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Ahtract-This paper describes the first successfully implemented real-time Mandarin dictation machine developed in the world which recognizes Mandarin speech with very large vocabulary and almost unlimited texts for the input of Chinese characters into computers. Considering the special characteristics of the Chinese language, syllables are chosen as the basic units for dictation. The machine is speaker dependent, and the input speech is in the form of sequences of isolated syllables. The machine can be decomposed into two subsystems. The first subsystem is to recognize the syllables using hidden Markov models, in which special training algorithms and recognition approaches have been developed to recognize the 408 very confusing syllables (disregarding the tones), and special feature vectors have been used to recognize the five different tones including the very confusing neutral tone. But this does not help very much because every syllable can represent many different homonym characters and form different multi-syllabic words with syllables on its right or left. The second subsystem is then needed to identify the exact characters from the syllables and correct the errors in syllable recognition by first finding all possible word hypotheses and forming a word lattice for the sequence of recognized syllables through a lexical access process, and then obtaining the best path in the lattice with the maximum likelihood as the output sentence using a data-trained Markov Chinese language model. The real-time implementation is on an IBM PC/AT, connected to three sets of specially designed hardware boards on which seven TMS 320C25 chips operate in parallel. The preliminary test results indicate that it takes only about 0.45 s to dictate a syllable (or character) with an accuracy on the order of 90%. All techniques used in this machine are described and discussed in detail in this paper.

Objectives:The purpose of this study was to evaluate the prevalence of metabolic syndrome (MetS) among hemodialysis patients and factors associated with quality of dialysis.Methods:Data were collected from 377 long-term hemodialysis patients who received hemodialysis treatment from clinics in Tainan and Kaohsiung between November 2009 and February 2010. MetS was defined using criteria set by the adult treatment panel III (ATP-III). But, the cutpoint of waist circumference has been modified to adjust for Asian populations.The measurement of Kt/V was used as an indicator of the quality of dialysis. A below 1.4 Kt/V was considered poor dialysis quality.Results:Results showed that the prevalence of MetS among the chronic hemodialysis patients in this sample was 61.0%. Logistic regression results identified that the quality of dialysis in females was better than that in males (odds ratio (OR)=7.98, 95% confidence interval (CI): 2.52-25.31). Better quality dialysis was associated with older age, longer treatment time, and increased blood flow rate (OR=1.49, 13.63, and 1.35, respectively). However, for every one kilogram increase in weight, the quality of dialysis decreased by 13 percents (OR=0.87, 95% CI: 0.83-0.92).Conclusions:MetS is common among hemodialysis patients. The prevalence of hypertension, hyperlipidemia, and hyperglycaemia were significantly higher among hemodialysis patients. Quality of dialysis related to gender, age, weight, and the dialysis prescription (treatment time and blood flow rate).

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