• Journal of Audiology & Otology
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.89-95
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• 2019

Background and Objectives: Knowing the ototoxic potential of the agents used in medical treatments is important for the protection of hearing. Although we have knowledge regarding some effects of dexmedetomidine, which is an anesthetic-sparing drug, its influence over the hearing system has never been studied and is obscure yet. The aim of this study is to determine the effects of intravenous dexmedetomidine application during sevoflurane anesthesia on otoacoustic emissions (OAEs). Subjects and Methods: This prospective randomized study was performed on 60 patients (34 male, 26 female, mean age: 30.6±9.2 years) who were scheduled for an elective surgery under general anesthesia and the patients were enrolled and randomly divided into 2 groups. They received dexmedetomidine (Group D) or Saline (Group S) infusion during a standardized Sevoflurane anesthesia. Transient and distortion product OAEs were measured preoperatively and postoperatively (24th hour). OAE results were compared within and between groups. Results: In group D postoperative OAEs were lower than preoperative OAEs and postoperative levels of group S, especially at low frequencies (p<0.05). Conclusions: Dexmedetomidine infusion affects the micromechanical function of cochlea especially in the low-frequency region. Dexmedetomidine should be carefully used during general anesthesia to avoid its probable harmful effects on cochlear micromechanics.

• Korean Journal of Audiology
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.89-95
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• 2019

Background and Objectives: Knowing the ototoxic potential of the agents used in medical treatments is important for the protection of hearing. Although we have knowledge regarding some effects of dexmedetomidine, which is an anesthetic-sparing drug, its influence over the hearing system has never been studied and is obscure yet. The aim of this study is to determine the effects of intravenous dexmedetomidine application during sevoflurane anesthesia on otoacoustic emissions (OAEs). Subjects and Methods: This prospective randomized study was performed on 60 patients (34 male, 26 female, mean age: 30.6±9.2 years) who were scheduled for an elective surgery under general anesthesia and the patients were enrolled and randomly divided into 2 groups. They received dexmedetomidine (Group D) or Saline (Group S) infusion during a standardized Sevoflurane anesthesia. Transient and distortion product OAEs were measured preoperatively and postoperatively (24th hour). OAE results were compared within and between groups. Results: In group D postoperative OAEs were lower than preoperative OAEs and postoperative levels of group S, especially at low frequencies (p<0.05). Conclusions: Dexmedetomidine infusion affects the micromechanical function of cochlea especially in the low-frequency region. Dexmedetomidine should be carefully used during general anesthesia to avoid its probable harmful effects on cochlear micromechanics.

• The Korean Journal of Nuclear Medicine Technology
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.62-68
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• 2014

Purpose: After I-131 therapy, SPECT/CT is useful in identifying location of thyroid remnants and metastasis of thyroid cancers. An excessive uptake of thyroid leads to a ringing artifact in the SPECT images. The aim of this study is to investigate and suggest a proper post filters to remove ringing artifact and produce better image quality. Materials and Methods: A low-cost, customized thyroid-mimicking phantom, consisting of an acrylic bottle and a hollow sphere was used for SPECT/CT Discovery (GE Healthcare, USA). It was filled with I-131 solution. The ratio of hollow sphere to background were varied as 50:1, 200:1, 1000:1 and 4000:1. Acquired images were reconstructed by OSEM (2 iterations, 10 subsets) with and without Evolution (resolution recovery correction, GE). Three different post-filters were applied; Butterworth (cut off: 0.38 to 0.58 with intervals of 0.05), Hanning (cut off: 0.8 to 1 with intervals of 0.05) and Gaussian (FWHM: 3 to 5 with intervals of 0.5) filters. Contrast, background variability, air area variability, and full width half maximum (FWHM) were compared. Results: Higher contrasts were obtained from the SPECT images with Evolution than without Evolution. In the case of images without Evolution, image distortion such as star artifact was generated. For all sphere-to-background ratio, the Butterworth filter showed better constrasts and FWHMs than other two filters, but the ringing artifact was still generated in all studies except 50:1 and it was decreased as cutoff value was increased. The ringing artifact didn't appear with Hanning and Gaussian filters at all studies, however constrats and FWHMs with Gaussian was worse than Hanning filter. For the images having ringing artifacts, the background variability and air area variability were increased. Conclusion: In this study, we suggested that it is desirable to use Hanning filter when the ringing artifact is generated and to use Butterworth filter when ringing artifact is not generated in I-131 SPECT.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.43 no.5 s.311
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• pp.79-87
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• 2006

In this study, we evaluated the performance of a companding strategy as a preprocessing for speech enhancement and noise reduction. The proposed algorithm is based on two tone suppression that is human's hearing characteristics. This algorithm enhances spectral peak of speech signal and reduces background noise, however it has tradeoff characteristics between speech distortion and noise reduction due to limited channel number and nonlinear block. Therefore, we designed two different companding structures that have relative characteristics of noise reduction and speech distortion and found suitable companding structures by difference of individual speech perception ability in noise environment. Thus we proposed speech perception enhancement of cochlear implant user in noise environment with low SNR. The performance of the proposed algorithm was evaluated through 5 normal hearing listeners using noise band simulation. Improvement of speech perception was observed for all subjects and each subject preferred the different type of companding structure.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.13B no.7 s.110
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• pp.689-698
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• 2006

Pattern recognition is the study of how machines can observe the environment, learn to distinguish patterns of interest from their background, and make sound and reasonable decisions about the categories of the patterns. Color image consists of various color patterns. And most pattern recognition methods use the information of color which has been trained and extract the feature of the color. This thesis extracts adaptively specific color feature from images with several limited colors. Because the number of the color patterns is limited, the distribution of the color in the image is similar. But, when there are some noises and distortions in the image, its distribution can be various. Therefore we cannot extract specific color regions in the standard image that is well expressed in special color patterns to extract, and special color regions of the image to test. We suggest new method to reduce the error of recognition by extracting the specific color feature adaptively for images with the low distortion, and six test images with some degree of noises and distortion. We consequently found that proposed method shouws more accurate results than those of statistical pattern recognition.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.40 no.3
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• pp.234-240
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• 2021

In this paper, the mask-based speech enhancement is improved for effective speech recognition in noise environments. In the mask-based speech enhancement, enhanced spectrum is obtained by multiplying the noisy speech spectrum by the mask. The VoiceFilter (VF) model is used as the mask estimation, and the Spectrogram Inpainting (SI) technique is used to remove residual noise of enhanced spectrum. In this paper, we propose a combined loss to further improve speech enhancement. In order to effectively remove the residual noise in the speech, the positive part of the Triplet loss is used with the component loss. For the experiment TIMIT database is re-constructed using NOISEX92 noise and background music samples with various Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) conditions. Source to Distortion Ratio (SDR), Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ), and Short-Time Objective Intelligibility (STOI) are used as the metrics of performance evaluation. When the VF was trained with the mean squared error and the SI model was trained with the combined loss, SDR, PESQ, and STOI were improved by 0.5, 0.06, and 0.002 respectively compared to the system trained only with the mean squared error.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.42 no.6
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• pp.544-551
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• 2023

Speech enhancement used to improve the perceptual quality and intelligibility of noise speech has been studied as a method using a complex-valued spectrum that can improve both magnitude and phase in a method using a magnitude spectrum. In this paper, a study was conducted on how to apply attention mechanism to complex-valued spectrum-based speech enhancement systems to further improve the intelligibility and quality of noise speech. The attention is performed based on additive attention and allows the attention weight to be calculated in consideration of the complex-valued spectrum. In addition, the global average pooling was used to consider the importance of the feature map. Complex-valued spectrum-based speech enhancement was performed based on the Deep Complex U-Net (DCUNET) model, and additive attention was conducted based on the proposed method in the Attention U-Net model. The results of the experiments on noise speech in a living room environment showed that the proposed method is improved performance over the baseline model according to evaluation metrics such as Source to Distortion Ratio (SDR), Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ), and Short Time Object Intelligence (STOI), and consistently improved performance across various background noise environments and low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) conditions. Through this, the proposed speech enhancement system demonstrated its effectiveness in improving the intelligibility and quality of noisy speech.

• Journal of Chest Surgery
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• v.47 no.2
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• pp.117-123
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• 2014

Background: Implanted venous access devices or permanent central venous access systems (PCVASs) are routinely used in oncologic patients. Complications can occur during the implantation or use of such devices. We describe such complications of the PCVAS and their management. Methods: Our retrospective study included 1,460 cases in which PCVAS was implanted in the 11 years between January 2002 and January 2013, including 810 women and 650 men with an average age of 45.2 years. We used polyurethane or silicone catheters. The site of insertion and the surgical or percutaneous procedure were selected on the basis of clinical data and disease information. The subclavian and cephalic veins were our most common sites of insertion. Results: About 1,100 cases (75%) underwent surgery by training surgeons and 360 patients by expert surgeons. Perioperative incidents occurred in 33% and 12% of these patients, respectively. Incidents (28%) included technical difficulties (n=64), a subcutaneous hematoma (n=37), pneumothoraces (n=15), and an intrapleural catheter (n=1). Complications in the short and medium term were present in 14.2% of the cases. Distortion and rupture of the catheter (n=5) were noted in the costoclavicular area (pinch-off syndrome). There were 5 cases of catheter migration into the jugular vein (n=1), superior vena cava (n=1), and heart cavities (n=3). No patient died of PCVAS insertion or complication. Conclusion: PCVAS complications should be diagnosed early and treated with probable removal of this material for preventing any life-threatening outcome associated with complicated PVCAS.

• Nutrition Research and Practice
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• v.14 no.6
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• pp.667-678
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• 2020

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES: This study aimed to improve portion size estimation aids (PSEAs) used in the nutrition survey of the Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (KNHANES) and validate the accuracy and precision of the newly developed aids. SUBJECTS/METHODS: We conducted intensive interviews with survey experts in KNHANES and consulted with experts to collect opinions about improvement of PSEAs. Based on the results of the interviews, 5 types of PSEAs (rice bowl, earthen pots, mounds, measuring spoons, and thickness sticks) were newly developed using 3-dimensional (3D) modeling or modification of color or shape. Validation tests were conducted with 96 adults 20 years old or older. For the rice bowl and earthen pots, the participants were asked to select the more similar PSEA in size after being shown the real dishes. For the mounds, measuring spoons, and thickness sticks, the participants were presented with actual plates of food and asked to estimate the given portion sizes using the given PSEAs. RESULTS: The improved 2-dimensional (2D) picture aid for the rice bowl reflecting the size distortion by angle of view using 3D modeling was perceived more closely to the actual size than the current 2D picture (P < 0.001). The change of the color of 2D pictures and 3D models, the change of shape of the measuring spoons, and the 3-dimensionalization of the 2D mounds had no significant improvement in the subjects' perception. CONCLUSIONS: The currently used 2D PSEAs need to be fully redesigned using 3D modeling to improve subjects' perception. However, change of color or shape will not be necessary. For amorphous foods, it is suggested that more evaluation be performed before reaching a final conclusion in the use of PSEAs, or alternative ways to improve accuracy of estimation need to be explored.

• Archives of Plastic Surgery
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• v.46 no.6
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• pp.535-543
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• 2019

Background A high incidence of breast animation deformity (BAD) has been reported following immediate breast reconstruction with subpectorally placed implants. The aim of this study was to assess and compare the incidence of BAD in women who underwent either subpectoral or prepectoral immediate breast reconstruction. Therefore, we developed a grading tool and tested its reproducibility in a clinical setting. Methods Video recordings of 37 women who had undergone unilateral or bilateral immediate breast reconstruction were evaluated by two consultant plastic surgeons. The degree of BAD was assessed by our grading tool, named the Nipple, Surrounding Skin, Entire Breast (NSE) grading scale, which evaluates the degree of tissue distortion in three areas of the breast. Blinded assessments were performed twice by each observer. Results Eighteen patients were reconstructed with subpectoral implant placement and 19 with prepectoral implant placement. Using the NSE grading scale, we found a significant difference in the degree of BAD between the groups, in favor of patients who underwent prepectoral immediate breast reconstruction (0.2 vs. 4, P=0.000). Inter- and intraobserver agreement was moderate (74%) to strong (88%). Conclusions The incidence and severity of BAD was significantly lower in women reconstructed with a prepectorally placed implant than in those who underwent subpectoral immediate breast reconstruction. All patients reconstructed using the subpectoral technique had some degree of BAD. The inter- and intraobserver agreements were high when using the NSE grading scale, suggesting it is an easy-to-use, reproducible scale for assessing BAD in women who undergo immediate breast reconstruction.