Background Noise exposure and noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) are common worldwide, but the contributions of common noise sources, such as mass transit, to total annual noise exposures have not been adequately explored among urban residents and workers. Methods We estimated noise exposures associated with five common noise sources (use of ...

Many teleost fishes produce sounds for social communication with mechanisms that do not involve swim bladder musculature. Such sounds may reflect physical attributes of the sound-production mechanism, be constrained by body size and therefore control signal reliability during agonistic behaviors. We examined kinematics of the cranium, median fins and caudal ...

INTRODUCTION AND HYPOTHESIS: This work was conducted to study the Doppler ureteric jets in the assessment of pelvic organ prolapse (POP) patients. METHODS: Forty POP-Q stage ≧III patients and 20 without POP were assessed with color Doppler ultrasonography. RESULTS: Among 40 POP, 28 had bladder outlet obstruction (BOO) and 4 ...

What's known on the subject? and What does the study add? Fluorescent-light cystoscopy has a high sensitivity, relative to that of white light cystoscopy, for carcinoma in situ of the bladder. However, this systematic review reveals that the absolute sensitivity is unknown due to the absence of proper gold standard ...

Circadian clocks are the endogenous oscillators that harmonize a variety of physiological processes within the body. Although many urinary functions exhibit clear daily or circadian variation in diurnal humans and nocturnal rodents, the precise mechanisms of these variations are as yet unclear. In this review, we briefly introduce circadian clocks ...

Gold nanorods have strong absorption bands in the near-infrared region, in which light penetrates deeply into tissues. The absorbed light energy is converted into heat by gold nanorods, the so-called 'photothermal effect'. Hence, gold nanorods are expected to act not only as on-demand thermal converters for photothermal therapy but also ...

Microcystis aeruginosa forms algal bloom in lakes. They produce toxic compounds such as microcystin. Against such algal problems, the effect of UV treatment was examined. In UV treatment, the effect of photoreactivation should be examined. Photoreactivation is a repair mechanism of genomic DNA damage by sunlight irradiation. UV treatment causes ...

Auditory steady state response (ASSR) testing provides a means to objectively estimate hearing levels in newborns and adults for whom behavioral tests prove difficult. When testing these patient groups, it is preferable that clear responses to both air and bone conduction stimuli are obtained in a short amount of time. ...

The efficient-coding hypothesis asserts that neural and perceptual sensitivity evolved to faithfully represent biologically relevant sensory signals. Here we characterized the spectrotemporal modulation statistics of several natural sound ensembles and examined how neurons encode these statistics in the central nucleus of the inferior colliculus (CNIC) of cats. We report that ...

We propose a method to simultaneously measure the center frequency of a spectral feature and the frequency linewidth of the feature. The method relies on dual frequency modulation of a carrier frequency, which probes the spectral feature, and phase sensitive detection of the transmitted signal at the two modulation frequencies. ...

Previous behavioural studies in human subjects have demonstrated the importance of amplitude modulations to the process of intelligible speech perception. In functional neuroimaging studies of amplitude modulation processing, the inherent assumption is that all sounds are decomposed into simple building blocks, i.e. sinusoidal modulations. The encoding of complex and dynamic ...

Auditory steady state response (ASSR) tests allow frequency-specific assessment of the auditory system. The responses can be elicited with long-duration tones that are modulated at particular rates. The literature has reported that some rates may evoke larger responses than others. Modulation transfer functions (MTFs), which show ASSR response as a ...

To better understand the processing of complex high-frequency sounds, modulation-detection thresholds were measured for sinusoidal frequency modulation (SFM), quasi-frequency modulation (QFM), sinusoidal amplitude modulation (SAM), and random-phase FM (RPFM). At the lowest modulation frequency (5 Hz) modulation thresholds expressed as AM depth were similar for RPFM, SAM and QFM suggesting ...

An experimental setup is built for the measurement of monochromatic incident photon-to-electron conversion efficiency (IPCE) of solar cells. With this setup, three kinds of IPCE measuring methods as well as the convenient switching between them are achieved. The setup can also measure the response time and waveform of the short-circuit ...

Neuroscience time series data from a range of techniques and species reveal complex, non-linear interactions between different frequencies of neuronal network oscillations within and across brain regions. Here, we briefly review the evidence that these nested, cross-frequency interactions act in concert with linearly covariant (within-frequency) activity to dynamically coordinate functionally ...

We show that any optical pulse train recovers its original waveform after passing through a group velocity dispersion (GVD) device when the total GVD value of the device is equal to an integral multiple of 1/(2πf(rep)(2)), where f(rep) is the repetition rate of the optical pulse train. In addition, we ...

Dynamic holography using spatial light modulators is a very flexible technique that offers various new applications compared to static holography. We give an overview on the technical background of dynamic holography focusing on pixelated spatial light modulators and their technical restrictions, and we present a selection of the numerous applications ...

Ambiguous figures induce sudden transitions between rivaling percepts. We investigated electroencephalogram frequency modulations of accompanying change-related de- and rebinding processes. Presenting the stimuli discontinously, we synchronized perceptual reversals with stimulus onset, which served as a time reference for averaging. The resultant gain in temporal resolution revealed a sequence of time-frequency ...

The sinusoidal modulation of excitation intensity and phase-sensitive detection of emission is ideally suitable for the accurate determination of the lifetime and intensity of lanthanide luminescence. In this work we elaborate on the general mathematical and instrumental techniques of the frequency-domain (FD) measurements in the low-frequency domain below 100 kHz. ...

This study investigated the ability to use spatial information in mixed-modulated (MM) sounds containing concurrent frequency-modulated (FM) and amplitude-modulated (AM) sounds by exploring patterns of interference when different modulation types originated from different loci as may occur in a multisource acoustic field. Interaural delay thresholds were measured from 5 normal-hearing ...

Multi-focus two-photon polymerization with a spatial light modulator is demonstrated. The spatial light modulator generates multi-focus spots via phase modulation technique controlled by a computer generated hologram (CGH) pattern. Each focus spot can be individually addressed in position and laser intensity. The multi-focus two-photon polymerization technique allows the fabrication of ...

Auditory steady state responses (ASSR) allow objective assessment of hearing thresholds. At high stimulation levels artifactual responses have been reported in subjects with severe to profound deafness. Relatively large amplitude 'steady state' responses to amplitude modulated tones were measured from the Sternocleidomastoid muscle at 500 Hz. Response thresholds were similar ...

The auditory steady-state response (ASSR) is an auditory evoked potential which follows the envelope of the stimulus. One of the advantages of the ASSR is that multiple stimulation frequencies can be tested simultaneously. In experiment 1, we evaluated the effects of simultaneously presenting two separate stimuli on ASSR response amplitude. ...

Previous research demonstrated the ability of temporally based rhythm metrics to distinguish among dysarthrias with different prosodic deficit profiles (J. M. Liss et al., 2009). The authors examined whether comparable results could be obtained by an automated analysis of speech envelope modulation spectra (EMS), which quantifies the rhythmicity of speech ...

We present a photonic technique for generating a frequency- modulated sub-terahertz signal for non-destructive or noninvasive sensing and imaging applications. Large frequency deviation was achieved by using optical phase modulation and heterodyne photomixing with an uni-travelling photodetector. The operation principle is theoretically derived and explained. In addition, the generation of ...

Response rates of auditory nerve fibers (ANFs) to electric pulse trains change over time, reflecting substantial spike-rate adaptation that depends on stimulus parameters. We hypothesize that adaptation affects the representation of amplitude-modulated pulse trains used by cochlear prostheses to transmit speech information to the auditory system. We recorded cat ANF ...

We put forward a new approach to generate stable, fully three-dimensional light bullets, which is based on the matching of the intrinsic material dispersion with a suitable effective diffraction. The matching is achieved in adequate waveguide arrays whose refractive index is periodically modulated along the direction of light propagation. We ...

It is possible to reduce the diffraction peaks of a Spatial Light Modulator (SLM) by breaking the periodicity of the pixels shape. We propose a theoretical investigation of a SLM that would be based on a Voronoi diagram, obtained by deforming a regular grid, and show that for a specific ...

The Escherichia coli chemotaxis-signaling pathway computes time derivatives of chemoeffector concentrations. This network features modules for signal reception/amplification and robust adaptation, with sensing of chemoeffector gradients determined by the way in which these modules are coupled in vivo. We characterized these modules and their coupling by using fluorescence resonance energy ...

We used the stimulus-driven 40-Hz auditory steady-state response (ASSR) that localizes tonotopically to the region of primary auditory cortex (A1) to study modulation of this region by top-down attention. Experiment 1 presented amplitude modulated (AM) auditory and visual stimuli simultaneously (AM at 40 Hz and 16 Hz, respectively) while participants ...

To determine the effects of hearing loss and fast-acting compression on auditory grouping based on across-frequency modulation, modulation detection interference (MDI) was measured in listeners with normal hearing and hearing loss. MDI, the increase in the amplitude-modulation detection threshold of a target presented with an interferer distant in frequency, was ...

Visual attention modulates neuronal responses in primate motion processing area MT. However, whether it modulates the strength local field potentials (LFP-power) within this area remains unexplored, as well as how this modulation relates to the one of the neurons' response. We investigated these issues by simultaneously recording LFPs and neuronal ...

The transcutaneous communication system (TCS) is one of the key technologies for monitoring and controling artificial hearts and other artificial organs in the body. In this study, we have developed a new TCS that uses the human body as a conductive medium. Having no energy conversion from electric currents into ...

We demonstrate the wireless conversion of frequency modulation to amplitude modulation by radio frequency resonators as means of accurately determining the resonance frequency of passive acoustoelectronic sensors. The emitted frequency modulated radio frequency pulses are generated by a pulsed radar for probing a surface acoustic wave based sensor. The sharp ...

Human perception of a stimulus varies depending on the context in which the stimulus is presented. Such contextual modulation has often been explained by two basic neural mechanisms: lateral inhibition and spatial pooling. In the present study, we presented observers with a vernier stimulus flanked by single lines; observers' ability ...

A new interferometric technique is described to measure the complex modulation curve of a spatial light modulator. Based on a lateral shear imaging interferometer, it enables the amplitude and phase modulation for several modulation levels to be displayed simultaneously in a single interferogram. As an example of the power of ...

The major drawback of frequency modulation (FM)-based directly modulated laser (DML) is its non-uniform FM response at low frequency range which gives rise to a severe pattern-dependent performance degradation. In this paper, we investigate the use of line coding to deplete the low-frequency spectral contents of the signal and thus ...

The purpose of these experiments was to assess whether the detection of diotic 5 Hz "probe" modulation of a 4000 Hz sinusoidal carrier was influenced by binaural interaction of "masker" modulators presented separately to each ear and applied to the same carrier. A 50 Hz masker modulator was applied to ...

This summary article reviews the literature on neural correlates of age-related changes in temporal processing in the auditory brainstem. Two types of temporal processing dimensions are considered, (i) static, which can be measured using a gap detection or forward masking paradigms, and (ii) dynamic, which can be measured using amplitude ...

This study investigated temporal and spectral influences in a task used to investigate the bandwidths of phase sensitivity. Subjects discriminated amplitude modulated (AM) tones and quasi-frequency modulated (QFM) tones in a 2IFC. An adaptive threshold procedure was used to estimate modulation depth needed to make the discrimination as a function ...

Understanding how amplitude modulations are used for speech recognition is essential for improving speech signal processing techniques. Previous studies using vocoding or incoherent modulation filtering indicated that slow amplitude modulations are essential for speech recognition [e.g., Drullman (1994), Shannon (1995)]. Each method had limitations that constrain our understanding of how ...

The perception of consonance and dissonance of isolated chords (sensory consonancedissonance) is fundamental to music appreciation. Consonant chords are composed of tones related to each other by simple frequency ratios (e.g., perfect fifth 3:2), whereas dissonant chords are composed of tones related to each other by complex ratios (e.g., minor ...

Temporal modulation transfer function (TMTF) is one of the most common methods for evaluating temporal acuity in the auditory system. In this experiment, we recorded cortical responses to amplitude modulation of tone carriers from implanted electrodes in guinea pigs to generate TMTFs by calculating the response amplitude changes as a ...

Various researchers have found a correlation between the auditory steady state response (ASSR) and corresponding behavioral measurements such as speech recognition scores [e.g., Dimitrijevic et al. (2001)]. However, relatively few studies have examined the sensitivity to small changes in amplitude and frequency modulation depths. In the present study, it was ...

Dynamic radiation force has been used in several types of applications, and is performed by modulating ultrasound with different methods. By modulating ultrasound, energy can be transmitted to tissue, in this case a dynamic force to elicit a low frequency cyclic displacement to inspect the material properties of the tissue. ...

The pattern of sound energy spread across frequency and time (spectro-temporal modulation) is a crucial stimulus cue for sound identification. Improvements in the sensitivity to this modulation could potentially aid performance on numerous real-world tasks, yet it is unknown how practice influences this sensitivity. To investigate this issue, normal-hearing adults ...

Interpretation of frequency-specific measures of temporal acuity is often confounded by the coexistence of spectral and temporal cues. The current study presents a new experimental technique to measure the temporal modulation transfer function (TMTF), in which inherent envelope modulations in narrowband noise are used as the detection target. Modulation depths ...

Foveal detection thresholds for luminance-modulated (LM) and contrast-modulated (CM) blobs in the presence of fixed modulation, laterally placed noise blobs (separations of 0-6 degrees ) were measured in four observers with normal vision. Detection thresholds measured for LM blobs placed between highly visible LM flankers (111) and for CM blobs ...

Amplitude and phase of steady-state signals recorded in response to amplitude-modulated (AM) sine tones vary over time, suggesting that the steady-state response (SSR) reflects not only stimulus input but also its interaction with other input streams or internally generated signals. Alterations of the interaction between simultaneous SSRs associated with tinnitus ...

Many natural sounds such as speech contain concurrent amplitude and frequency modulation (AM and FM), with the FM components often in the form of directional frequency sweeps or glides. Most studies of modulation coding, however, have employed one modulation type in stationary carriers, and in cases where mixed-modulation sounds have ...