• Journal of Pharmaceutical Investigation
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• v.30 no.3
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• pp.191-199
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• 2000

Genomics is providing targets faster than we can validate them and combinatorial chemistry is providing new chemical entities faster than we can screen them. Historically, the drug discovery cascade has been established as a sequential process initiated with a potency screening against a selected biological target. In this sequential process, pharmacokinetics was often regarded as a low-throughput activity. Typically, limited pharmacokinetics studies would be conducted prior to acceptance of a compound for safety evaluation and, as a result, compounds often failed to reach a clinical testing due to unfavorable pharmacokinetic characteristics. A new paradigm in drug discovery has emerged in which the entire sample collection is rapidly screened using robotized high-throughput assays at the outset of the program. Higher-throughput pharmacokinetics (HTPK) is being achieved through introduction of new techniques, including automation for sample preparation and new experimental approaches. A number of in vitro and in vivo methods are being developed for the HTPK. In vitro studies, in which many cell lines are used to screen absorption and metabolism, are generally faster than in vivo screening, and, in this sense, in vitro screening is often considered as a real HTPK. Despite the elegance of the in vitro models, however, in vivo screenings are always essential for the final confirmation. Among these in vivo methods, cassette dosing technique, is believed the methods that is applicable in the screening of pharmacokinetics of many compounds at a time. The widespread use of liquid chromatography (LC) interfaced to mass spectrometry (MS) or tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) allowed the feasibility of the cassette dosing technique. Another approach to increase the throughput of in vivo screening of pharmacokinetics is to reduce the number of sample analysis. Two common approaches are used for this purpose. First, samples from identical study designs but that contain different drug candidate can be pooled to produce single set of samples, thus, reducing sample to be analyzed. Second, for a single test compound, serial plasma samples can be pooled to produce a single composite sample for analysis. In this review, we validated the issue whether the second method can be applied to practical screening of in vivo pharmacokinetics using data from seven of our previous bioequivalence studies. For a given drug, equally spaced serial plasma samples were pooled to achieve a 'Pooled Concentration' for the drug. An area under the plasma drug concentration-time curve (AUC) was then calculated theoretically using the pooled concentration and the predicted AUC value was statistically compared with the traditionally calculated AUC value. The comparison revealed that the sample pooling method generated reasonably accurate AUC values when compared with those obtained by the traditional approach. It is especially noteworthy that the accuracy was obtained by the analysis of only one sample instead of analyses of a number of samples that necessitates a significant man-power and time. Thus, we propose the sample pooling method as an alternative to in vivo pharmacokinetic approach in the selection potential lead(s) from combinatorial libraries.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.651-658
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• 2021

Because bolts with anti-loosening coatings are used mainly for joining safety-related components in automobiles, accurate automatic screening of these coatings is essential to detect defects efficiently. The performance of the convolutional neural network (CNN) used in a previous study [Identification of bolt coating defects using CNN and Grad-CAM] increased with increasing number of data for the analysis of image patterns and characteristics. On the other hand, obtaining the necessary amount of data for coated bolts is difficult, making training time-consuming. In this paper, resorting to the same VGG16 model as in a previous study, transfer learning was applied to decrease the training time and achieve the same or better accuracy with fewer data. The classifier was trained, considering the number of training data for this study and its similarity with ImageNet data. In conjunction with the fully connected layer, the highest accuracy was achieved (95%). To enhance the performance further, the last convolution layer and the classifier were fine-tuned, which resulted in a 2% increase in accuracy (97%). This shows that the learning time can be reduced by transfer learning and fine-tuning while maintaining a high screening accuracy.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.129-143
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• 2023

In the era of big data, the field of artificial intelligence is showing remarkable growth, and in particular, the image classification learning methods by deep learning are becoming an important area. Various studies have been actively conducted to further improve the performance of CNNs, which have been widely used in image classification, among which a representative method is the Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN) algorithm. The CRNN algorithm consists of a combination of CNN for image classification and RNNs for recognizing time series elements. However, since the inputs used in the RNN area of CRNN are the flatten values extracted by applying the convolution and pooling technique to the image, pixel values in the same phase in the image appear in different order. And this makes it difficult to properly learn the sequence of arrangements in the image intended by the RNN. Therefore, this study aims to improve image classification performance by proposing a novel hybrid method of CNN and RNN applying the concepts of encoder and decoder. In this study, the effectiveness of the new hybrid method was verified through various experiments. This study has academic implications in that it broadens the applicability of encoder and decoder concepts, and the proposed method has advantages in terms of model learning time and infrastructure construction costs as it does not significantly increase complexity compared to conventional hybrid methods. In addition, this study has practical implications in that it presents the possibility of improving the quality of services provided in various fields that require accurate image classification.