The purpose of our study is to evaluate the quality of the synthesized speech by measuring the mismatch negativity (MMN) of the auditory event-related potentials (ERPs). The plosive consonant-vowel (CV) pair/tsu/was sinusoidally interpolated by using two kinds ofextrema. One was exact acquisition in the filtered speech with a passing bandwidth of one octave and a sampling frequency of 1 MHz, and another was approximation in the filtered wav-formatted data. Subjects were presented with a repetitive stimulus of a conventional recording /tsu/, randomly replaced at a 14.3 % probability by a deviant stimulus. As compared with the MMN amplitude when presenting a pure tone for the deviant stimulus, the modulus of MMN is significantly reduced by 4.97μV when using the exact synthesis and by 3.96μV when using the approximation. These results have interpreted as the evidence, in which the synthesized speeches were phonetically equivalent to the conventional recording.

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The maximum and minimum information of the acoustic waveform plays a key role in the reproduction of sound, maintaining the pitch, loudness and timbre. We have estimated the margin of error of the extrema, which would facilitate not only the visualization but also the operation of the acoustic structue. The sampled extrema were manipulated by the three steps of ±20%, ±40% and ±60% of amplitude errors and more three steps of ±4%, ±9% and ±14% of phase errors. The subjective scores have determined that the margin of error of the extrema exceeded ±20% for amplitude and ±4% for phase. The results have supported the idea that the great many resources of the wav-formattedfile could be converted the temporal series of the approximated extrema under the spectral constraint from 80 to 5,120Hz.

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Epilepsy is a chronic brain disorder characterized by recurrent seizures. The seizure is shot down by the surgical removal of the region which is so called "epileptogenic focus ". However, the accuracy to detect the focus is not good (order of cm). Thus the extirpation of origin with significant margin causes the removal of healthy brain and leads to the severe aftereffects such as restricted vision, motor dysfunction, disorder of memory, and so on. To cope with this problem, we should develop the technology of (1) detecting the epileptogenic focus, and (2) necrotizing the epileptogenic focus excluding healthy brain by (a) colliquative necrosis with flash freezing or (b) cauterizing by focused laser beam.

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Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) is established as a communication system that controls a machine by measured neuronal activity of human brain. And, it is expected that a BCI contributes to the progress of the instrument for nursing and welfare. In this study, we propose a fundamental system of BCI based on Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) technique. And, a brain activity relating internal speech production is used as controlling signal for the system. The availability of the BCI system was demonstrated by experiment for multiple subjects.

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Recently, importance of neurorehabilitation under a finding for the plasticity of the brain has been recognized. In the present study, as fundamental study to innovate a finding of the brain science in the walk rehabilitation, we measured the change of cerebral blood flow during locomotion using 2 kinds of exercise instrument by functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy, and relationships between the changes of cerebral blood flow and muscle activity of leg and effect of the exercise instruments were investigated.

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Lifestyle-related diseases are caused by smoking, overweight and stress. But a daily health check is important because the symptoms are clear. We develop diagnostic software that visualizes the state of the blood vessels using the regular SOM, and we perform with it a synthetic plethysmogram diagnosis of 4 elements in the map, referring to : 1) the state of the blood vessels on the map, 2) the looseness of the positions on the map for several pulse waves, 3) the number of heartbeats/minute, 4) the variation and stability of a heartbeat. Also, the change in the relation between the pulse wave and each clinical condition can be visualized.

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The aim is to visualize the mark degree of the metabolic syndrome. The 4 diagnostic indicators used are : the BMI (Body Mass Index), or an abdominal circumscript, the systolic blood pressure (H-BP) in the other cases, the fasting-blood-glucose (GLU), triglyceride (TG) (acylglycerol). Moreover, in the case of 6 indicators, the diastolic blood pressure (L-BP) and HDL cholesterol are added. The plane Torus type SOM was used for the analysis. After training the SOM, the metabolic mark degree is displayed immediately after entering the medical examination data and the contribution of each indicator can be grasped at the same time as well. Moreover, the effect of adding hemoglobin Ale (HbAlc) to the list of diagnostic indicators (thus, 5 or 7 indicators in total) was assessed.

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In this article, We introduce a method of analysis of Web readability based on Self-Organizing Map (SOM). As readability, we focused only on number of characters and line-space, among the design-elements of Web contents. Then we consider a threshold of readability for the specific age groups using maps generated by SOM. The maps are available for improving readability and individual personal accessibility. We will implement a new web browsing system with an automatic text style changing for personal user's readability. Since user profiling data is required beforehand for every user, we solved this problem with SOM

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In this article, we introduce a method of intrusion detection based on self-organizing maps (SOM). As learning cost, we made input vectors from Snort, which is an open source intrusion detection system (IDS). Snort has detection rules as signature files. There are two approaches in IDS : Misuse Intrusion Detection (MID) and Anomaly Intrusion Detection (AID). We inspect our method to be sure that it can detect distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks which MID can't detect. In the result, it can't detect all of them, but can detect subspecies of known attacks. So, the maps are available for detecting unknown attacks especially DDoS. We will implement our method into Snort or other software, and verify detecting behavior.

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A new clustering analysis using spherical SOM has been proposed to create a more accurate representation of the data by removing the "border effect". The method is able to visualize a multi-dimensional dataset as a graphical object and to extract a tree structure from the object as a dendrogram. In my work, to better understand the potential effectiveness of the method, the clustering method using spherical SOM has been applied to real medical treatment data and has been compared the results of another approaches for clustering, which are Learning Vector Quantization, Support Vector Machine and Discriminant Analysis.

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The purpose of this research is to make the 2008 version of assessment sheet which can predict the delirium after the operation, and find out the validity. The research method starts to investigate actual conditions of the appearance of delirium after the operation, make a delirium assessment sheet after the operation, and finally show the validity. A multiple regression analysis was done to find out the correlation of presence and the assessment sheet item on the appearance of delirium. The disease probability was calculated by using the sigmoid function from the change in the delirium appearance and the score of the assessment sheet as a delirium risk after the operation. As a result, the following two points became clear. (1) As delirium appearance of disease factor, the order was "Understanding", "ICU entering ", "Art type", and "Age" as the partial regression coefficient. (2) The disease rate in "High risk" group goes high, and the sensitivity to judge the disease goes high. Therefore, it is suggested that the 2008 version assessment sheet is more useful to predict the appearance of delirium after the operation.

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It is observed that there is a gap of the expectation for the student between the practice leader and the midwife course student through the practice of every day. The aim of this research is to clarify the gap, and to obtain better learning and a smooth practice in future. The subject is midwife course students and the practice leaders in five hospitals. The research was done by the questionnaire for them. As for the result, a significant difference was seen on eight items among 29 items. On the basis of these results, it is possible for midwife course student to practice smoothly in the future.

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Many nursing students go to their school healthcare room more frequently year by year particularly for consultation of their stress symptoms. We have analyzed relevant literature in order to configure the network for countermeasures to stress of these students using the Precede-Proceed Model of Health Promotion Co. As a result, we found out possibilities for solving the problem of their stress. We also confirmed that the nurses of healthcare rooms and teachers of nursing must play key roles in relieving the students' stress.

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Recognition concerning the 'Baby post' is clarified among three courses of students, childcare students, general woman students, and midwife students. A questionnaire survey was executed for the 350 students. The person who answered the necessity for deepening knowledge about the 'Baby post' was the highest among 15 items. The approval or disapproval are, 53 c agreement (58.2%), 30 opposite (32.9%) in the childcare students, and 45 agreement (48.9%) and 43 opposite (46.7%) in the general woman student, 61 agreement (58.6%) and 41 opposite (39.4%) in the midwife students, these did not show a difference. In a comparison of the agreement group, the childcare student was significantly higher than the midwife student in seven items (p<0.05), and general woman student was significantly higher than the midwife student in one item (p<0.01). As a conclusion, it is shown the necessity to pay attention to other fields while making the best use of each specialty, and to cooperate in the future.

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It was investigated whether there are differences in concentration and the motivation for learning by the position of the seat of the lecture using a questionnaire form. As a result, it is shown that the student in a forward seat has a strong interest on the lecture and significantly high in the motive for learning of every day schooling. On the contrary, the student of backward seat felt tediously, and think about other things while the lecture, and they cannot concentrate in the lecture. In addition, the investigation shows that the seat for which the student is sitting at present is his desired seat.

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The objective of this study is to assist the movement of hand fingers by FES (Functional Electrical Stimulation) and to establish the control systems of the finger of patients with C5 or C6 spinal cord injury. Forearm mapping was tried on its muscle of a healthy person. The mapping allows us to choose each muscle which can move finger and wrist. Especially, we could examine individual movement of four fingers except the first finger by smaller mapping of flexor digitorum superficialis muscle (FDS). The following movements were reprodced successfully : palmar flexion and dorsiflexion of hand, grasp of finger, pronation of forearm, individual movement of first finger and four fingers except the first finger, specific movements of hand-finger.

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In the present days, information society has so rapidly extended that not only young people but also the elderly have to use the Internet to exchange and acquire information. One of the most popular internet services is WWW that is typical visual media. Human visual characteristics, however, change due to age-related clouding of the eye lens. Therefore, it is very likely that aged people overlook important information of web sites when the change of human visibility is ignored. In this report, the silent reading time, the gaze duration and the saccade were calculated using point-of-regard measurement for evaluating legibility of the Web site. As the results, the silent reading time and the gaze duration were extended and the saccade was shortened, when the contrast between characters and a background decreased. Moreover, it was shown that the contrast has a greater influence on negative coloration than positive coloration. These results indicate that the oculomotor analysis is useful to evaluate the web legibility.

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This paper relates an analysis of the heart rate variability (HRV) effects from the repeated listening to the same wind band composition. A man and a woman are invited as the experiment subjects, and one piece of wind band music ("Appalachian overture" (composed by J. Barnes)) is employed as the test piece. Subjects are asked to listen to the test piece for 2 weeks (one time per a day), and their HRV are recorded. The experimental data is analyzed by FFT, components of low frequency (LF; 0.04-0.15Hz) and high frequency (HF ; 0.15-0.40Hz) are obtained from the analysis of the HRV power spectrum. The study discovered some relationship between the frequency of listening to the test piece and the change of the HF or LF/HF value.

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Depression is often accompanied with various physical symptoms, especially autonomic nervous system's symptoms such as dizziness when standing, palpitation and stiff shoulders. The object of this study is to estimate physiological state in depression objectively by measurement of motor activity and autonomic nervous system's activity using actigraphy. Motor activity was significantly increased after recovery from depression. The HFnorm, which probably reflects the activity of cardiac vagal nerves, showed a trend of increase. On the other hand, LF/HF, which is the ratio of LF to HF and is thought to be a marker of sympathetic nervous activity decreased significantly after recovery from depression. These findings suggest the possibility that the activity of the sympathetic nerves would be higher and the activity of the vagal nerves system would be lower in depressive states. Furthermore the fractal dimension of the R-R interval power spectrum was decreased significantly lower after recovery from depression. It could be supposed that this fractal dimension has a close relationship to the balance of total autonomic nervous system activity.

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If the nuclear folding and clefting characteristic ofmonocytoid cells are not present, the morphologic features observed under light microscopy may not be sufficient to clarify the diagnosis. Much more reliable methodology should be developed for the clinical examination. Dielectrophoresis (DEP) is the motion of a matter caused by polarization effects in a non-uniform electric field. The dielectrophoretic force would be the candidate to achieve the separation, handling and characterization of the biological cells in the medium. It is not so easy to measure this extremely small motive force, though it is very important. This paper describes the methodology to measure the dielectrophoretic force of several tens offemto-Newtons.

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As an extension of TS fuzzy reasoning method, "weighted TS fuzzy reasoning method" was proposed by us in which the consequent part of fuzzy rule consists of a function with an weighting function. This paper proposes learning algorithm for the weighted TS fuzzy reasoning method by using steepest decent method, and compares learning results with the cases by simplified reasoning method and TS fuzzy reasoning method by applying to a diabetes diagnostic system.

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This paper discusses fuzzy discriminant analysis for diabetes data by using a simplified distance-type reasoning method with scale factor, which is a simplified version of distance-type fuzzy reasoning method. Moreover, learning algorithm is proposed for the distance-type reasoning method and applied to a diabetes diagnostic system, showing the satisfactory learning results.

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In recent years, integrating Oriental medicine and modern Western medicine have been required with the increase of disease related to lifestyle related and the change of disease structure. We need prove that the oriental medicine must be usefulness in health screening of Western medicine. The results of Oriental medical examination were compared with the result of Western medical examination, and the usefulness of "Oriental medical examination" was investigated. From the result, it was proven that the results of Oriental medical examination have a relationship with a few results of Western medical examination.

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Risk management of medical accident is important to attain better "fabric administration", "Accident correspondence", and "field management". We performed an investigation for actual medical accidents cases. We classified the medical accidents into four factors by using cluster analysis and regression analysis. As a result, rates of malpractices caused by "Carelessness group" had about 49%, Which has much influence on maintaining for our quality of medical cares. We used analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and, from this result, determined strategy of prevention for "the accidents with various medical apparatus". As a result, most effective correspondence was "enlightenment education" and the next was "emergency measure", and then the third was "detailed research". At First, we advance a suggestion "Emergency measure" and "Detailed research" on "Carelessness group". In addition, we suggestion "educations on improvements of Working environment" with applying same schedule for Working Environmental group. Secondly, we suggestion about "administration countermeasure" and "Inexperience research" or "safety control". We got the result that these plans are the most effective counter measures. The AHP analysis countermeasure was thought to be useful tools in all in medical scene.

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I continued research and development on automated diagnosis of ECG and evaluation of health management. The study of finding the optimum method for getting the maximum diagnostic accuracy based on multiple tests has been achieved. It was found that consideration about correlation between tests is necessary in order to get the maximum diagnostic accuracy. This paper focuses on the problem how to treat the inter-test correlation coefficient and overall diagnostic accuracy. It was cleared that the more overall diagnostic accuracy of the multiple test is earned in case of the less inter-test correlation coefficient. A randomized generation method of simulation data which has arbitrary sensitivity, specificity and inter-test correlation coefficient of each test, was developed.

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Many decision making tasks are too complex to be understood quantitatively, however, humans succeed by using knowledge that is imprecise rather than precise. The fuzzy theory was proposed to analyze the inexact information such as human behavior and recognition, It has updatingly been applied not only to natural science but also social and human sciences. In this paper, we discuss the analytic method about the maximizing decision in fuzzy decision.

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Decision making is a very important activity for human being, and we need it everyday. There are several criteria for decision making and we wish to choose the best criterion. In this paper, we propose a new method, application of paired comparison to fuzzy decision..

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In this paper, the hisory of fuzzy logic is overviewed. Fuzzy logic has four origins: 1) the logic of vagueness, 2) the logic of logical circuit, 3) the fuzzy algorithm, which is called fuzzy reasoning, and 4) Zadeh's fuzzy logic. At present, the fuzzy logic is regarded as the logic of fuzzy reasoning.

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A global evaluation method by fuzzy rules and Choquet integral is proposed. Using the Choquet integral, this method expresses the interaction degrees among the input values. Using the fuzzy rule table, rules can be changed by input values 'fuzzy labels, such as small, middle and big. Despite from the various fuzzy reasoning methods, the method has good properties such as monotonicity and linearity. Lastly a medical example - evaluation for blood-sugar level - is represented.

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As is well known, the inversion in genetic algorithm has no lethal and is effective for solving kinky in TSP (traveling salesman problem). But detail for the inversion has not been cleared. After, we categorize the inversion into the three types according to exchange area of gens; We show the fore methods to select the individual for new generation. Also through solving the traveling salesman problems, we compare the mean convergence ratio among inversion, OX, and MPX.

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In this article, we introduce a method of personal authentication with keystroke rhythm patterns based on Self-Organizing Maps (SOM). Our method is simple but convenient for login to Web application systems on the Internet as a low-cost biometric authentication, which is important in information security today. We implemented the prototype program in Java, and experimented with it. In the experiment, 10 subjects tried to type their own passphrase rhythmically in 4 times, and these collected rhythm patterns were evaluated with SOM. As a result, keystroke rhythm patterns are useful for personal authentication, so that both FAR (False Accept Rate) and FRR (False Reject Rate) are less than 8%. It is effective to use our method with other biometric authentication methods.

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In this article, we made evaluation on impersonation of biometric authentication by keystroke rhythm patterns. In the experiment, 4 subjects tried to type their own passphrase rhythmically in 4 times, and type others' keystroke rhythm in 3 times after the practice. These collected rhythm patterns were evaluated with Self-Organizing Maps (SOM). As a result, both FAR (False Accept Rate) and FRR (False Reject Rate) are less than 60%. In addition, registering a complex keystroke rhythm pattern, both FAR and FRR are less than 12%. It is possible to contribute to the improvement of reliability by using authentication with key stroke rhythm based on SOM together with existing authentication methods.

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We propose a plaque boundary extraction method employing fuzzy inference in intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) image used for a diagnosis of the acute coronary syndromes. In the proposed method, the positions and the number of membership functions are automatically decided according to information of seed points marked by a medical doctor. The proposed method has advantages over our previous method in the boundary extraction accuracy and the burden reduction on medical doctors.

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Tissue classification of a plaque is important for a diagnosis of the acute coronary syndromes. The conventional method however can not perform good classification, because the characteristics of some types of tissues have similar features with others. In this paper, we propose a novel feature extraction and classification method for intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) signal by using an adaptive subspace self-organizing map (ASSOM). In the proposed method, a tissue is classified by considering the statistical information of feature vectors acquired by ASSOM. The validity and the effectiveness of the proposed method are verified by applying it to the tissue classification problem of the real IVUS data.

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In this paper, we propose a novel tissue characterization method of a coronary plaque. In the proposed method, feature vectors are selected by considering the spatial continuities of tissues in both the feature and its observation spaces, and a tissue is then characterized by the feature vectors. In the experiment, the proposed method is applied to the tissue characterization problem of the intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) data, and its performance is evaluated by using ROC analysis.

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In a clustering analysis, the main problem is often referred to the uncertainty of the data, which could be possibly clustered, meaning the quality of the designed, improved, or analysed system that could be evaluated by this uncertainty of the clustered data. A reliable optimal solution from clustering data could be found by making the best use ofDNA computing. In this paper, a reliable optimal algorithm is proposed to cluster specific data for supporting a complicated data structure based on DNA computing with applied statistics. Its realization is very challenging while the underlying goal could be easily understood in a dimensional space. Given their nature, clustering problems become NP-complete problems. The use of DNA computing as a vehicle of data clustering with applied statistics is discussed and described in this study.

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We proposed new basic theory and methods for quantum computation and neuro-computer based on functional path integral of quantum theory. And then we concretely calculated probability amplitudes for quantum circuit and slit which have interferences and tunnel effects. We give operator expressions of switches and their circuits, and the diagrams of those systems correspond to potentials of Hamiltonian. Finally, we found that AND-circuit is represented by second order of perturbation, and OR-circuit looks upon as two particles scattering system. We showed it is useful to design and to make tests for new quantum system and computers.

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