We attack the general problem of HMM-based speech recognizer design, and in particular, the problem of isolated letter recognition in the presence of background noise. The standard design method based on maximum likelihood (ML) is known to perform poorly when applied to isolated letter recognition. The more recent minimum classiication error (MCE) approach directly targets the ultimate design c...

BACKGROUND According to some international studies, patients with acute coronary syndrome (ACS) and increased left atrial volume index (LAVI) have worse long-term prognosis. However, national Brazilian studies confirming this prediction are still lacking. OBJECTIVE To evaluate LAVI as a predictor of major cardiovascular events (MCE) in patients with ACS during a 365-day follow-up. METHODS P...

BACKGROUND The non-invasive differentiation of ischemic and nonischemic acute heart failure (AHF) not resulting from acute myocardial infarction is difficult and has therapeutic and prognostic implications. The aim of this study was to assess whether resting myocardial contrast echocardiography (MCE) can detect coronary artery disease (CAD) in patients with decreased left ventricular (LV) systo...

Magnetic refrigeration represents a promising technology. A number of Gd-based metallic glasses have been demonstrated to exhibit excellent magnetocaloric effect (MCE) and superior refrigerant capacity. The development such often involves the identification glass-forming alloys, in which MCE is further evaluated. process laborious time-consuming as it typically relies on conventional trial-and-...

In the US, wildfires and prescribed burning present significant challenges to air regulatory agencies attempting to achieve and maintain compliance with air quality regulations. Fire emission factors (EF) are essential input for the emission models used to develop wildland fire emission inventories. Most previous studies quantifying wildland fire EF of temperate ecosystems have focused on emiss...

BACKGROUND The association of minimal change esophagitis (MCE) with GERD is controversial. i-Scan endoscopy (SE) provides high resolution and modulation of images that may improve minimal change lesion (MCL) detection. We aimed to assess the efficacy of SE in detecting MCL in dyspeptic patients with GERD compared with patients without GERD by GerdQ or by endoscopy with 24-h pH monitoring (PHM) ...

Discriminative training criteria have been shown to consistently outperform maximum likelihood trained speech recognition systems. In this paper we employ the Minimum Classification Error (MCE) criterion to optimize the parameters of the acoustic model of a large scale speech recognition system. The statistics for both the correct and the competing model are solely collected on word lattices wi...

The magnetic properties and magnetocaloric effect (MCE) of ternary intermetallic RE2Cu2Cd (RE = Dy and Tm) compounds and its composite materials have been investigated in detail. Both compounds undergo a paramagnetic to ferromagnetic transition at its own Curie temperatures of TC ~ 48.5 and 15 K for Dy2Cu2Cd and Tm2Cu2Cd, respectively, giving rise to the large reversible MCE. An additionally ma...