factors transition , manner and vowel length (and their interaction) also played a role. We argue that only such systematic approaches allow insights into the complex interplay between encoding levels in stut-tering.
IMPLICIT VS. EXPLICIT PERCEPTION OF FRENCH OPTIONAL LIAISON AS A MARKER OF FORMALITY

This study examines the effect of explicit awareness (or, noticing ) of socially-indexed variation on the generation of social inferences during speech perception. In a matched-guise task, French listeners associated sentences that contained optional liaison— a sociolinguistic variable at the level of stereotype in French—more frequently with ‘formal language’ than with ‘everyday language’. This effect was larger for participants who reported noticing the optional liaisons than for participants who did not. These results demonstrate that while noticing variation in context is not a necessary condition for social inferences to be generated, language users’ subjective experience of socially-conditioned variation influences the frequency with which social inferences arise, which may ultimately lead to individual differences in the representation of the same socially-indexed variation.
Lateral Variation in the Source Parameters of Earthquakes in the Korean Peninsula

To elucidate the seismic characteristics of earthquakes in the Korean Peninsula, we investigated seismic source parameters of 651 earthquakes that occurred between 2001 and 2014 with magnitudes greater than 1.9. We estimated the seismic moment, corner frequency, and stress drop of an event from S ‐wave source spectra. Comparison of our estimates with the results of previous studies confirmed the reliability of our findings. Breakdown in the self‐similarity of an earthquake source may occur at around a seismic moment of 1021 dyn·cm, as suggested by previous studies, although nonnegligible variation still appears in the corner frequency of low‐magnitude events. We also found that earthquakes in two regions, near Pyongyang and on the western margin of the East Sea (Sea of Japan), occurred with low stress drops. These regions have distinctively higher seismicity than other regions. The largest earthquake ( M w 6.2) in the Korean Peninsula in the past century occurred in the low stress‐drop region near Pyongyang. The western margin of the East Sea reportedly has earthquake focal mechanisms that differ from those of earthquakes in other regions in the peninsula. Therefore, we suggest that lateral variation in stress drops in the Korean Peninsula could be related to the distinctive seismic characteristics in these regions.
Lessons learned from applying established cut-off values of questionnaires to detect somatic symptom disorders in primary care: a cross-sectional study

Introduction Based on two diagnostic accuracy studies in high-prevalence settings, two distinctly different combinations of cut-off values have been recommended to identify persons at risk for somatic symptom disorder (SSD) with the combination of the Patient-Health Questionnaire-15 (PHQ-15) and the Somatic Symptom Disorder—B Criteria Scale (SSD-12). We investigated whether the reported sensitivity and specificity of both recommended cut-off combinations are transferable to primary care. Methods In a cross-sectional study, 420 unselected adult primary care patients completed PHQ-15 and SSD-12. Patients scoring ≥9 and ≥ 23 (recommended cut-off combination #1) or ≥ 8 and ≥ 13 (recommended cut-off combination #2) were considered test-positive for SSD, respectively. To assess the validity of the reported sensitivity and specificity in different low- to high-prevalence settings, we compared correspondingly expected proportions of test positives to the proportion observed in our sample. Results Based on combination #1, 38 participants (9%) were found to be test positive, far fewer than expected, based on the reported values for sensitivity and specificity (expected minimum frequency 30% with a true prevalence ≥1%). This can only be explained by a lower sensitivity and higher specificity in primary care. For combination #2, 98 participants (23%) were test positive, a finding consistent with a true prevalence of SSD of 15% or lower. Discussion Our analyzes strongly suggest that the sensitivity and specificity estimates reported for combination #1 are not applicable to unselected primary care patients and that the cut-off for the SSD (≥23) is too strict. Cut-off combination #2 seems more applicable but still needs to be tested in studies that compare screening findings by questionnaires with validated diagnostic interviews as reference standards in primary care populations.
Cochlear implant positioning: development and validation of an automatic method using computed tomography image analysis

The aim of this study was to preoperatively asses the feasibility of drilling a bony recess for the fixation of a cochlear implant in the temporal bone. Even though complications are rare with cochlear implantations, drilling at the site of implantation have resulted in hematoma or cerebrospinal fluid leakage. Mainly in cases with a reduced temporal bone thickness, the risk for complications has increased, such as in paediatric patients. Methods An in-house designed semi-automatic algorithm was developed to analyse a 3D model of the skull. The feasibility of drilling the recess was determined by a gradient descent method to search for the thickest part of the temporal bone. Feasibility was determined by the residual bone thickness which was calculated after a simulated drilling of the recess at the thickest position. An initial validation of the algorithm was performed by measuring the accuracy of the algorithm on five 3D models with known thickest locations for the recess. The accuracy was determined by a part comparison between the known position and algorithm provided position. Results In four of the five validation models a standard deviation for accuracy below the predetermined cut-off value of 4.2 mm was achieved between the actual thickest position and the position determined by the algorithm. Furthermore, the residual thickness calculated by the algorithm showed a high agreement (max. 0.02 mm difference) with the actual thickness. Conclusion With the developed algorithm, a semi-automatic method was created to analyse the temporal bone thickness within a specified region of interest on the skull. Thereby, providing indications for surgical feasibility, potential risks for anatomical structures and impact on procedure time of cochlear implantation. This method could be a valuable research tool to objectively assess feasibility of drilling a recess in patients with thin temporal bones preoperatively.
3D Shape Reconstruction Using Focus Clue From Defocus Blur Detection

3D shape reconstruction has numerous applications in computer vision. Shape from focus (SFF) is one of the 3D shape reconstruction techniques that employs the focus information of the images. Accurate estimation of the focus values of image pixels is a critical step in SFF such that it plays a significant role in determining the overall quality of the reconstructed 3D shape. Traditionally, in SFF, hand-crafted focus measure (FM) operators are used, which do not perform well under diverse and complicated situations. In this work, we propose to exploit the pre-trained deep convolutional neural network (CNN)-based model to estimate the focus values of image pixels. Experimental results showed that the proposed method yields better focus measurements which leads to high-quality shape reconstruction. This opens a window for a vast variety of deep learning-based single image focus/defocus estimation techniques to be employed for the 3D shape reconstruction in SFF.
Clock Synchronization Performance Measurement in VMs via PCIe Pass-through

Clock synchronization technology is widely used in high-precision time-demanding applications such as industrial control networks, aerospace control networks, etc. With the development of cloud computing and virtualization technology, the demand for time synchronization on virtual machines is becoming more and more prominent, and the characteristics of virtualization technology to isolate abstract underlying hardware make the clock synchronization of existing virtual machines software-based. It is challenging to measure synchronization errors through oscilloscopes. This paper proposes an innovative method for measuring the time synchronization accuracy of the virtual cluster with the help of a clock card. In addition, this paper gives the measurement accuracy of this measurement method through theoretical derivation. Finally, the effectiveness of the measurement method is verified by scientifically designing relevant experiments.