• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2013.08a
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• pp.278.1-278.1
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• 2013

Among the prerequisites for stable neural interfacing are the long-term stability of electrical performance of and the excellent biocompatibility of conducting materials in implantable neural electrodes. Reduced graphene oxide offers a great potential for a variety of biomedical applications including biosensors and, particularly, neural interfaces due to its superb material properties such as high electrical conductivity, decent optical transparency, facile processibility, and etc. Nonetheless, there have been few systematic studies on the graphene-based neural interfaces in terms of biocompatibility of electrode materials and long term stability in electrical characteristics. In this research, we prepared the primary culture of rat hippocampal neurons directly on reduced graphene oxide films which is chosen as a model electrode material for the neural electrode. We observed that the viability of primary neuronal culture on the present structure is minimally affected by nanoscale graphene flakes below. These results implicate that the multilayer films of reduced graphene oxides can be utilized for the next-generation neural interfaces with decent biocompatibility and outstanding electrical performance.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.175-182
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• 1994

The international standard for digital compression and coding of continuous-tone still image known as JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) standard is investigated for medical image archiving and communication. The JPEG standard has widely been accepted in the areas of electronic image communication, computer graphics, and multimedia applications, however, due to the lossy character of the JPEG compression its application to the field of medical imaging has been limited. In this paper, the JPEG standard is investigated for medical image compression with a series of head sections of magnetic resonance (MR) images (256 and 4096 graylevels, $256 {\times}256$size). Two types of Huffman codes are employed, i. e., one is optimized to the image statistics to be encoded and the other is a predetermined code, and their coding efficiencies are examined. From experiments, compression ratios of higher than 15 were obtained for the MR images without noticeable distortion. Error signal in the reconstructed images by the JPEG standard appears close to random noise. Compared to existing full-frame bit-allocation technique used for radiological image compression, the JPEG standard achieves higher compression with less Gibb's artifact. Feature of the progressive image build-up of the JPEG progressive coding may be useful in remote diognosis when data is transmitted through slow public communication channel.

• Korean Journal of Chemical Engineering
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• v.35 no.12
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• pp.2452-2463
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• 2018

Surface treatment of sol-gel bioglass is required to increase its biomedical applications. In this study, a dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma treatment in atmospheric pressure was performed on the surface of [$SiO_2-CaO-P_2O_5-B_2O_3$] sol-gel derived glass. The obtained bioglass was treated by plasma using discharge current 12 mA with an exposure period for 30 min. The type of discharge can be characterized by measuring the discharge current and applied potential waveform and the power dissipation. Apatite formation on the surface of the DBD-treated and untreated samples after soaking in simulated body fluid (SBF) at $37^{\circ}C$ is characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), X-Ray diffraction (XRD), inductively coupled plasma (ICP-OES) and scanning electron microscopy coupled with energy dispersive spectroscopy (SEM/EDS). We observed a marked increase in the amount of apatite deposited on the surface of the treated plasma samples than those of the untreated ones, indicating that DBD plasma treatment is an efficient method and capable of modifying the surface of glass beside effectively transforming it into highly bioactive materials.

• Current Optics and Photonics
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.368-372
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• 2020

We report the terahertz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) of transdermal drug delivery in human skin. The time evolution of transdermal nicotine delivery in nicotine patches was assessed by detecting the transmission coefficient of sub-picosecond THz pulses and using a semi-analytic model based on the single-layer effective medium approximation. Using commercial nicotine patches (Nicoderm CQ^®, 7 mg/24 h), THz transmission coefficients were measured to quantitatively analyze the cumulative amounts of nicotine released from the patches in the absence of their detailed specifications, including multilayer structures and optical properties at THz frequencies. The results agreed well with measurements by conventional in vitro and in vivo methods, using a diffusion cell with high-performance liquid chromatography and blood sampling respectively. Our study revealed the ability of the THz-TDS method to be an effective alternative to existing methods for noninvasive and label-free assessments of transdermal drug delivery, showing its high promise for biomedical, pharmaceutical, and cosmetic applications.

• International Journal of Industrial Entomology and Biomaterials
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• v.35 no.2
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• pp.83-88
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• 2017

Silk is appealing materials for many biomedical applications involving tissue engineering and implantable devices, because of its biocompatibility, environmental stability, controlled proteolytic biodegradability and morphologic flexibility. Silk matrix is required for the treatment of a wide wound area, but the present silk matrix is made by the second processing, and thus, the labor and the cost are high. In this work, we investigated the optimal production condition of natural silk 3D matrix using the silkworms and invented Automatic Silk Matrix Making Machine (ASMMM) for natural silk 3D matrix production. As a result, we determined that optimal production condition for making A4 paper size natural silk 3D matrix was used Rough aquarelle paper on surface at $25^{\circ}C$ and 30 silkworm larvae. These results are expected to provide basic data for the efficient production of the natural silk 3D matrix, and it is suggested that the produced natural silk 3D matrix is useful as a medical biomaterials.

• Korean Journal of Pharmacognosy
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• v.50 no.2
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• pp.112-117
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• 2019

In this study, extracts of bark from Ulmus davidiana var. japonica and its fractions were investigated the antioxidative, antibacterial and tyrosinase inhibition activity for physiological activity towards functional applications. In the measurement of DPPH radical scavenging activity, the ethyl acetate fraction showed higher radical scavenging ability than others. Moreover, in the tyrosinase inhibition assay, showed that the ethyl acetate fraction has good inhibition effects. Results of the DPPH radical scavenging and tyrosinase inhibition activity are related with the total polyphenol concentrations of ethyl acetate fraction. In antibacterial activity used to find out by utilizing the disc diffusion assay, chloroform fraction showed strong effect against Staphylococcus aureus and S. epidermidis. These results are related with the flavonoid contents of chloroform fraction. On the other hand, in the L929 cell viability measurement by MTT assay, the hexane, butanol and aqueous fraction treated at high concentration were showed cytotoxicity. But the others samples were exhibited a moderate viabilities. As a result of investigated the antioxidant and tyrosinase inhibition activity, the ethyl acetate fraction could be applicable for cosmetics related fields. And the chloroform fraction showed significant antibacterial activity against S. aureus and S. epidermidis.

• Journal of Powder Materials
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• v.25 no.6
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• pp.459-465
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• 2018

Most commercially available detonation nanodiamonds (DNDs) require further processing to qualify for use in biomedical applications, as they often contain many impurities and exhibit poor dispersibility in aqueous media. In this work, DNDs are modified to improve purity and impart a high colloidal stability to the particles. The dispersive and adsorption properties of modified DNDs are evaluated in terms of the suitability of DNDs as carriers for non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) in transdermal delivery. The study of adsorption on strongly positively and strongly negatively charged DNDs showed their high loading capacity for NSAIDs, and a pronounced relationship between the drugs and the particles' charges. Experiments on long-term desorption carried out with DND/NSAID complexes indicate that the nanoparticles exert a sustained effect on the drug release process.

• Microbiology and Biotechnology Letters
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• v.47 no.1
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• pp.69-77
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• 2019

Screening microorganisms that can produce glucan hydrolases for industrial, environmental, and biomedical applications is important. Herein, we describe a novel approach to perform glucan hydrolase screening-based on analysis of matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry (MALDI-MS) spectra-which involves degradation of the oligo- and polysaccharides. As a proof-of-concept study, glucan hydrolases that could break down glucans made of several glucose units were used to demonstrate the MALDI-MS-based enzyme assay. First, the enzyme activities of ${\alpha}$-amylase and cellulase on a mixture of glucan oligosaccharides were successfully discriminated, where changes of the MALDI-MS profiles directly reflected the glucan hydrolase activities. Next, we validated that this MALDI-MS-based enzyme assay could be applied to glucan polysaccharides (i.e., pullulan, lichenan, and schizophyllan). Finally, the bacterial glucan hydrolase activities were screened on 96-well plate-based platforms, using cell lysates or samples of secreted enzyme. Our results demonstrated that the MALDI-MS-based enzyme assay system would be useful for investigating bacterial glucoside hydrolases in a high-throughput manner.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.24 no.8
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• pp.1000-1011
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• 2021

In recent years, using Deep Learning methods to apply for medical and biomedical image analysis has seen many advancements. In clinical, using Deep Learning-based approaches for cancer image analysis is one of the key applications for cancer detection and treatment. However, the scarcity and shortage of labeling images make the task of cancer detection and analysis difficult to reach high accuracy. In 2015, the Unet model was introduced and gained much attention from researchers in the field. The success of Unet model is the ability to produce high accuracy with very few input images. Since the development of Unet, there are many variants and modifications of Unet related architecture. This paper proposes a new approach of using Unet++ with pretrained EfficientNet as backbone architecture for breast tumor cell nuclei segmentation and uses the multi-organ transfer learning approach to segment nuclei of breast tumor cells. We attempt to experiment and evaluate the performance of the network on the MonuSeg training dataset and Triple Negative Breast Cancer (TNBC) testing dataset, both are Hematoxylin and Eosin (H & E)-stained images. The results have shown that EfficientUnet++ architecture and the multi-organ transfer learning approach had outperformed other techniques and produced notable accuracy for breast tumor cell nuclei segmentation.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.20 no.7
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• pp.73-86
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• 2022

Purpose: Considering the COVID-19 pandemic and the increasing number of online food delivery applications (OFDA), this study aims to assess the distribution of the presence of Indonesian OFDA and to measure the factors that influence the spending habits of OFDA users. Research design, data and methodology: Two hundred and nine OFDA users from Jakarta's Generation Z were surveyed via a questionnaire. The data were analyzed using Structural Equation Modeling and SMART PLS 3.0. Results: OFDAs were introduced into Indonesia in the recent past with varying degrees of popularity determined by the number of downloads. Users' intention to use was not determined by the speed of the introduction of an OFDA. This study also reveals that previous experience of the service, the orientation of time and price savings had a significant effect on spending habits. A moderating role of the saving variable on time and price was not demonstrated. Conclusions: The results of the study suggest that, in COVID-19 pandemic conditions, the spending habits of Generation Z are not based on impulse, thrift, or extravagance. The pandemic shaped specific motivations in spending habits, namely prioritizing need. This study has limitations, including the small sample size and the use of internal variables.