An emotional modulation model as signature for the identification of children developmental disorders.

In recent years, applications like Apple's Siri or Microsoft's Cortana have created the illusion that one can actually "chat" with a machine. However, a perfectly natural human-machine interaction is far from real as none of these tools can empathize. This issue has raised an increasing interest in speech emotion recognition systems, as the possibility to detect the emotional state of the speaker. This possibility seems relevant to a broad number of domains, ranging from man-machine interfaces to those of diagnostics. With this in mind, in the present work, we explored the possibility of applying a precision approach to the development of a statistical learning algorithm aimed at classifying samples of speech produced by children with developmental disorders(DD) and typically developing(TD) children. Under the assumption that acoustic features of vocal production could not be efficiently used as a direct marker of DD, we propose to apply the Emotional Modulation function(EMF) concept, rather than running analyses on acoustic features per se to identify the different classes. The novel paradigm was applied to the French Child Pathological & Emotional Speech Database obtaining a final accuracy of 0.79, with maximum performance reached in recognizing language impairment (0.92) and autism disorder (0.82).

Application of fractal analysis to mammography.

We report on a morphological study of 192 breast masses as seen in mammograms, with the aim of discrimination between benign masses and malignant tumors. From the contour of each mass, we computed the fractal dimension (FD) and a few shape factors, including compactness, fractional concavity, and spiculation index. We calculated FD using four different methods: the ruler and box-counting methods applied to each 2-dimensional (2D) contour and its 1-dimensional signature. The ANOVA test indicated statistically significant differences in the values of the various shape features between benign masses and malignant tumors. Analysis using receiver operating characteristics indicated the area under the curve, A(z), of up to 0.92 with the individual shape features. The combination of compactness, FD with the 2D ruler method, and the spiculation index resulted in the highest A(z) value of 0.93.

Recombinant plasminogen activator therapy for cerebral vein thrombosis in a child carrier of prothrombin gene mutation.

Venous thrombosis of transverse and sigmoid sinuses was diagnosed in a 3-year-old child who is a carrier of the G20210A prothrombin gene mutation. Recombinant tissue plasminogen activator (rt-PA) treatment was started 9 days following the onset of neurologic signs. Nine days of rt-PA therapy completely dissolved the thrombus. This case provides further evidence that rt-PA is useful and safe in children with thrombosis.