• BMB Reports
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• v.55 no.11
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• pp.565-570
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• 2022

Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) is a progressive and devastating disease whose pathogenesis is associated with a phenotypic switch of pulmonary arterial vascular smooth muscle cells (PASMCs). Bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) signaling and potassium two pore domain channel subfamily K member 3 (KCNK3) play crucial roles in PAH pathogenesis. However, the relationship between BMP signaling and KCNK3 expression in the PASMC phenotypic switching process has not been studied. In this study, we explored the effect of BMPs on KCNK3 expression and the role of KCNK3 in the BMP-mediated PASMC phenotypic switch. Expression levels of BMP receptor 2 (BMPR2) and KCNK3 were downregulated in PASMCs of rats with PAH compared to those in normal controls, implying a possible association between BMP/BMPR2 signaling and KCNK3 expression in the pulmonary vasculature. Treatment with BMP2, BMP4, and BMP7 significantly increased KCNK3 expression in primary human PASMCs (HPASMCs). BMPR2 knockdown and treatment with Smad1/5 signaling inhibitor substantially abrogated the BMP-induced increase in KCNK3 expression, suggesting that KCNK3 expression in HPASMCs is regulated by the canonical BMP-BMPR2-Smad1/5 signaling pathway. Furthermore, KCNK3 knockdown and treatment with a KCNK3 channel blocker completely blocked BMP-mediated anti-proliferation and expression of contractile marker genes in HPAMSCs, suggesting that the expression and functional activity of KCNK3 are required for BMP-mediated acquisition of the quiescent PASMC phenotype. Overall, our findings show a crosstalk between BMP signaling and KCNK3 in regulating the PASMC phenotype, wherein BMPs upregulate KCNK3 expression and KCNK3 then mediates BMP-induced phenotypic switching of PASMCs. Our results indicate that the dysfunction and/or downregulation of BMPR2 and KCNK3 observed in PAH work together to induce aberrant changes in the PASMC phenotype, providing insights into the complex molecular pathogenesis of PAH.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.1-16
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• 2022

Despite recent breakthroughs in deep learning and computer vision fields, the pixel-wise identification of tiny objects in high-resolution images with complex disturbances remains challenging. This study proposes a modified U-net for tiny crack segmentation in real-world steel-box-girder bridges. The modified U-net adopts the common U-net framework and a novel Self-Attention-Self-Adaption (SASA) neuron as the fundamental computing element. The Self-Attention module applies softmax and gate operations to obtain the attention vector. It enables the neuron to focus on the most significant receptive fields when processing large-scale feature maps. The Self-Adaption module consists of a multiplayer perceptron subnet and achieves deeper feature extraction inside a single neuron. For data augmentation, a grid-based crack random elastic deformation (CRED) algorithm is designed to enrich the diversities and irregular shapes of distributed cracks. Grid-based uniform control nodes are first set on both input images and binary labels, random offsets are then employed on these control nodes, and bilinear interpolation is performed for the rest pixels. The proposed SASA neuron and CRED algorithm are simultaneously deployed to train the modified U-net. 200 raw images with a high resolution of 4928 × 3264 are collected, 160 for training and the rest 40 for the test. 512 × 512 patches are generated from the original images by a sliding window with an overlap of 256 as inputs. Results show that the average IoU between the recognized and ground-truth cracks reaches 0.409, which is 29.8% higher than the regular U-net. A five-fold cross-validation study is performed to verify that the proposed method is robust to different training and test images. Ablation experiments further demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SASA neuron and CRED algorithm. Promotions of the average IoU individually utilizing the SASA and CRED module add up to the final promotion of the full model, indicating that the SASA and CRED modules contribute to the different stages of model and data in the training process.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.41-63
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• 2023

As the online e-commerce market growing, the need for a recommender system that can provide suitable products or services to customer is emerging. Recently, many studies using the sentiment score of online review have been proposed to improve the limitations of study on recommender systems that utilize only quantitative information. However, this methodology has limitation in extracting specific preference information related to customer within online reviews, making it difficult to improve recommendation performance. To address the limitation of previous studies, this study proposes a novel recommendation methodology that applies deep learning technique and uses various linguistic factors within online reviews to elaborately learn customer preferences. First, the interaction was learned nonlinearly using deep learning technique for the purpose to extract complex interactions between customer and product. And to effectively utilize online review, cognitive contents, affective contents, and linguistic style matching that have an important influence on customer's purchasing decisions among linguistic factors were used. To verify the proposed methodology, an experiment was conducted using online review data in Amazon.com, and the experimental results confirmed the superiority of the proposed model. This study contributed to the theoretical and methodological aspects of recommender system study by proposing a methodology that effectively utilizes characteristics of customer's preferences in online reviews.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.48 no.2
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• pp.207-233
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• 2023

Steel-concrete composite box girder bridges are widely used in the construction of highway and railway bridges both domestically and abroad due to their advantages of being light weight and having a large spanning ability and very large torsional rigidity. Composite box girder bridges exhibit the effects of shear lag, restrained torsion, distortion and interface bidirectional slip under various loads during operation. As one of the most commonly used calculation tools in bridge engineering analysis, one-dimensional models offer the advantages of high calculation efficiency and strong stability. Currently, research on the one-dimensional model of composite beams mainly focuses on simulating interface longitudinal slip and the shear lag effect. There are relatively few studies on the one-dimensional model which can consider the effects of restrained torsion, distortion and interface transverse slip. Additionally, there are few studies on vehicle-bridge integrated systems where a one-dimensional model is used as a tool that only considers the calculations of natural frequency, mode and moving load conditions to study the dynamic response of composite beams. Some scholars have established a dynamic analysis model of a coupled composite beam bridge-train system, but where the composite beam is only simulated using a Euler beam or Timoshenko beam. As a result, it is impossible to comprehensively consider multiple complex force effects, such as shear lag, restrained torsion, distortion and interface bidirectional slip of composite beams. In this paper, a 27 DOF vehicle rigid body model is used to simulate train operation. A two-node 26 DOF finite beam element with composed box beams considering the effects of shear lag, restrained torsion, distortion and interface bidirectional slip is proposed. The dynamic analysis model of the coupled composite box girder bridge-train system is constructed based on the wheel-rail contact relationship of vertical close-fitting and lateral linear creeping slip. Furthermore, the accuracy of the dynamic analysis model is verified via the measured dynamic response data of a practical composite box girder bridge. Finally, the dynamic analysis model is applied in order to study the influence of various mechanical effects on the dynamic performance of the vehicle-bridge system.

• Animal Bioscience
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• v.35 no.10
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• pp.1461-1478
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• 2022

The maintenance of poultry gut health is complex depending on the intricate balance among diet, the commensal microbiota, and the mucosa, including the gut epithelium and the superimposing mucus layer. Changes in microflora composition and abundance can confer beneficial or detrimental effects on fowl. Antibiotics have devastating impacts on altering the landscape of gut microbiota, which further leads to antibiotic resistance or spread the pathogenic populations. By eliciting the landscape of gut microbiota, strategies should be made to break down the regulatory signals of pathogenic bacteria. The optional strategy of conferring dietary fibers (DFs) can be used to counterbalance the gut microbiota. DFs are the non-starch carbohydrates indigestible by host endogenous enzymes but can be fermented by symbiotic microbiota to produce short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs). This is one of the primary modes through which the gut microbiota interacts and communicate with the host. The majority of SCFAs are produced in the large intestine (particularly in the caecum), where they are taken up by the enterocytes or transported through portal vein circulation into the bloodstream. Recent shreds of evidence have elucidated that SCFAs affect the gut and modulate the tissues and organs either by activating G-protein-coupled receptors or affecting epigenetic modifications in the genome through inducing histone acetylase activities and inhibiting histone deacetylases. Thus, in this way, SCFAs vastly influence poultry health by promoting energy regulation, mucosal integrity, immune homeostasis, and immune maturation. In this review article, we will focus on DFs, which directly interact with gut microbes and lead to the production of SCFAs. Further, we will discuss the current molecular mechanisms of how SCFAs are generated, transported, and modulated the pro-and anti-inflammatory immune responses against pathogens and host physiology and gut health.

• Molecules and Cells
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• v.26 no.5
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• pp.443-453
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• 2008

The Bric-a-brac, Tramtrack, Broad-complex (BTB) domain is a protein-protein interaction domain that is found in many zinc finger transcription factors. BTB containing proteins play important roles in a variety of cellular functions including regulation of transcription, regulation of the cytoskeleton, protein ubiquitination, angiogenesis, and apoptosis. Here, we report the cloning and characterization of a novel human gene, KLHL31, from a human embryonic heart cDNA library. The cDNA of KLHL31 is 5743 bp long, encoding a protein product of 634 amino acids containing a BTB domain. The protein is highly conserved across different species. Western blot analysis indicates that the KLHL31 protein is abundantly expressed in both embryonic skeletal and heart tissue. In COS-7 cells, KLHL31 proteins are localized to both the nucleus and the cytoplasm. In primary cultures of nascent mouse cardiomyocytes, the majority of endogenous KLHL31 proteins are localized to the cytoplasm. KLHL31 acts as a transcription repressor when fused to GAL4 DNA-binding domain and deletion analysis indicates that the BTB domain is the main region responsible for this repression. Overexpression of KLHL31 in COS-7 cells inhibits the transcriptional activities of both the TPA-response element (TRE) and serum response element (SRE). KLHL31 also significantly reduces JNK activation leading to decreased phosphorylation and protein levels of the JNK target c-Jun in both COS-7 and Hela cells. These results suggest that KLHL31 protein may act as a new transcriptional repressor in MAPK/JNK signaling pathway to regulate cellular functions.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.43-61
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• 2019

Development of technologies in artificial intelligence has been rapidly increasing with the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and researches related to AI have been actively conducted in a variety of fields such as autonomous vehicles, natural language processing, and robotics. These researches have been focused on solving cognitive problems such as learning and problem solving related to human intelligence from the 1950s. The field of artificial intelligence has achieved more technological advance than ever, due to recent interest in technology and research on various algorithms. The knowledge-based system is a sub-domain of artificial intelligence, and it aims to enable artificial intelligence agents to make decisions by using machine-readable and processible knowledge constructed from complex and informal human knowledge and rules in various fields. A knowledge base is used to optimize information collection, organization, and retrieval, and recently it is used with statistical artificial intelligence such as machine learning. Recently, the purpose of the knowledge base is to express, publish, and share knowledge on the web by describing and connecting web resources such as pages and data. These knowledge bases are used for intelligent processing in various fields of artificial intelligence such as question answering system of the smart speaker. However, building a useful knowledge base is a time-consuming task and still requires a lot of effort of the experts. In recent years, many kinds of research and technologies of knowledge based artificial intelligence use DBpedia that is one of the biggest knowledge base aiming to extract structured content from the various information of Wikipedia. DBpedia contains various information extracted from Wikipedia such as a title, categories, and links, but the most useful knowledge is from infobox of Wikipedia that presents a summary of some unifying aspect created by users. These knowledge are created by the mapping rule between infobox structures and DBpedia ontology schema defined in DBpedia Extraction Framework. In this way, DBpedia can expect high reliability in terms of accuracy of knowledge by using the method of generating knowledge from semi-structured infobox data created by users. However, since only about 50% of all wiki pages contain infobox in Korean Wikipedia, DBpedia has limitations in term of knowledge scalability. This paper proposes a method to extract knowledge from text documents according to the ontology schema using machine learning. In order to demonstrate the appropriateness of this method, we explain a knowledge extraction model according to the DBpedia ontology schema by learning Wikipedia infoboxes. Our knowledge extraction model consists of three steps, document classification as ontology classes, proper sentence classification to extract triples, and value selection and transformation into RDF triple structure. The structure of Wikipedia infobox are defined as infobox templates that provide standardized information across related articles, and DBpedia ontology schema can be mapped these infobox templates. Based on these mapping relations, we classify the input document according to infobox categories which means ontology classes. After determining the classification of the input document, we classify the appropriate sentence according to attributes belonging to the classification. Finally, we extract knowledge from sentences that are classified as appropriate, and we convert knowledge into a form of triples. In order to train models, we generated training data set from Wikipedia dump using a method to add BIO tags to sentences, so we trained about 200 classes and about 2,500 relations for extracting knowledge. Furthermore, we evaluated comparative experiments of CRF and Bi-LSTM-CRF for the knowledge extraction process. Through this proposed process, it is possible to utilize structured knowledge by extracting knowledge according to the ontology schema from text documents. In addition, this methodology can significantly reduce the effort of the experts to construct instances according to the ontology schema.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.43 no.1
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• pp.151-164
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• 2022

According to the records of historical and instrumental earthquakes, the southeastern part of the Korean Peninsula is considered the highest seismic activity area. Owing to recent reports of numerous Quaternary faults along the Yangsan and Ulsan fault zones, paleoseismological studies are being actively conducted in these areas. The study area is located in the central part of the Ulsan fault zone, where the largest number of active faults have been reported. Based on lineament and geomorphic analysis using LiDAR images and aerial photographs, fault-related landforms showing topographic relief were observed and a trench survey was conducted. The trench length 20 m, width 5 m, depth 5 m is located approximately 300 m away to the northeast from the previously reported Malbang fault. From the trench section, we interpreted the geometric and kinematic characteristics of the fault based on the deformed features of the Quaternary sedimentary layers. The attitude of the reverse fault, N26°W/33°NE, is similar to those of the reported faults distributed along the Ulsan fault zone. Although a single apparent displacement of approximately 40 cm has been observed, the true displacement could not be calculated due to the absence of the slickenline on the fault plane. Based on the geochronological results of the cryogenic structure proposed in a previous study, the most recent faulting event has been estimated as being earlier than the late Wurm glaciation. We interpreted the thrust fault system of the study area as an imbrication structure based on the previous studies and the fault geometry obtained in this additional trench. Although several previous investigations including many trench surveys have been conducted, they found limited success in obtaining the information on fault parameters, which could be due to complex characteristics of the reverse fault system. Additional paleoseismic studies will contribute to solving the mentioned problems and the comprehensive fault evolution.

• The Journal of the Petrological Society of Korea
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.15-26
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• 1998

The Dabie-Sulu ultra-high pressure metamorphic (UHPM) zone is commonly suggested to be a collisional belt between the Sino-Korea craton (North China craton) and Yangtze craton (Zhai and Cong, 1996). Two important questions in formulating the tectonic evolution of the northeast Asia are : (1) the boundary between the UHPM zone and the Sino-Korea craton in the Shandong peninsula and (2) the extension of this Chinese UHPM zone into the Korean peninsula. There have been different opinions on the boundary between UHPM zone and the Sino-Korea craton in the Shandong peninsula. For example, the boundary has been suggested to be the Tan-Lu fault (Bai et al., 1993; Wang and Cong, 1996), or Wulian-Rongcheng fault (Cao et al., 1990). Our recent study finds out new evidences, indicating that the possible boundary is the Kunyushan granitoid complex zone, which occurs along the Wulian-Muping fault. Our new evidences are : (1) the basic rocks west to the Kunyushan granitoid zone are high-pressure granulites rather than eclogites (Zhai, 1996) with their Sm-Nd isotopic ages of 1750 Ma and 2788 Ma, representing their retrograde metamorphic and petrogenetic ages, respectively (Li et al., 1997b); (2) the orthogneisses west to the Kunyushan granitoid zone yield 2600-2900 Ma zircon ages and 1600-2020 Ma Rb-Sr and chemical U-Th-total Pb ages, with no younger data (Enami et al., 1993; Ishizaka et al., 1994), having a typical characteristic for the early Precambrian rocks in the Sino-Korea craton; (3) the orthogneisses east to the Kunyushan granitoid zone have 110-320 Ma isotopic ages with a peak value of 180-230 Ma, showing a typical characteristic of metamorphic rocks in the UHPM zone; (4) the Kunyushan granitoid zone consists of numerous granitic bodies, stocks and veins, which have 1900-2000 Ma, 610-710 Ma and 124-180 Ma istotopic ages indicating a long and complicated evolution history of this granitoid zone. There are many lenses and enclosures of metamorphic rocks from the Sino-Korea craton and Sulu UHPM belt in the Kunyushan granitoid zone. Zhai et al. (1998) have defined the Kunyushan granitoid zone as the Jiaodong Boundary complex zone. Some geologists suggested that the UHPM zone extend eastward to the Korea peninsula (Yin and Nie, 1993; Wang and Cong, 1996) and possibly to the Imjingang belt (Chang, 1994; Ree et al., 1996). Unfortunately, there has not been a conclusive evidence indicating that UHPM rocks occur in the Korea peninsula. In this regard, it becomes more important to compare metamorphic rocks in the Shandong peninsula with those in northern and southern Korea peninsula.

• Journal of Chest Surgery
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• v.38 no.8 s.253
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• pp.551-556
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• 2005

Background: Complete arterial off-pump coronary artery bypass grafting (OPCAB) by sequential anastomoses with one or two arterial grafts provides favorable outcomes. However, problems of insufficient graft length, hypopefusion, kinking of graft, and unfavorable course of graft may be encountered. To solve these problems, we have used different technique with multiple arterial Y composite graft to allow end-to-side rather than sequential anastomoses and evaluated the results of this method. Material and Method: Between February 2003 and October 2004, If patients underwent total arterial OPCAB using multiple arterial V composite grafts with left internal mammary artery (LIMA), radial artery (RA), and right internal mammary artery (RIMA). We divided RA into multiple segments by number of distal target site after measuring of individual proper length and constructed arterial composite graft. One of segments was sutured end-to-side to LIMA and other segment was sutured end-to-side to the previously constructed radial graft. Postoperative graft patency was evaluated in 6f patients by multi-slice computed tomegraphy. Result: An average of $2.5\pm0.6$ arteries and $3.7pm0.7$ distal anastomoses per patient were done. There was no perioperative myocardial infarction, clinical hypoperfusion syndromes, and operative mortality. Postoperative mean CK-MB level was $17.4pm29.7\;IU/L.$Overall graft patency was $99.1\%\;(214/216)(LIMA:\;100\%,\;RA:\;98.4\%,\;RIMA:\;100\%).$ Conclusion: This technique allows total arterial OPCAB without technical problems and provides excellent early clinical results and graft patency. We believe that this technique is more convenient in the obtuse marginal area compared to sequential technique, and helpful in patients who require complex arterial grafting.