Effectiveness of Intense Accent Modification Training With Refugees From Burma.

PURPOSE: This pilot research project sought to determine if an intensive accent modification training program that included See the Sound-Visual Phonics and prosodic gestures improved articulation, prosody, and intelligibility measures in refugees from Burma. PARTICIPANTS: Four individuals (two men, two women) aged 20-67 participated in this study, and they were recruited from a state organization supporting refugees who have resettled in the United States. METHOD: All participants completed the Proficiency in Oral English Communication (POEC) and Assessment of Intelligibility of Dysarthric Speech (AIDS) to measure pre- and posttraining changes. The duration of this study was 6 weeks and consisted of 1 week of pretesting, 4 weeks of accent modification training, and 1 week of posttesting. Participants attended a total of twelve 50-min accent modification training sessions, including eight individual sessions (twice per week) and four group sessions (once per week), which provided a functional way to practice newly acquired skills in a scripted conversational-type format. Trained and untrained articulation and prosody probes were used to establish baselines and measure change. RESULTS: All four participants showed gains across articulation and prosody (in untrained and trained items). On pre- and posttest measures, three of the four participants also made gains on the broad measures of the AIDS and the POEC. CONCLUSION: Findings support that a brief and intensive multimodality accent modification program can be beneficial.

SARS CoV-2 mRNA vaccination exposes latent HIV to Nef-specific CD8+ T-cells.

Efforts to cure HIV have focused on reactivating latent proviruses to enable elimination by CD8+ cytotoxic T-cells. Clinical studies of latency reversing agents (LRA) in antiretroviral therapy (ART)-treated individuals have shown increases in HIV transcription, but without reductions in virologic measures, or evidence that HIV-specific CD8+ T-cells were productively engaged. Here, we show that the SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine BNT162b2 activates the RIG-I/TLR - TNF - NFκb axis, resulting in transcription of HIV proviruses with minimal perturbations of T-cell activation and host transcription. T-cells specific for the early gene-product HIV-Nef uniquely increased in frequency and acquired effector function (granzyme-B) in ART-treated individuals following SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccination. These parameters of CD8+ T-cell induction correlated with significant decreases in cell-associated HIV mRNA, suggesting killing or suppression of cells transcribing HIV. Thus, we report the observation of an intervention-induced reduction in a measure of HIV persistence, accompanied by precise immune correlates, in ART-suppressed individuals. However, we did not observe significant depletions of intact proviruses, underscoring challenges to achieving (or measuring) HIV reservoir reductions. Overall, our results support prioritizing the measurement of granzyme-B-producing Nef-specific responses in latency reversal studies and add impetus to developing HIV-targeted mRNA therapeutic vaccines that leverage built-in LRA activity.

Spectral-spatial classification of hyperspectral data based on a stochastic minimum spanning forest approach.

In this paper, a new method for supervised hyperspectral data classification is proposed. In particular, the notion of stochastic minimum spanning forest (MSF) is introduced. For a given hyperspectral image, a pixelwise classification is first performed. From this classification map, M marker maps are generated by randomly selecting pixels and labeling them as markers for the construction of MSFs. The next step consists in building an MSF from each of the M marker maps. Finally, all the M realizations are aggregated with a maximum vote decision rule in order to build the final classification map. The proposed method is tested on three different data sets of hyperspectral airborne images with different resolutions and contexts. The influences of the number of markers and of the number of realizations M on the results are investigated in experiments. The performance of the proposed method is compared to several classification techniques (both pixelwise and spectral-spatial) using standard quantitative criteria and visual qualitative evaluation.