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Automatic voice condition analysis systems have been developed to automatically discriminate pathological voices from healthy ones in the context of two disorders related to exudative lesions of Reinke’s space: nodules and Reinke’s edema. The systems are based on acoustic features, extracted from sustained vowel recordings. Reduced subsets of features have been obtained from a larger set by a feature selection algorithm based on Whale Optimization in combination with Support Vector Machine classification. Robustness of the proposed systems is assessed by adding noise of two different types (synthetic white noise and actual noise recorded in a clinical environment) to corrupt the speech signals. Two speech databases were used for this investigation: the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary (MEEI) database and a second one specifically collected in Hospital San Pedro de Alcantara (Caceres, Spain) for the scope of this work (UEX-Voice database). The results show that the prediction performance of the detection systems appreciably decrease when moving from MEEI to a database recorded in more realistic conditions. For both pathologies, the prediction performance declines under noisy conditions, being the effect of white noise more pronounced than the effect of noise recorded in the clinical environment.

The aim of this study was to assess the effect of inoculated endophytic bacteria on the concentrations of vitamins E (tocopherols), K (phylloquinone), B1 (thiamine), B2 (riboflavin), C (ascorbic acid) and the peroxyl radical scavenging capacity of hydroponically grown sweet basil. Endophytic strains were all isolated from hydrocarbon-stressed herbaceous plants or from basil showing superior growth. Plants inoculated with the endophytes displayed up to 40% increase (p < 0.05) in the concentration of the reduced form of vitamin C relative to control [0.56 mg/g fresh weight (FW)] which indicated less oxidative stress in the presence of endophytes. In the case of γ-tocopherol, the highest content [25.8 μg/g of fresh weight (FW)] in inoculated basils was significantly higher compared to control plants (18.5 ± 1.2 μg/g FW) (p < 0.05). Antioxidant activity (ROO∙ radicals scavenging) was as high as 94 ± 4 μM Trolox equivalents (TE)/g FW vs. 53 ± 5 μM TE/g FW for the control basil. Concentrations of vitamins C, B1, and B2 were not affected by most strains. The results showed that endophytic bacteria have the capacity to alter free radical quenching capacity and vitamin concentrations in basil plants and, that their effect is strain and nutrient dependent.

Background and objective Automatic voice condition analysis systems to detect Parkinson’s disease (PD) are generally based on speech data recorded under acoustically controlled conditions and professional supervision. The performance of these approaches in a free-living scenario is unknown. The aim of this research is to investigate the impact of uncontrolled conditions (realistic acoustic environment and lack of supervision) on the performance of automatic PD detection systems based on speech. Methods A mobile-assisted voice condition analysis system is proposed to aid in the detection of PD using speech. The system is based on a server–client architecture. In the server, feature extraction and machine learning algorithms are designed and implemented to discriminate subjects with PD from healthy ones. The Android app allows patients to submit phonations and physicians to check the complete record of every patient. Six different machine learning classifiers are applied to compare their performance on two different speech databases. One of them is an in-house database (UEX database), collected under professional supervision by using the same Android-based smartphone in the same room, whereas the other one is an age, sex and health-status balanced subset of mPower study for PD, which provides real-world data. By applying identical methodology, single-database experiments have been performed on each database, and also cross-database tests. Cross-validation has been applied to assess generalization performance and hypothesis tests have been used to report statistically significant differences. Results In the single-database experiments, a best accuracy rate of 0.92 (AUC = 0.98) has been obtained on UEX database, while a considerably lower best accuracy rate of 0.71 (AUC = 0.76) has been achieved using the mPower-based database. The cross-database tests provided very degraded accuracy metrics. Conclusion The results clearly show the potential of the proposed system as an aid for general practitioners to conduct triage or an additional tool for neurologists to perform diagnosis. However, due to the performance degradation observed using data from mPower study, semi-controlled conditions are encouraged, i.e., voices recorded at home by the patients themselves following a strict recording protocol and control of the information about patients by the medical doctor at charge.

This study investigated the valorization of oat bran and the use of its proteins to generate polypeptides with antioxidant and bile acid-binding properties. Ten protein hydrolysates were prepared by treating cellulase (CPI) or Viscozyme (VPI) protein isolates with five proteases. VPI-pepsin was the best peroxyl radical scavenger (497 ± 6-μM Trolox equivalents [TE]/g) while VPI-Flavourzyme quenched hydroxyl radicals (28 ± 0.6) and VPI-pepsin superoxide anion radicals (45.3 ± 6.6%). Hydrolysates, except those produced with pepsin, dose-dependently chelated iron whereas VPI-Protamex had the best copper-chelating capacity (59.83 ± 1.40%). These antioxidative capacities were important in preventing by 50% in vitro copper-induced oxidation of human low-density lipoprotein. Furthermore, due to their aromatic amino acid contents and hydrophobicity, the hydrolysates bound up to 46.3% the bile acids taurodeoxycholate and taurocholate. PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS: The presence of oxidants in foods can damage food molecules and decrease their quality. They are also known to increase the risk of developing chronic conditions like cardiovascular disease. Finding new antioxidant molecules are therefore useful in the management of chronic diseases. Data from this work showed that hydrolyzed oat bran proteins can be useful in stabilizing commercial oil as they reduced the oxidation of peanut oil. Additionally, the protein hydrolysates not only prevented the oxidation of linoleic, a common component of both vegetable oils and biological cell membranes, they also inhibited the oxidation of human LDL cholesterol and chelated bile acids. These hydrolysates can then be further explored as multifunctional ingredients for the development of stable functional food products with potential beneficial effects on the cardiovascular system.

In the past few years there has been a great interest in computer aided diagnosis research. In the field of voice quality assessment, signal processing gives us tools to analyze and extract numeric characteristics describing the analyzed signal. These features might be used to tell an impaired voice from a healthy one for many different voice conditions, being Reinke’s edema one of the most severe ones. Most studies have been carried out under strict laboratory conditions, making use of professional sound equipment and facilities, trying to minimize the influence of external conditions. However, real world situations are exposed to adverse acoustic environments. The goal of this paper is to build automatic detection systems for Reinke’s edema based on a novel in-house dataset and, alternatively, on the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary Voice Disorders Database, and assess noise robustness in both cases.

This paper reports on the first H-band broadside hybrid coupler based on a three-metallization layer process and a grounded coplanar waveguide environment. The performance of this integrated coupler is carefully examined through electromagnetic (EM) simulations and experimental evaluation, and compared to a Tandem-X hybrid, which is based on a two-metallization layer process and requires twice the chip area. The EM analysis covers S-parameter simulations of the coupler structures as well as even- and odd-mode impedance analysis of the edge- and broadside-coupled lines. The broadside hybrid exhibits insertion losses of 3.8-4.3 dB in the through and coupled ports from 246 to 297 GHz. This corresponds to a fractional bandwidth of 19%. In this frequency range, the imbalance is lower than 0.2 dB and a phase difference of 93.6° ± 1.4° is obtained. It is demonstrated that the broadside coupler overcomes the performance of Tandem-X hybrids when applied to medium power amplifiers (MPAs). An MPA monolithic microwave integrated circuit based on triple-stacked FETs and broadside couplers achieves at least 4.5 dBm at 300 GHz and large-signal gain of 7.5 dB at the 3-dB compression point.

En fechas recientes se llevó a cabo un homenaje a uno de los grandes y más destacados economistas mexicanos, el distinguido Víctor L. Urquidi, con motivo del centenario de su nacimiento en El Colegio de México. Diversos intelectuales y analistas destacaron su particular legado y trayectoria, así como el rescate de sus aportes contemporáneos, embonando los distintos planteamientos y desafíos que enfrenta México en el contexto actual en materia de economía, política y reforma fiscal y monetaria. El ensayo también hace un recuento de su rol como constructor de instituciones.

This paper reports on the first stacked field-effect transistor (stacked-FET) submillimeter-wave monolithic integrated circuit (S-MMIC) power amplifier cell operating at 0.3 THz and the first stacked-FET medium power amplifier (MPA) at 240 GHz. Both circuits are fabricated using a 35-nm InGaAs-on-GaAs metamorphic high electron mobility transistor (mHEMT) technology with grounded coplanar waveguide lines. In both cases, compactness and performance are enhanced thanks to the use of an in-house process, based on three-metallization layers, instead of the usual two-layer process. The single-stacked cell exhibits an ultrawide small-signal 3-dB relative bandwidth (RBW) of $\hbox{47.3}{\%}$ , with output power levels higher than 4.3 dBm from 280 to 308 GHz (9.5%). The MPA MMIC combining four triple-stacked mHEMT cells in parallel achieves a small-signal 3-dB RBW of 24.2%, 10.8 dBm of output power, and a power-added efficiency of 5.02%. These values outperform the state-of-the-art results of MPAs published within a comparable technology.

The control and representation of sexualities were powerful tools in the construction of colonial orders. Though Edward Said noted the centrality of the erotic to the devaluation and submission of ...

Reinke's edema is one of the most prevalent laryngeal pathologies. Its detection can be addressed by using computer-aided diagnosis systems based on features extracted from speech recordings. When extracting acoustic features from different voice recordings of a particular subject at a concrete moment, imperfections in technology and the very biological variability result in values that are close, but they are not identical. This suggests that the within-subject variability must be properly addressed in the statistical methodology. Regularization-based regression approaches can be used to reduce the classification errors by favoring the best predictors and penalizing the worst ones. Three replication-based regularization approaches for variable selection and classification have been specifically designed and implemented to take into account the underlying within-subject variability. In order to illustrate the applicability of these approaches, an experiment has been specifically conducted to discriminate Reinke's edema patients (30 subjects) from healthy people (30 subjects) in a hospital environment. The features have been extracted from four phonations of the sustained vowel /a/ recorded for each subject, leading to a database that has fed the proposed machine learning approaches. The proposed replication-based approaches have been proved to be reliable in terms of selected features and predictive ability, leading to a stable accuracy rate of 0.89 under a cross-validation framework. Also, a comparison with traditional independence-based regularization methods reports a great variability of the latter in terms of selected features and accuracy metrics. Therefore, the proposed approaches contribute to fill a gap in the scientific literature on statistical approaches considering within-subject variability and can be used to build a robust expert system.

Congenital melanocytic nevus syndrome (CMNS) is the result of an abnormal proliferation of melanocytes in the skin and central nervous system caused by progenitor-cell mutations during embryonic development. Mutations in the NRAS gene have been detected in many of these cells. We present 5 cases of giant congenital melanocytic nevus, 3 of them associated with CMNS; NRAS gene mutation was studied in these 3 patients. Until a few years ago, surgery was the treatment of choice, but the results have proved unsatisfactory because aggressive interventions do not improve cosmetic appearance and only minimally reduce the risk of malignant change. In 2013, trametinib was approved for use in advanced melanoma associated with NRAS mutations. This drug, which acts on the intracellular RAS/RAF/MEK/pERK/MAPK cascade, could be useful in pediatric patients with CMNS. A better understanding of this disease will facilitate the development of new strategies.

Resumen El sindrome del nevus melanocitico congenito (SNMC) consiste en la proliferacion anormal de melanocitos en la piel y el sistema nervioso central, y se debe a mutaciones de las celulas progenitoras durante el desarrollo embrionario. En muchas de estas celulas se han detectado mutaciones en el gen NRAS. Se exponen 5 casos de nevus melanocitico congenito gigante, 3 de ellos asociados al SNMC, en los que se ha estudiado dicha mutacion. Hasta hace unos anos la cirugia era el tratamiento de eleccion, sin embargo, sus resultados son insatisfactorios, con cirugias agresivas que no mejoran el aspecto estetico y reducen minimamente el riesgo de malignizacion. En el ano 2013 se aprobo el trametinib en el uso del melanoma avanzado con mutaciones de NRAS. Dicho farmaco, que participa en la cascada intracelular de RAS-RAF-MEK-pERK-MAPK, podria ser util en pacientes pediatricos con SNMC. El conocimiento mas amplio de esta enfermedad permitira crear nuevas estrategias.

This letter presents a multilayer formulation for substrate integrated waveguide circuits, based on the analytical connection of cylindrical modes of sections described by their generalized scattering matrix (GSM). Sections containing arbitrary elements, defined by feeding and cylindrical ports, are analyzed using the finite element method with fast frequency sweep to obtain their GSM.

In this work, it will be shown some interesting capabilities of a direct domain decomposition methodology, based on the use of the hybrid finite element/modal analysis (FE/MA), which takes advantage of the addition theorems for cylindrical waves. These theorems allow to perform analytical rotations and translations of domains in the whole structure, avoiding recalculations with the FE/MA method. Specifically, it will be used to place via holes between patch antennas on a continuous substrate, in order to prevent mutual coupling through the substrate. It will also be shown how this methodology can be applied to the fast analysis of radial line slot antennas, where each slot is considered as a subdomain defined by a cylindrical port and a hemispherical port; and to the analysis of groove gap waveguides, where each quadrangular post is characterized by a cylindrical port.

Monitoring Parkinson's Disease (PD) progression is an important task to improve the life quality of the affected people. This task can be performed by extracting features from voice recordings and applying specifically designed statistical models, leading to systems that improve the ability of monitoring the progression of PD in an objective, remote, non-invasive, fast, and economically sustainable way. An experiment has been conducted with 36 subjects to study the progression of the PD over 4 years by using the Hoehn and Yahr (HY) scale and features extracted from the phonation of the vowel/a/. The collected dataset had many missing data, which should be addressed jointly with the non-decreasing nature of the disease and the within-subject variability due to the use of replicated features. In order to handle these issues, a Hidden Markov model for longitudinal data was designed and implemented by using a data augmentation scheme based on different latent variables. Markov chain Monte Carlo methods were used to generate from the posterior distribution. The proposed approach has been tested on simulated data, providing good accuracy rates in the context of a multiclass problem. It also has been applied to the real data obtained from the conducted experiment, providing imputed and predicted HY stages compatible with the progression of PD. The conducted experiment and the proposed approach contribute to fill a gap in the scientific literature on experiments and methodologies for tracking PD progression based on acoustic features and the HY scale. This would help to derive an expert system that can be integrated into the protocols of neurology units in hospital centers.

A design topology for a microwave planar permittivity sensor focused on manufacturing simplicity is proposed. Its operation is based on the first-notch frequency of the reflection parameter. The impacts of substrate and bending angle on the performance of this type of sensor are comparatively analyzed. Three flexible substrates are considered in comparison to three rigid ones. By full-wave electromagnetic analysis, the sensors have been simulated in contact to a material under test with a relative permittivity ranging between 1 and 20. The resulting shifts in the first-notch frequency show the potential of flexible environmentally-friendly substrates, such as liquid crystal polymer and paper, for the development of the sensors. In the flexible cases, the bending angles have been varied from 0 to 120 ∘ , producing deviations in S 11 first-notch frequency of 0.4 to 4.7%. The simulation methodology is validated by experimental characterization of a prototype on Rogers 4003C laminate.

This paper introduces a fast full-wave methodology for the analysis of antenna arrays placed on the top plate of substrate integrated waveguides (SIWs). The methodology is based on the generalized scattering matrix (GSM) of each array element in terms of spherical and cylindrical modes and plane-port feeding modes, and the simultaneous use of addition theorems for spherical and cylindrical waves. Addition theorems allow the analytical translation of spherical and cylindrical modes, so that the GSMs can be simultaneously connected in the SIW layer and in the radiation region, to obtain the full-wave response of the array. The proposed methodology is validated by means of full-wave simulations with commercial and in-house softwares.

This work investigates the problem of spurious mode propagation in a grounded coplanar waveguide (GCPW) environment at frequencies between 200 GHz and 335 GHz. Design strategies focused on minimizing undesired effects are explored through full-wave electromagnetic (EM) analysis and experimental results from different test structures. It is shown that a $\lambda/13$ distance between via-holes should be chosen to avoid unwanted resonances at these high frequencies. The critical role of via-holes is also demonstrated through the experimental comparison of two power splitters. Finally, the need of closed RF pads to avoid any propagation of parasitic modes is experimentally shown in an application example of a power amplifier (PA) cell based on a 35 nm GaAs metamorphic high electron mobility transistor (mHEMT) technology. The PA cell with closed pads achieves a 0.5 dB bandwidth of 28 % with small-signal gain levels larger than 5.2 dB.

A general subject-based Bayesian approach has been proposed.Special treatment is provided for the probit model.Latent variables are used to provide a predictive model that can handle replications.A Gibbs sampling-based method is derived to compute the model parameters.The approach is used to discriminate healthy people from people suffering PD. A clinical expert system has been developed for detection of Parkinson's Disease (PD). The system extracts features from voice recordings and considers an advanced statistical approach for pattern recognition. The significance of the work lies on the development and use of a novel subject-based Bayesian approach to account for the dependent nature of the data in a replicated measure-based design. The ideas under this approach are conceptually simple and easy-to-implement by using Gibbs sampling. Available information could be included in the model through the prior distribution. In order to assess the performance of the proposed system, a voice recording replication-based experiment has been specifically conducted to discriminate healthy people from people suffering PD. The experiment involved 80 subjects, half of them affected by PD. The proposed system is able to discriminate acceptably well healthy people from people with PD in spite that the experiment has a reduced number of subjects.

A 4-way Wilkinson and a 4:1 Dolph-Chebyshev divider MMIC based on grounded coplanar waveguide technology on GaAs are presented, analyzed and compared. The Dolph-Chebyshev structure was simulated by using electromagnetic software, whereas the 4-way Wilkinson divider was simulated by a schematic CAD tool. Both dividers are processed and experimentally evaluated for operation in H-band (220–330 GHz). The 4-way Wilkinson MMIC achieves the best insertion losses, which are lower than 107 dB between 235 and 255 GHz (8 2 % of relative bandwidth, RBW). Input return losses better than 12 dB, an amplitude imbalance between outer and inner branches lower than 0.7 dB and a phase difference of (1.5 ± 0.1)° is achieved by the Dolph-Chebyshev from 235 to 257 GHz (RBW=8.9 %). The 4-way Wilkinson divider is very compact with a size of 0.09 × 0.22 mm2.

The first full $G$ -band power amplifier module demonstrated in GaAs metamorphic high electron mobility transistor (mHEMT) technology has been developed for use as a driver amplifier in instrumentation. The circuit integrated in this module uses a compact balanced cascode topology and is based on a 35-nm mHEMT technology in a grounded coplanar waveguide environment. High compactness is achieved due to the use of a small ground-to-ground spacing of $14~\mu {\mathrm{ m}}$ and an advanced process with three metallization layers. The millimeter-wave integrated circuit exhibits a linear gain higher than 15.3 dB and return losses better than 10 dB from 118 to 236 GHz, which represents an ultrabroad relative bandwidth (RBW) of 67%. A peak output power of 10 dBm is achieved at 200 GHz. The WR-5 module uses broadband transitions, which show insertion losses of less than 1.5 dB. It demonstrates a small-signal gain that exceeds 13.4 dB in the whole $G$ -band (RBW ≥ 54%). Large-signal characterization exhibits power levels higher than 3.6 dBm from 130 to 210 GHz (RBW = 47%). This module achieves the highest bandwidth in $G$ -band and the highest output power when comparing it with modules based on similar technologies.