• Biomolecules & Therapeutics
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• v.31 no.6
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• pp.674-681
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• 2023

Bile pigment, bilirubin, and biliverdin concentrations may change as a results of biliary tract cancer (BTC) altering the mechanisms of radical oxidation and heme breakdown. We explored whether changes in bile pigment components could help distinguish BTC from benign biliary illness by evaluating alterations in patients with BTC. We collected bile fluid from 15 patients with a common bile duct stone (CBD group) and 63 individuals with BTC (BTC group). We examined the bile fluid's bilirubin, biliverdin reductase (BVR), heme oxygenase (HO-1), and bacterial taxonomic abundance. Serum bilirubin levels had no impact on the amounts of bile HO-1, BVR, or bilirubin. In comparison to the control group, the BTC group had considerably higher amounts of HO-1, BVR, and bilirubin in the bile. The areas under the curve for the receiver operating characteristic curve analyses of the BVR and HO-1 were 0.832 (p<0.001) and 0.891 (p<0.001), respectively. Firmicutes was the most prevalent phylum in both CBD and BTC, according to a taxonomic abundance analysis, however the Firmicutes/Bacteroidetes ratio was substantially greater in the BTC group than in the CBD group. The findings of this study showed that, regardless of the existence of obstructive jaundice, biliary carcinogenesis impacts heme degradation and bile pigmentation, and that the bile pigment components HO-1, BVR, and bilirubin in bile fluid have a diagnostic significance in BTC. In tissue biopsies for the diagnosis of BTC, particularly for distinguishing BTC from benign biliary strictures, bile pigment components can be used as additional biomarkers.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• 1997.11a
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• pp.45-58
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• 1997

본 논문에서는 중요한 정보의 형태 중 하나인 영상 정보를 빠르고 정확하게 송수신하기 위하여 사용되는 영상 압축 방법 중 간단하면서도 좋은 성능을 가진 기존의 Block Truncation Coding(BTC)을 기반으로 하여 더욱 발전된 성능의 BTC를 구현하기 위한 방법을 제안한다. 인간의 시각적인 특성을 이용하여 각 블록을 명암에 따라 판단하여 차별된 양자화기를 사용함으로써 높은 압축에도 시각적인 측면뿐만 아니라 수치적인 측면에서 더욱 개선된 영상을 얻을 수 있었다. 또한, 모서리 부분의 특성이 잘 보존되도록 한 블록 안의 평균과 로그평균의 차를 이용하여 블록 안의 임계값을 결정하는 새로운 형태의 적응성 BTC 구현을 제안하여 BTC의 상반된 두 가지 특성인 압축률과 오차율을 개선시켰다.

• Composites Research
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• v.29 no.6
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• pp.369-374
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• 2016

In this study, a structural optimal design of 10 MW composite blade was performed using bend-twist coupled(BTC) design concept. Bend-twist coupling of blade means the coupling behavior between the bending and torsional deflections due to the composite lamina with fiber angle biased from the blade longitudinal axis. This can potentially improve the overall performance of composite blade and reduce the dynamic loading. Parametric studies on layup angle, thickness and area of off-axis carbon UD were conducted to find the optimum coupling effect with weight reduction. Comparing the results of fatigue load analysis between conventional model and BTC applied model, the damage equivalent load(DEL) of blade root area were decreased about 3% in BTC model. To verify the BTC effect experimentally, a 1:29 scaled model was fabricated and the torsion at the tip under deflection behavior of blade stiffener model was measured by static load test.

• Korean Chemical Engineering Research
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• v.52 no.2
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• pp.214-218
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• 2014

In this study, nanoporous $Cu_3(BTC)_2$ membranes were synthesized on macroporous alumina tube supports by solvothermal method. It is very difficult to prepare uniform and crack-free $Cu_3(BTC)_2$ layer on macroporous alumina support by in situ solvothermal method. In this study, continuous and crack-free $Cu_3(BTC)_2$ tubular membranes could be obtained by in situ solvothermal process after surface modification of alumina support. The surface modification was conducted by spraying Cu precursor solution on the alumina support heated at $200^{\circ}C$. The prepared $Cu_3(BTC)_2$ tubular membranes were characterized by XRD, FE-SEM and gas permeation experiments. $H_2$ permeance through $5{\mu}m$ thick $Cu_3(BTC)_2$ tubular membrane was calculated to be $7.8{\times}10^{-7}mol/s{\cdot}m^2{\cdot}Pa$ by single gas permeation test, with the ideal selectivities of $H_2/N_2=11.94$, and $H_2/CO_2=12.82$.

• Environmental and Resource Economics Review
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.413-440
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• 2010

Since 2000, as importance of sourcing energy emphasized caused by instability of international oil price, interests toward Caspian countries as an alternative markets has increased. Especially, Azerbaijan, as middle Asian emerging exporting country, has performed drastic economic boom because of massive amount of foreign capital flowed in and construction of BTC pipeline. However, despite this economic surge, there are unbalanced economy which is merely focusing on energy industry and pressure from increase in real exchange rate and inflation. In order to analyze the sustainability of Azerbaijan economy, the total sample time period of this paper is from January 2001 to December 2007 and the term is divided into before and after BTC line construction. Vector Error-Correction Model has been applied to analysis confirming short-term and long-term effect. As a result, Azerbaijan now face the symptoms of the recession during the time period and this is due to high oil price and increase in export influenced by BTC oil pipeline resulting in decrease in real interest rate. This conclusion is to affect competitiveness of manufacturing industry, base industry for economic proliferation, in a negative way.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics B
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• v.30B no.12
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• pp.73-86
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• 1993

This paper proposes an automatic variable block truncation coding (BTC) method. It selects the block size automatically based on the mode of the discontinutiy measure of blocks. The combination of an automatic block-size determination scheme and the conventional BTC results in the proposed automatic variable BTC techniques. For color images, subsampling in I and Q chrominance components is adopted along with the variable BTC. To show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, its simulation results are compared to those of the several conventional BTC algorithms for monochrome and color test images. Computer simulation shows that the proposed algorithm gives better performance than the conventional ones based on the subjective and objective performance evaluation.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.81-87
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• 1988

This paper proposes a new EBTC(extended block truncation coding) algorithm extended from the BTC for image compression. The EBTC has a capability to eliminate the defects of BTC, such as the deterioration of resolution or blocky effect,and to make a real-time processing like BTC. It shows better performances than the DPCM and the transform coding. Especially, it is a suitable coding method for the high quality picture transmission. It may be adequate to the system of transmission rate of 30-50 Mbits/sec. The picture quality has been scarecely degraded with a vector quantization to the EBTC output at the bit rate of 1.25 bits/pel. The bit rate of the scalar quantized EBTC method is 2.6-3.7 bits/pel.

• BMB Reports
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.87-93
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• 1995

To investigate the biological functions of the EGF-like domain of mouse betacellulin (BTC), mouse BTC(33-80), a 48-residue peptide corresponding to the EGF-like domain, was synthesized by stepwise solidphase methods using a 9-fluorenylmethoxycarbonyl (Fmoc) strategy. The homogeneity of synthetic mouse BTC(33-80) was confirmed by analytical reversed phase (RP)-HPLC, amimo acid analysis, and fast atom bombardment mass spectrometer (FAB-MS). Three disulfide bond pairings of synthetic mouse BTC(33-80) were established by amino acid analysis of cysteine-containing fragments derived from thermolytic digestion. These were consistent with the pairings of EGF and transforming growth factor ($TGF-{\alpha}$). The EGF-Iike domain of mouse BTC showed equipotent activity in both EGF-receptor binding on A-431 epidermoid carcinoma cells, and mitogenesis on NIH-3T3 fibroblast cells, as compared with authentic h-EGF. Results suggest that the EGF-Iike domain of BTC plays a significant role in mitogenic activity with an EGF-receptor mediated system.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.30 no.1
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• pp.21-30
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• 2020

Bitcoin (BTC) is a type of cryptocurrency that supports transaction/payment of virtual money between BTC users without the presence of a central authority or any third party like bank. It uses some cryptographic techniques namely public- and private-keys, digital signature and cryptographic-hash functions, and they are used for making secure transactions and maintaining distributed public ledger called blockchain. In BTC system, each transaction signed by sender is broadcasted over the P2P (Peer-to-Peer) Bitcoin network and a set of such transactions collected over a period is hashed together with the previous block/other values to form a block known as candidate block, where the first block known as genesis-block was created independently. Before a candidate block to be the part of existing blockchain (chaining of blocks), a computation-intensive hard problem needs to be solved. A number of miners try to solve it and a winner earns some BTCs as inspiration. The miners have high computing and hardware resources, and they play key roles in BTC for blockchain formation. This paper mainly analyses the underlying cryptographic techniques, identifies some weaknesses and proposes their enhancements. For these, two modifications of BTC are suggested ― (i) All BTC users must use digital certificates for their authentication and (ii) Winning miner must give signature on the compressed data of a block for authentication of public blocks/blockchain.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.49 no.4
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• pp.1-9
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• 2012

LCD(Liquid Crystal Display) commonly used as an output device has a drawback of slow response time compared with CRT display. This drawback causes motion blur especially when an abrupt intensity change occurs in an image sequence as time goes on. To overcome the problem of slow response time overdriving technique has been used in TCON of LCD. In this technique, the previous frame data has to be compressed and stored in an external memory. Considering both chip size of TCON and computational complexity, AM-BTC has been applied to the 8bit HD display driver. However, the conventional method is not suitable for 10 bit Full HD because 10 bit Full HD data is much larger than that of 8 bit HD data. Being applied to 10 bit Full HD display driver, the conventional method increase cost by enlarging the external memory size of TCON or deteriorates image quality. In this paper, we propose dual BTC image coding technique for Full HD display driver that is an adaptive coding scheme according to morphological information of each sample block. Through experiments, it is verified that the proposed Dual BTC method performs better than the conventional method not only quantitatively but also qualitatively.