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Telepractice or teletherapy is defined as the means of service delivery via technology-based platforms that allow long-distance interventions across populations, age spans, and geographical locations. Specifically, telepractice capitalizes on communication technologies such as online modules, videoconferencing, and computerized software programs, in servicing populations with communication challenges. Notably, telepractice has emerged as a potentially effective, low-cost, and promising means of conducting and completing online assessment, diagnosis, and intervention sessions for individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Moreover, telepractice allows the inclusion of parents, caregivers, and educators as potential facilitators in supporting treatment delivery in populations with ASD. This thematic review article aims to highlight and acquaint practitioners and other stakeholders with relatively recent information regarding the advantages and disadvantages of the telepractice service delivery model in ASD. Furthermore, the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted service delivery in the field of Health Sciences including speech and language pathology (SLP). Consequently, the need to avoid face-to-face therapy sessions, recommended to SLPs as to all health practitioners, resulted in the call for adaptation and adjustment of service telepractice. This paper attempts to answer this call by suggesting supplementing traditional diagnostic and therapy resources with training modules consisting of online materials and use of animated and specially designed programs in SLP intervention with individuals with ASD. Lastly, the paper includes a discussion of research findings in the field, a conclusion, and a take-home message.

The study aimed at evaluating the diadochokinetic (DDK) skills of Greek-speaking preschool children with phonological disorder (PD) by means of a structured evaluation protocol and at proposing cut-off points for children at risk of speech impairment. The participants were 36 children with PD and 60 typically developing (TD) peers. The groups were matched on age and gender. The PD group performed significantly slower than the TD group in all speech DDK tasks but not in the oral-motor tasks. The ROC analysis showed a statistically significant positive discrimination for all speech tasks. The internal consistency of the protocol was excellent (Cronbach’s α = .844), while complex stimuli showed a better discriminatory ability. The obtained results agree with Dodd’s classification for speech sound disorders (SSDs). Different types of speech stimuli must be included in the evaluation of DDK performance as a clinical predictor for preschoolers with SSDs who face difficulties in speech maturation.

The variety described here is Pontic Greek (ISO 639 name: pnt), and specifically the variety that originates from Trapezounta in Asia Minor (present-day Trabzon in Turkey) as spoken today in Etoloakarnania, Greece by second-generation refugees. The term ‘Pontic Greek’ (in Greek: ) was originally an etic term, while Pontians called their language by other names, mainly [ɾoˈmeika] ‘Romeika’ (Sitaridou 2016) but also [laziˈka] ‘Laz language’ (Drettas 1997: 19, 620), even though Pontians and Laz people do not share the same language, the latter being Caucasian. Nowadays, is the standard term used not only by researchers, but also by native speakers of Pontic Greek born in Greece to refer to their variety (but see Sitaridou 2013 for Romeyka in the Black Sea). Pontic Greek belongs to the Asia Minor Greek group along with other varieties, such as Cappadocian Greek (e.g. Horrocks 2010: 398–404; Sitaridou 2014: 31). According to Sitaridou (2014, 2016), on the basis of historical reconstruction, the Pontic branch of Asia Minor Greek is claimed to have been divided into two major dialectal groups: Pontic Greek as spoken by Christians until the 20th century in Turkey and Romeyka as spoken by Muslims to date in Turkey. Triantafyllidis (1938/1981: 288) divides Pontic varieties, as were spoken in Asia Minor, into three dialectal groups, namely Oinountian, Chaldiot, and Trapezountian, the latter consisting of the varieties that were spoken at Trapezounta, Kerasounta, Rizounta, Sourmena, Ofis, Livera, Tripolis, and Matsouka in Asia Minor (Trabzon, Giresun, Sürmene, Of, Yazlık, Tirebolu, and Maçka respectively in present-day Turkey). However, Triantafyllidis does not explain his criteria for this classification (Chatzissavidis 2012). According to one other classification (Papadopoulos 1955: 17–18; Papadopoulos 1958: $\upzeta$ ), the variety that was used in Trapezounta belongs to the dialectal group in which post-stressed /i/ and /u/ delete along other varieties, such as e.g. the ones that were spoken in Chaldia (present-day Gümüşhane), Sourmena, and Ofis (as opposed to the rest of Pontic varieties, such as the one of Kerasounta, in which those vowels are retained). Trapezountian Pontic Greek can also be classified with the group of varieties that retain word-final /n/, such as the varieties of Kerasounta and Chaldia, as opposed to the varieties that do not retain it, such as the ones of Oinoe (present-day Ünye) and (partially) Ofis (Papadopoulos 1958: θ).

ZusammenfassungMetastasen oder Lokalrezidive eines Nierenzellkarzinoms treten in den meisten Fällen in den ersten fünf Jahren nach Tumornephrektomie oder Nierentumorresektion auf. Dennoch werden immer wieder Spätrezidive oder Metastasen beobachtet. Die häufigsten Lokalisationen sind Lungen und Knochen, aber auch außergewöhnliche Lokalisationen sind möglich. Wir präsentieren den Fall eines 70-jährigen Patienten, bei dem 14 Jahre nach rezidivfreiem Überleben ein solitäres Rezidiv eines klarzelligen Nierenzellkarzinoms retrovesikal diagnostiziert wurde. Bei dem Patienten wurde eine Zystoprostatektomie mit Anlage eines Ileumconduits durchgeführt. Die Resektion erfolgte in sano. Der Verlauf des Patienten bleibt abzuwarten. Wenngleich ein singuläres Spätrezidiv eines Nierenzellkarzinoms retrovesikal selten ist, so gehört das Spätrezidiv zu den spezifischen Charakteristika dieses Tumors. Vor diesem Hintergrund ist für mindestens 15 Jahre eine Tumornachsorge erforderlich. Die kurative chirurgische Resektion ist bei solchen singulären Spätrezidiven Therapie der Wahl.

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have been utilized in the educational process, enriching and enhancing the traditional teaching methods. The purpose of the current study was to explore the potential of utilizing ICTs as an educational and therapeutic tool in preschool children with speech and language difficulties in the Greek language, as part of an individual or group-based intervention program. The intervention included the use of specific therapeutic tools whether paper-based or applications for each child or group. The improvement of phonological processes and the enrichment of vocabulary, and literacy after intervention were evaluated. The results revealed that ICTs could be used to improve phonological awareness and vocabulary for the specific group of children. This finding is very important especially in times of pandemic conditions such as that of Covid-19 whereas social distancing is needed.

Currently, the needs for new technologies are rising and especially due to Covid-19. The world is changing into a digital theater of businesses and educational processes. Consequently, tele-health is constantly enriched with new scientific areas of expertise, a fact that gives a new and promising perspective for people who cannot reach in-time a specialist. Specifically, for the case of speech language therapy (SLT), new techniques emerge and involve telepractice and tele-counceling. In turn, the aim of the present study was to discover a model of predicting potential benefits from the online form of speech and language therapy (distant sessions) along with the view of the involved speech therapists and parents. For this purpose, a hypothetical sample of specialists and parents, was produced as being supposedly participated into sessions with their children for evaluating the overall performance of each technique (live and distant) with a total score. Thereinafter, statistical analyses were performed and the relevant machine learning was applied for building an artificial neural network for examining the results, in order to show the capabilities of the proposed model. This outcome is important as it can actuate SLT scientific area to include, in the future, more advanced techniques for distant sessions, concluding to even surpassing the classical technique.

Το ακουστικό κανάλι ένα από τα δύο συνηθέστερα κανάλια επικοινωνίας. Μέσω της ακοής, ο άνθρωπος αντιλαμβάνεται μία πληθώρα πληροφοριών σχετικά με το περιβάλλον του, μπορεί να λάβει γνώσει από πληροφορίες που του μεταδίδει κάποιος άλλος άνθρωπος ή και να ψυχαγωγηθεί. Η γνώση ότι η ομιλία και η μουσική μπορούν να εγείρουν συναισθήματα στον ακροατή είναι κοινός τόπος στους ειδικούς και μη ειδικούς. ́Ομως, οι δύο αυτοί τύποι ηχητικού ερεθίσματος, ήτοι ομιλία και μουσική, είναι μόνο ένα μέρος του συνόλου των ήχων που μπορεί να ακούσει ένας άνθρωπος. Υπάρχει και μία άλλη κατηγορία, οι γενικοί ήχοι ή ηχητικά γεγονότα, οι οποίοι καταλαμβάνουν το μεγαλύτερο μέρος του πλήθους ηχητικών ερεθισμάτων που ακούει ένας άνθρωπος. ́Εχει ήδη δειχθεί, από δημοσιευμένες εργασίες, ότι τα ηχητικά γεγονότα μπορούν να επηρεάσουν το συναίσθημα του ακροατή τους, χωρίς όμως να έχει βρεθεί κάποια σχέση με τα τεχνικά χαρακτηριστικά του ηχητικού ερεθίσματος ή επιπλέον πληροφορίας που μεταφέρεται μέσω τον ηχητικών γεγονότων. Λόγω της γενικής φύσης αυτού του τύπου ηχητικού ερεθίσματος, εάν βρεθεί μία σχέση μεταξύ των τεχνικών ηχητικών χαρακτηριστικών και του εγειρόμενου, στον ακροατή, συναίσθημα τότε είναι αρ- κετά πιθανό αυτό το τεχνικό χαρακτηριστικό να μπορεί να επιδράσει με τον συγκεκριμένο τρόπο και στις άλλες δύο, πιο ειδικές, μορφές ήχου, ήτοι την ομιλία και την μουσική. Το γεγονός αυτό θα επιτρέψει μία εποπτική έρευνα σχετικά με τα τεχνικά χαρακτηριστικά των εν γένει ηχητικών ερεθισμάτων με την συναισθηματική τους επήρεια στον ακροατή. ́Ετσι, η ανά χείρας διατριβή εστιάζει στην αναγνώριση συναισθήματος από ηχητικά γεγονότα. Ερευνά και παρουσιάζει αποτελέσματα σχετικά με την επήρεια του ρυθμού, της ενέργειας, του σημασιολογικού περιεχομένου του ηχητικού γεγονότος αλλά και της χωρικής τοποθέτησης της πηγής στο συναίσθημα του ακροατή. Τα αποτελέσματα δείχνουν ότι ο ρυθμός αποτελεί ένα τεχνικό χαρακτηριστικό το οποίο μπορεί να επηρεάσει το συναίσθημα του ακροατή για όλους τους τύπους ηχητικών ερεθισμάτων αλλά και ότι η χωρική τοποθέτηση της πηγής μπορεί να τροποποιήσει το εγειρόμενο συναίσθημα από ένα ηχητικό ερέθισμα.

Local recurrence or metachronous distant metastasis of renal cell carcinoma mostly occurs in the first five years after radical or partial nephrectomy. Nevertheless, late local recurrences or metachronous metastases are regularly observed. The most common metastatic sites are lung and bones, although unusual metastatic sites are also possible. We present the case of a 70-year-old patient with a solitary recurrence of a clear renal cell carcinoma in retrovesical location after a relapse-free survival of 14 years. We performed cystoprostatectomy with an ileal conduit, resecting the tumour completely (in sano). The long-term prognosis of the patient cannot be estimated as yet.Despite the fact that a solitary and very late recurrence of a renal cell carcinoma in retrovesical location is extremely rare, late recurrence is a specific characteristic of renal cell carcinoma. Therefore, long-term follow-up for at least 15 years is required. Curative surgical resection is the treatment of choice for such late solitary recurrences.Metastasen oder Lokalrezidive eines Nierenzellkarzinoms treten in den meisten Fällen in den ersten fünf Jahren nach Tumornephrektomie oder Nierentumorresektion auf. Dennoch werden immer wieder Spätrezidive oder Metastasen beobachtet. Die häufigsten Lokalisationen sind Lungen und Knochen, aber auch außergewöhnliche Lokalisationen sind möglich. Wir präsentieren den Fall eines 70-jährigen Patienten, bei dem 14 Jahre nach rezidivfreiem Überleben ein solitäres Rezidiv eines klarzelligen Nierenzellkarzinoms retrovesikal diagnostiziert wurde. Bei dem Patienten wurde eine Zystoprostatektomie mit Anlage eines Ileumconduits durchgeführt. Die Resektion erfolgte in sano. Der Verlauf des Patienten bleibt abzuwarten. Wenngleich ein singuläres Spätrezidiv eines Nierenzellkarzinoms retrovesikal selten ist, so gehört das Spätrezidiv zu den spezifischen Charakteristika dieses Tumors. Vor diesem Hintergrund ist für mindestens 15 Jahre eine Tumornachsorge erforderlich. Die kurative chirurgische Resektion ist bei solchen singulären Spätrezidiven Therapie der Wahl.

Audio representation learning based on deep neural networks (DNNs) emerged as an alternative approach to hand-crafted features. For achieving high performance, DNNs often need a large amount of annotated data which can be difficult and costly to obtain. In this paper, we propose a method for learning audio representations, aligning the learned latent representations of audio and associated tags. Aligning is done by maximizing the agreement of the latent representations of audio and tags, using a contrastive loss. The result is an audio embedding model which reflects acoustic and semantic characteristics of sounds. We evaluate the quality of our embedding model, measuring its performance as a feature extractor on three different tasks (namely, sound event recognition, and music genre and musical instrument classification), and investigate what type of characteristics the model captures. Our results are promising, sometimes in par with the state-of-the-art in the considered tasks and the embeddings produced with our method are well correlated with some acoustic descriptors., 8 pages, 1 figure, workshop on Self-supervision in Audio and Speech at the 37th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2020, Vienna, Austria

The proper use of language for communication in any context is defined as Pragmatics. Pragmatics includes the linguistic adjustments made (what is said, how it is said, body language, appropriateness) in order to accomplish the communication goal. Children and adults may be referred for rehabilitation when pragmatic communication deficits have an impact on social functioning, employment, and family/marital relationships (Turkstra, et al., 2016). The aim of this study is to examine gamification as an alternative to supplement clinical assessment procedures of an individual’s communication deficiencies with a focus on pragmatics perception, which led to the creation of a mobile gamified procedure designed to collect data on pragmatics perception. The gamified procedure was created in Kahoot! and was played by a sample of two hundred and fifty-six (256) university students with non-acquired communicative deficits studying health related courses in Greece. Data on points scored, response accuracy and duration of time spent on of each language feature was recorded. A detailed description on students’ pragmatics abilities and motivation was reported. The results of the study described normative data concerning points scored, response time and accuracy of language features. Statistically significant differences were found between genders in terms of response accuracy and time for some language features. The gamified e-assessment has the clear potential to contribute innovatively to the clinical assessment procedures of pragmatic communicative deficits including the needs of individuals with developmental disorders, psychiatric disorders, acquired brain injury, neurodegenerative disorders in a motivating way along with current technological advances of face to face and/or telepractice services.

The relationship between smoking and alterations of the vocal tract and larynx is well known. This pathology leads to the degradation of voice performance in daily living. Multiple assessment methods of vocal tract and larynx have been developed, and in recent years they were enriched with self-reported questionnaires such as Voice Handicap Index (VHI). This study determined the cutoff points of VHI's total score and its three domains for young female smokers in Greece. These estimated cutoff points could be used by voice specialists as an indicator for further clinical evaluation (foreseeing a potential risk of developing a vocal symptom because of smoking habits). A sample of 120 female nondysphonic smokers (aged 18-31) was recruited. Participants filled out the VHI and Voice Evaluation Form. VHI's cutoff point of total score was calculated at the value of 19.50 (sensitivity: 0.780, 1-specificity: 0.133). Specifically, the construct domain of functional was 7.50 (sensitivity: 0.900, 1-specificity: 0.217), for physical it was 8.50 (sensitivity: 0.867, 1-specificity: 0.483), and for emotional it was 7.50 (sensitivity: 0.833, 1-specificity: 0.200) through the use of receiver operating characteristic. Furthermore, VHI could be used as a monitoring tool for smokers and as a feedback for smoking cessation.

Audio captioning is the task of automatically creating a textual description for the contents of a general audio signal. Typical audio captioning methods rely on deep neural networks (DNNs), where the target of the DNN is to map the input audio sequence to an output sequence of words, i.e. the caption. Though, the length of the textual description is considerably less than the length of the audio signal, for example 10 words versus some thousands of audio feature vectors. This clearly indicates that an output word corresponds to multiple input feature vectors. In this work we present an approach that focuses on explicitly taking advantage of this difference of lengths between sequences, by applying a temporal sub-sampling to the audio input sequence. We employ a sequence-to-sequence method, which uses a fixed-length vector as an output from the encoder, and we apply temporal sub-sampling between the RNNs of the encoder. We evaluate the benefit of our approach by employing the freely available dataset Clotho and we evaluate the impact of different factors of temporal sub-sampling. Our results show an improvement to all considered metrics. publishedVersion

Objectives: The aims of this study were: (1) to investigate the effect of colorful semantics (CS) on the morphosyntactic and semantic development of Cypriot-Greek (CG)-speaking children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to obtain a better understanding of its role in an augmentative communication (AC) intervention program; (2) to address the paucity of intervention tools geared for CG-speaking children with ASD. Participants and Methods: The study included 24 boys and 16 girls with ASD, all preschool-aged 4–6 years. All were verbal but with limited production and minimal mean length of utterance. The study followed a randomized control trial design with equally sized experimental and control groups. The experimental group followed a therapeutic program using the AC with a CS protocol, while the control group’s AC intervention did not include the CS protocol. Results: The use of CS significantly improved the children’s semantic and morphosyntactic development. Conclusions: The intervention results illustrate the effectiveness of CS in this study; however, generalizability of effectiveness to other similar CG-speaking children with ASD requires further evidence.

ZusammenfassungEs wird über den Fall eines PSA-negativen und lokal fortgeschrittenen azinären Prostatakarzinoms berichtet, das bei thyroid transcription factor-1 (TTF-1) Expression eine Metastase eines bereits behandelten Bronchialkarzinoms imitierte. Unseres Wissens ist ein TTF-1 positiv azinäres Prostatakarzinom bisher nur ein Mal in der Literatur dokumentiert. Die Bestimmung des Immunophänotyps des Karzinoms mit Napsin A, CK7 und CK20 in Kombination mit der Beurteilung des gesamten Krankheitsverhaltens waren für die definitive Diagnose eines primären Prostatakarzinoms entscheidend.

Close miking represents a widely employed practice of placing a microphone very near to the sound source in order to capture more direct sound and minimize any pickup of ambient sound, including other, concurrently active sources. It is used by the audio engineering community for decades for audio recording, based on a number of empirical rules that were evolved during the recording practice itself. But can this empirical knowledge and close miking practice be systematically verified? In this work we aim to address this question based on an analytic methodology that employs techniques and metrics originating from the sound source separation evaluation field. In particular, we apply a quantitative analysis of the source separation capabilities of the close miking technique. The analysis is applied on a recording dataset obtained at multiple positions of a typical musical hall, multiple distances between the microphone and the sound source multiple microphone types and multiple level differences between the sound source and the ambient acoustic component. For all the above cases we compute the Source to Interference Ratio (SIR) metric. The results obtained clearly demonstrate an optimum close-miking performance that matches the current empirical knowledge of professional audio recording.

Summary Students' groups (eg, teachers, speech language pathologists) are presumably at risk of developing a voice disorder due to misuse of their voice, which will affect their way of living. Multidisciplinary voice assessment of student populations is currently spread widely along with the use of self-reported questionnaires. This study compared the Voice Handicap Index domains and item scores between female students of speech and language therapy and of other health professions in Greece. We also examined the probability of speech language therapy students developing any vocal symptom. Two hundred female non-dysphonic students (aged 18–31) were recruited. Participants answered the Voice Evaluation Form and the Greek adaptation of the Voice Handicap Index. Significant differences were observed between the two groups (students of speech therapy and other health professions) through Voice Handicap Index (total score, functional and physical domains), excluding the emotional domain. Furthermore, significant differences for specific Voice Handicap Index items, between subgroups, were observed. In conclusion, speech language therapy students had higher Voice Handicap Index scores, which probably could be an indicator for avoiding profession-related dysphonia at a later stage. Also, Voice Handicap Index could be at a first glance an assessment tool for the recognition of potential voice disorder development in students. In turn, the results could be used for indirect therapy approaches, such as providing methods for maintaining vocal health in different student populations.

A PSA-negative, advanced adenocarcinoma of the prostate is a rare finding. Expression of thyroid transcription factor-1 (TTF-1) in the tumour in combination with a previous medical history of lung adenocarcinoma could complicate the final diagnosis. To the best of our knowledge, we present the second case of a TTF-1-positive, acinar adenocarcinoma of the prostate.We present the case of a 65-year-old male with surgically treated lung adenocarcinoma; 3 years later we diagnosed adenocarcinoma of the bladder and prostate. Although our initial assumption was that the patient had metastatic lung carcinoma in the bladder and prostate, a further immune histochemical analysis of the carcinoma with Napsin A, CK7 and CK20, along with the evaluation of the clinical manifestations, led us to the diagnosis of primary adenocarcinoma of the prostate.

This paper studies the emotion recognition from musical tracks in the 2-dimensional valence-arousal (V-A) emotional space. We propose a method based on convolutional (CNN) and recurrent neural networks (RNN), having significantly fewer parameters compared with the state-of-the-art method for the same task. We utilize one CNN layer followed by two branches of RNNs trained separately for arousal and valence. The method was evaluated using the 'MediaEval2015 emotion in music' dataset. We achieved an RMSE of 0.202 for arousal and 0.268 for valence, which is the best result reported on this dataset., Comment: Accepted for Sound and Music Computing (SMC 2017)

Modern interactive means combined with new digital media processing and representation technologies can provide a robust framework for enhancing user experience in multimedia entertainment systems and audiovisual artistic installations with non-traditional interaction/feedback paths based on user affective state. In this work, the ‘Elevator’ interactive audiovisual platform prototype is presented, which aims to provide a framework for signalling and expressing human behaviour related to emotions (such as anger) and finally produce a visual outcome of this behaviour, defined here as the emotional ‘thumbnail’ of the user. Optimised, real-time audio signal processing techniques are employed for monitoring the achieved anger-like behaviour, while the emotional elevation is attempted using appropriately selected combined audio/visual content reproduced using state-of-the-art audiovisual playback technologies that allow the creation of a realistic immersive audiovisual environment. The demonstration of the proposed prototype has shown that affective interaction is possible, allowing the further development of relative artistic and technological applications.