OBJECTIVE The HIV pandemic remains a significant global health concern. Accurate determination of CD4+ T-cells in patient samples relies on reliable CD4 enumeration. The Quality Assessment and Standardization programme for Immunological measures relevant to HIV/AIDS (QASI) programme of the Public Health Agency of Canada provides clinical laboratories from resource-limited countries with a mecha...

Automated segmentation is a useful method for studying large brain structures such as the cerebellum and brainstem. However, automated segmentation may lead to inaccuracy and/or undesirable boundary. The goal of the present study was to investigate whether SegAdapter, a machine learning-based method, is useful for automatically correcting large segmentation errors and disagreement in anatomical...

A system for providing Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training for Dutch was developed, Dutch-CAPT, which appeared to be effective in improving pronunciation quality of L2 learners of Dutch. In this paper we describe the architecture of the system paying particular attention to the rationale behind this system, to the performance of the error detection algorithm and its relationship to the ped...

This paper addresses the issue of learning hidden Markov model (HMM) parameters for speaker-independent continuous speech recognition. Bahl et al. [Bahl 88a] introduced the corrective training algorithm for speaker-dependent isolated word recognition. Their algorithm attempted to improve the recognition accuracy on the training data. In this work, we extend this algorithm to speaker-independent...

In this paper, a formally unifying approach for a class of discriminative training criteria including Maximum Mutual Information (MMI) and Minimum Classification Error (MCE) criterion is presented, including the optimization methods gradient descent (GD) and extended Baum-Welch (EB) algorithm. Comparisons are discussed for the MMI and the MCE criterion, including the determination of the sets o...

In this paperwe present a general framework for themodelling of the process of corrective and condition-based preventive maintenance actions for complex repairable systems. A new class of models is proposed, the generalized virtual age models. On the one hand, these models generalize Kijima’s virtual age models to the case where both preventive and corrective maintenances are present. On the ot...

Communication skills are important to overall wellbeing, for creating positive interpersonal atmosphere and for solving interpersonal problems. Many patients suffering with various psychiatric disorders suffer from either a state-dependent decrease of social skills or lifelong deficits of such skills. Patients with social skills deficits such as problems with communication with others people, s...