OBJECTIVES This study was undertaken to determine the safety and feasibility of extraction of the Sprint Fidelis (Medtronic, Minneapolis, Minnesota) lead. BACKGROUND The reported failure rate of the Sprint Fidelis defibrillator lead has increased to a range greater than initially appreciated with emerging evidence of an accelerating rate of fracture. At present, consensus guidelines continue ...

We consider randomness extraction by AC circuits. The main parameter, n, is the length of the source, and all other parameters are functions of it. The additional extraction parameters are the min-entropy bound k = k(n), the seed length r = r(n), the output length m = m(n), and the (output) deviation bound = (n). For k ≤ n/ log n, we show that AC-extraction is possible if and only if mr ≤ 1 + p...

introduction: impaction of third molars can be associated with a number of sequelae, each requiring a different type of treatment. the purpose of this study was to assess the changes in the position of lower third molars following extraction and non-extraction orthodontic treatments. methods: pre- and post-treatment panoramic radiographs of 26 class i malocclusion patients (4 male and 22 female...

extraction of nickel and its co-extraction with copper from ammoniacal media into emulsion liquid membrane systems (elms) was investigated using lix 84i as the carrier. measurement of the solute stripped in the internal phase of emulsion opened a new dimension in the study of the elm extraction processes. the effect of operating parameters such as feed ph, initial feed concentration, and treat ...

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems usually fail when they encounter speech from far-field microphone in reverberant environments. This is due to the application of short-term feature extraction techniques which do not compensate for the artifacts introduced by long room impulse responses. In this paper, we propose a front-end, based on Frequency Domain Linear Prediction (FDLP), that tri...

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, trained on speech signals from close-talking microphones, generally fail in recognizing far-field speech. In this paper, we present a Hilbert Envelope based feature extraction technique to alleviate the artifacts introduced by room reverberations. The proposed technique is based on modeling temporal envelopes of the speech signal in narrow sub-bands u...

AIM To investigate how long patients' improved visual function lasts after a cataract extraction. METHODS Patients' self assessed visual function was evaluated using the Catquest questionnaire both before and 6 months after a cataract extraction. The study population consisted of 615 patients undergoing a cataract extraction during 1995-2002. A final follow up with a new questionnaire was per...

A lot of alternatives and constraints have been proposed in order to improve the Fisher criterion. But most of them are not linked to the error rate, the primary interest in many applications of classification. By introducing an upper bound for the error rate a criterion is developed which can improve the classification performance.