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Scars can cause pain, long-term physical dysfunction, and psychological harm. Botulinum toxin type A (BoNT-A) is one treatment choice for scars, but further evidence is needed to confirm its efficacy.This systematic review included randomized controlled trials that investigated the effectiveness of BoNT-A on scars. The mean and standard deviation for the Vancouver Scar Scale, Stony Brook Scar Evaluation Scale, visual analog scale for appearance evaluation, visual analog scale for scar pain evaluation, and scar width were extracted for subgroup analysis.Twenty-one randomized controlled trials were included. The BoNT-A group had a lower Vancouver Scar Scale score than the saline group (standardized mean difference, -0.73; 95 percent CI, -1.12 to -0.35; p = 0.0002) but a higher score than the steroid group (standardized mean difference, 0.85; 95 percent CI, 0.27 to 1.43; p = 0.004). The BoNT-A group exhibited a higher Stony Brook Scar Evaluation Scale grade than the saline group (standardized mean difference, 1.42; 95 percent CI, 0.83 to 2.00; p0.00001). The visual analog scale for appearance evaluation revealed higher scores in the BoNT-A group than in the saline group (standardized mean difference, 1.14; 95 percent CI, 0.69 to 1.60; p0.00001). As for pain evaluation, the BoNT-A group had a lower visual analog scale score than the steroid group (standardized mean difference, -2.57; 95 percent CI, -4.40 to -0.74; p = 0.006). Furthermore, scar width was significantly shorter in the BoNT-A group than in the control group (standardized mean difference, -1.11; 95 percent CI, -1.38 to -0.83; p0.00001).BoNT-A is more effective in treating scars than saline, although steroids may exhibit higher potency. Therefore, it can be considered an alternative in patients not amenable to steroid treatment.Therapeutic, II.

This study investigated the associations of non-aerobic fitness (NAF) and motor competence (MC) with attention in 4–6 year-old preschoolers. The allocation of attentional resources and speed of stimulus categorization were examined using the amplitude and latency of P3 of event-related potentials respectively, while cortical activation related to general attention and task-specific discriminative processes were examined using event-related desynchronization (ERD) at lower (8–10 Hz) and upper (10–12 Hz) alpha frequencies, respectively. Seventy-six preschoolers completed NAF (muscular power, muscular endurance, flexibility, balance) and MC (coordination and dexterity, ball skills, agility and balance) test batteries. Electroencephalogram was recorded while participants performed an auditory oddball task. After controlling for age and MC, muscular endurance was positively related to P3 amplitude. MC and its coordination and dexterity sub-component were positively related to task performance, with higher levels of coordination and dexterity showing an additional association with greater upper alpha ERD between 700 and 1000 ms following stimulus onset after controlling for age and NAF. These findings suggest relationships of NAF and MC with early childhood neurocognitive function. Specifically, muscular endurance is related to the neuroinhibition in facilitating effective allocation of attentional resources to stimulus evaluation while coordination and dexterity are related to cortical activation underlying strategic attentional preparation for subsequent stimulus evaluation.

Background: Laser resurfacing is used to minimize wrinkles, solar scars and sequelae of acne. Objective: Purpose of the systematic review was to compare resurfacing outcomes of CO2 laser and erbium: yttrium aluminium garnet (erb:YAG) laser therapies. Materials and methods: Medline, Cochrane Library, EMBASE and Google Scholar databases were searched until 9 April 2015 using the following terms: laser, carbon dioxide/CO2, facial wrinkles, rhytides and erbium-doped yttrium aluminium garnet/erbium:YAG/Er:YAG. Two-armed controlled split faced studies that compared CO2 laser and erbium:YAG laser in patients with mild-to-moderate facial wrinkles or rhytides were included. Results: The pooled data in this study and findings of other studies support the greater efficacy with the CO2 laser in improving facial wrinkles, but the erb:YAG laser was associated with a better complication profile compared with the CO2 laser. Except one case of hypopigmentation, other complications (i.e., erythema, hyperpigmentatio...

Voice-controlled house-hold devices, like Amazon Echo or Google Home, face the problem of performing speech recognition of device-directed speech in the presence of interfering background speech, i.e., background noise and interfering speech from another person or media device in proximity need to be ignored. We propose two end-to-end models to tackle this problem with information extracted from the "anchored segment". The anchored segment refers to the wake-up word part of an audio stream, which contains valuable speaker information that can be used to suppress interfering speech and background noise. The first method is called "Multi-source Attention" where the attention mechanism takes both the speaker information and decoder state into consideration. The second method directly learns a frame-level mask on top of the encoder output. We also explore a multi-task learning setup where we use the ground truth of the mask to guide the learner. Given that audio data with interfering speech is rare in our training data set, we also propose a way to synthesize "noisy" speech from "clean" speech to mitigate the mismatch between training and test data. Our proposed methods show up to 15% relative reduction in WER for Amazon Alexa live data with interfering background speech without significantly degrading on clean speech., Comment: Accepted by ICASSP 2019

The central nervous system plays a crucial role in fatigue during endurance exercise. Branched-chain amino acids (BCAA) could reduce cerebral serotonin synthesis by competing with its precursor tryptophan for crossing the blood brain barrier. Arginine and citrulline could prevent excess hyperammonemia accompanied by BCAA supplementation. This study investigated the combination of BCAA, arginine, and citrulline on endurance performance in two consecutive days. Seven male and three female endurance runners ingested 0.17 g·kg-1 BCAA, 0.05 g·kg-1 arginine and 0.05 g·kg-1 citrulline (AA trial) or placebo (PL trial) in a randomized cross-over design. Each trial contained a 5000 m time trial on the first day, and a 10000 m time trial on the second day. The AA trial had significantly better performance in 5000 m (AA: 1065.7 ± 33.9 s; PL: 1100.5 ± 40.4 s) and 10000 m (AA: 2292.0 ± 211.3 s; PL: 2375.6 ± 244.2 s). The two trials reported similar ratings of perceived exertion. After exercise, the AA trial had significantly lower tryptophan/BCAA ratio, similar NH3, and significantly higher urea concentrations. In conclusion, the supplementation could enhance time-trial performance in two consecutive days in endurance runners, possibly through the inhibition of cerebral serotonin synthesis by BCAA and the prevention of excess hyperammonemia by increased urea genesis.

A keyword-sensitive language modeling framework for spoken keyword search (KWS) is proposed to combine the advantages of conventional keyword-filler based and large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) based KWS systems. The proposed framework allows keyword search systems to be flexible on keyword target settings as in the LVCSR-based keyword search. In low-resource scenarios it facilitates KWS with an ability to achieve high keyword detection accuracy as in the keyword-filler based systems and to attain a low false alarm rate inherent in the LVCSR-based systems. The proposed keyword-aware grammar is realized by incorporating keyword information to re-train and modify the language models used in LVCSR-based KWS. Experimental results, on the evalpart1 data of the IARPA Babel OpenKWS13 Vietnamese tasks, indicate that the proposed approach achieves a relative improvement, over the conventional LVCSR-based KWS systems, of the actual term weighted value for about 57 % (from 0.2093 to 0.3287) and 20 % (from 0.4578 to 0.5486) on the limited-language-pack and full-language-pack tasks, respectively.

Laser resurfacing is used to minimize wrinkles, solar scars and sequelae of acne.Purpose of the systematic review was to compare resurfacing outcomes of COMedline, Cochrane Library, EMBASE and Google Scholar databases were searched until 9 April 2015 using the following terms: laser, carbon dioxide/COThe pooled data in this study and findings of other studies support the greater efficacy with the COIn general, the CO

We attempt to formulate Bayesian speaker adaptation for deep models and explore two different solutions. In the first “indirect” approach, Bayesian adaptation is applied to context-dependent, Gaussian-mixture-model based hidden Markov models (CD-GMM-HMMs) with bottleneck (BN) features derived from deep neural networks (DNNs). The second method directly formulates Bayesian adaptation for CD-DNN-HMMs by casting the adaptation step into a generative framework to formulate maximum-likelihood (ML) and maximum a posteriori (MAP) adaptation schemes. Experiments on the Wall Street Journal task demonstrate that both MAP and Structural MAP (SMAP) adaptation schemes are effective even with discriminative BN features. Furthermore, SMAP can attain a meaningful word error reduction (WERR) of 7.3% even when 80 hours of data, and 284 different speakers are available at training time. We have also observed a notable performance improvement with the indirect approach, and that supports the plausibility of proposed solution towards this novel direction.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of short-term quercetin (QE) intake on exercise performance, physiological fatigue and emotional responses during the recovery after a single bout of high intensity exercise. Twelve healthy male college students were double blindly and randomly assigned into quercetin (QE) intake trial (2 × 500 mg/day) or placebo-controlled trial (PL). The treatment was given for 7 continuous days, and then subjects performed a single bout of intensive exercise (75% VO2max) until exhaustion. Exercise duration to exhaust and VO2max were recorded before exercise. Other tests, such as heart rate, blood pressure, and profile of mood states (POMS) were conducted and analyzed before exercise and during recovery at 0, 10, 20, 30, and 60 minutes after exercise. However, the changes in lactate concentrations were tested only before exercise, and 0, 30 and 60 minutes after exercise. After completion of the trial, subjects were cross-over and the same protocols were repeated with one-week interval. The results revealed that subjects in QE trial had significantly higher VO2max compared to PL trial. Exercise time to exhaust in QE trial was longer than PE by 11%, but no significant difference. Furthermore, lactate concentration in QE trial was significantly lower than PL trial during 60 minute recovery period. The systolic blood pressure in QE trial was also lower than PL trial. However, QE trial recovered quicker in the change of heart rate than PL trial at 20 minute recovery period. In addition, the scores of fatigue and negative mental factors in POMS for QE trial were also significantly lower than PL trial. This study concluded that QE may enhance the performance of VO2max, delay physical fatigue, and improve negative emotion after an intensive exercise.