Voice Activity Detection (VAD) is considered as an important pre-processing step in speech processing systems such as speech enhancement, speech recognition, gender and age identification. VAD helps in reducing the time required to process speech data and to improve final system accuracy by focusing the work on the voiced part of the speech. An automatic technique for VAD using Fuzzy-Neuro technique (FN-AVAD) is presented in this paper. The aim of this work is to alleviate the problem of choosing the best threshold value in traditional VAD methods and achieves automaticity by combining fuzzy clustering and machine learning techniques. Four features are extracted from each speech segment, which are short term energy, zero-crossing rate, autocorrelation, and log energy. A modified version of fuzzy C-Means is then used to cluster speech segments into three clusters; two clusters for voice and one for unvoiced. After that, three feed forward neural networks are trained to adjust their weights, in which each network represents one cluster. To make the final decision regarding the class type of a given speech segment, the membership degrees of this segment in all clusters along with neural networks' decisions are given to a defuzzification step which finally gives the class type of that segment. The proposed FN-AVAD is tested on the public multimodal emotion database, Surrey AudioVisual Expressed Emotion (SAVEE), and the error rate was 2.08%. The achieved results are comparable to the results achieved by the current published works in the literature.
Background: Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic and systemic autoimmune disease that is characterized by severe synovial inflammation, cartilage erosion, bone loss, and generalized vasculopathy. Although the immunologic mechanism of RA is still unclear, it is now thought to be a primarily Th17-driven disease. Along with other factors, IL-23 stimulates the expansion of Th17 cells from naive CD4+ T cells.
Objective: The objective of this study is to assess the circulating levels of interleukin (IL)-23 in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and determine the correlation between plasma/serum IL-23 levels and disease activity. So, we performed a systematic review with meta-analysis comparing
... Show MoreA total of 200 samples (180 fecal materials and 20 organ samples) were collected from (5 different poultry farms, 10 local poultry shops, 5 houses poultry, 5 Eggs stores shops and 5hand slaughters centers) in Ibb city, Yemen, 2014. According to morphological, cultural, as well as biochemical characterization and serological tests, 59(29.5%) isolates were identified as Salmonella spp. and all Salmonella isolates were categorized by serotype, which comprised of, 37(62.71%) Salmonella Typhimurium serovar, 21(35.59%). Salmonella Enteritidis serovar and 1(1.69%) Salmonella Heidlberg serovar. Antibiotic sensitivity test was done for bacterial isolates and the results showed there were clear differences in antibiotic resistant. Antimicrobial
... Show MoreThis study investigated the outcome of Alstonia boonei stem bark on liver enzymes after inducing the Wistar albino rats with carbon tetrachloride (CCl4). This effect of plant extract was compared with silymarin – a drug commonly used for the treatment of chronic hepatocyte disorder. The plant sample was extracted with ethanol; acute toxicity study of the extract was performed on eighteen Wistar mice, while 30 rats were sacrificed for liver enzymes assay. The rats were divided into six clusters: each cluster has five rats, culster 1 served as control and was given 2 mL/kg b.w - distilled water; clusters 2 – 6 were CCl4 induced. Cluster 2 was untreated but served as the negative control while cluster 3 wa
... Show MoreThe alfalfa plant, after harvesting, was washed, dried, and grinded to get fine powder used in water treatment. We used the alfalfa plant with ethanol to make the alcoholic extract characterized by using (GC-Mass, FTIR, and UV) spectroscopy to determine active compounds. Alcoholic extract was used to prepare zinc nanoparticles. We characterized Zinc nanoparticles using (FTIR, UV, SEM, EDX Zeta potential, XRD, AFM). Zinc nanoparticle with Alfalfa extract and alfalfa powder were used in the treatment of water polluted with inorganic elements such as Cr, Mn, Fe, Cu, Cd, Ag by (Batch processing). The batch process with using alfalfa powder gets treated with Pb (51.45%), which is the highest percentage of treatment. Mn (13.18%), which is the
... Show MoreThe study aimed to evaluating the inhibitory activity of apigenin extracted from Salvia officinalis leaves on the growth of L20B cancer cell in vitro, and through two incubation periods; 48 and 72 hours. Accordingly, eight concentrations (1.56, 3.13, 6.25, 12.5, 25.0, 50.0, 100.0 and 200.0 micromol) of apigenin and similar concentrations of vitamin C and carbon tetrachloride (CCl4) were tested. The apigenin revealed its significant inhibitory potentials against the growth of L20B cell line, especially at the low concentrations (1.56, 3.13 and 6.25 micromol) and at 72 incubation period in comparison with vitamin C and CCl4.
The objective of this study is to explain the role of credit policies in agricultural development of Iraq during the period 1979-1989 which were represented by the policy of co-operative agricultural bank the organization that responsible to finance agricultural sector for various reasons. It has been shown that there was no clear credit policy existed during the period concerned due to the differences between loans from year. The loan growth rate was low in general comparing with objectives of the agricultural development plans, a low production rates comparing with loans paid, the growth rate of average number of trees in each donum and the growth rate of livestock number was also low.In conclusion there should be a clear plan for cred
... Show MoreThis study was designed to investigate the hypoglycemic and hypolipidemic activity of aqueous green tea (GT) extract in normal and alloxan-induced diabetic rats. Forty adult male albino rats weighing 180-200 g were divided into four groups of 10 rats each: The first group was served as control; the second group was treated with GT (250 mg/kg b.w); the third group was affected by inducing experimental diabetes by intraperitonial injection of alloxan (150 mg/kg b.w); and the fourth group was affected by inducing diabetes and treated with GT (250 mg/kg b.w). Level of blood glucose and lipid profile [total cholesterol (TC), triglycerides (TG), high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), low density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) and ve
... Show Moreantimicrobial solutions against Coliforms, E. coli O157: H7, yeasts and molds were evaluated by agar well diffusion method. Chitosan (CH) exhibited best antimicrobial activity against the treated microorganisms at concentration of (5%) with contact time for 6hrs at refrigeration temperature (4ÚC), zones of inhibition for (GA) and (CH) for each solution alone ranging from (0 to 10 mm), chitosan solution (CH) exhibited both antibacterial and antifungal activities, Gum Arabic washing solution showed significant antibacterial activity (P < 0.05) against the microorganisms at concentration (15%), without inhibitory effect against E. coli O157:H7 at concentration (10%), in the current study the results confirmed that (15%) (w/v) of GA and 5%
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