• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.16 no.17
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• pp.7567-7573
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• 2015

Background: Catastrophic effects of mustard gas as a chemical warfare agent have always been a major problem for those exposed to this agent. In this meta-analysis it was tried to evaluate carcinogenesis, ocular, cutaneous and respiratory complications of mustard gas exposure among Iranians who had been exposed to this agent during the Iran-Iraq war. Materials and Methods: In this meta-analysis, the required data were collected using keywords "mustard gas", "sulfur mustard", "cancer", "neoplasm", "respiratory complications", "ocular complications", "lung disease", "chronic complication", "eye", "skin", "cutaneous complication", "carcinogenesis" and their combination with keywords "Iran", "Iranian", "prevalence", "mortality" and their Farsi equivalent terms from the databases of SID, Iranmedex, Magiran, Pubmed, Science Direct, Google Search engine, Gray Literature and Reference of References. To determine the prevalence of each complication and perform meta-analysis, CMA: 2 (Comprehensive Meta-Analysis) software with a randomized model was used. Results: Of the 542 articles found, 7 national articles, consistent with the aims of this study were selected. Meta-analysis of seven papers revealed that cancer risk, especially cancer of the respiratory system was elevated, so that the relative risk (RR) of cancer role of mustard gas was inconsistent from 2/1 to 4 in this survey. Also prevalence of delayed skin disorders due to sulfur mustard was 94.6%, pulmonary complications 94.5% and ocular complications 89.9%. The incidence of various cancers in victims exposed to mustard gas was 1.7% worldwide where the rate was 2.2% in Iranian victims of the Iraq-Iran war. Conclusions: Based on present study the prevalence of delayed mustard gas related cutaneous, pulmonary and ocular complications is above 90% and risk of carcinogenesis is higher in comparison to worldwide statistics. This may suggest need for long-term and persistent follow-up and rehabilitation procedures for populations exposed to this agent.

• Journal of Korea Spatial Information System Society
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.39-50
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• 2006

Rapid growth of the domestic economy caused a lot of the demand of land information. The land information system has to keep the records of the various data about land that includes its owner and usages. Also the system must present adequate results that have been accumulated upon a user's request. Since Korean Government enforces 'Law of National Land Usage and Management', the land in rural area was also tightly regulated as much as that in the urban area. In fact, when people wants to develop their land, then they realize that their land has many restrictions and regulations to use. Sometimes, they find many regulations and restrictions even in a parcel. Thus, many people quite often want to know all the laws, rules, regulations, and restrictions etc., whatever applicable on the land they are interested in. to use. The purpose of this paper is to show a legal service system that precisely presents all the related laws, regulations, and restrictions. for a piece of the land. It summarizes the search results on users' requests. It uses a knowledge-based expert system to figure out the users requests. In this paper, we designed the system architecture of the software, and implemented its prototype. The results on this system show more concise and user friendlier than those of the existing systems.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.15 no.20
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• pp.8765-8774
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• 2014

This study aimed at summarizing epidemiological research findings on associations between tobacco, alcohol and tea consumption and risk of gastric cancer (GC) in the Chinese population. The review searched PubMed, Embase, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) and China Biology Medicine (CBM) databases and reference lists of review papers for all studies published in English or Chinese languages. Information extracted, via two independent researchers, from retrieved articles included first author, year of publication, study design, sample size, source of controls and adjusted odds ratio (OR) or relative risk (RR) with the corresponding 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for each category. Statistical analyses used software STATA version 12.0. The systematic search found 89 articles containing 25,821 GC cases and 135,298 non-cases. The overall random effects in terms of pooled OR and 95%CI for tobacco, alcohol and tea consumption were 1.62 (95%CI: 1.50-1.74), 1.57 (95%CI: 1.41-1.76) and 0.67 (95%CI: 0.59-0.76) respectively; while the heterogeneity among included studies ranged from 80.1% to 87.5%. The majority of subgroup analyses revealed consistent results with the overall analyses. All three behavioral factors showed statistically significant dose-dependent effects on GC (P<0.05). The study revealed that tobacco smoking and alcohol drinking were associated with over 1/2 added risk of GC, while tea drinking conferred about 1/3 lower risk of GC in the Chinese population. However, these results should be interpreted with caution given the fact that most of the included studies were based on a retrospective design and heterogeneity among studies was relatively high.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.15 no.8
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• pp.3403-3410
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• 2014

Context: Interest exits in whether TNF-alpha antagonists increase the risk of breast cancer and total malignancies in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Objectives: To analyze the risk of malignancies, especially breast cancer, in patients with RA enrolled in randomized control trials (RCTs). Methods: A systematic literature search for RCTs from 1 January 1998 to 1 July 2013 from online databases, such as PubMed, WILEY, EMBASE, ISI web of knowledge and Cochrane Library was conducted. Studies included RCTs that compared the safety of at least one dose of the five TNF-${\alpha}$ antagonists with placebo or methotrexate (MTX) (or TNF-${\alpha}$ antagonists plus MTX vs placebo plus MTX) in RA patients for more than 24 weeks and imported all the references into document management software EndNote${\times}6$. Two independent reviewers selected studies and extracted the data about study design, patients' characteristics and the type, number of all malignancies. Results: 28 RCTs from 34 records with 11,741 patients were analyzed. Of the total, 97 developed at least one malignancy during the double-blind trials, and breast cancer was observed in 17 patients (17.5% of total malignancies). However, there was no statistically significant increased risk observed in either the per protocol (PP) model (OR 0.65, 95%CI [0.22, 1.93]) or the modified intention to treat (mITT) model (OR 0.75, 95%CI [0.25, 2.21]). There were also no significant trend for increased risk of total malignancies on anti-TNF-${\alpha}$ therapy administered at approved doses in either model (OR, 1.06, 95%CI [0.64, 1.75], and OR, 1.30, 95%CI [0.80, 2.14], respectively). As to the two models, modified intention to treat model analysis led to higher estimation than per protocol model analysis. Conclusions: This study did not find a significantly increased risk of breast cancer and total malignancies in adults RA patients treated with TNF-${\alpha}$ antagonists at approved doses. However, it cannot be ignored that more patients developed malignancies with TNF-${\alpha}$ antagonists therapy compared with patients with placebo or MTX, in spite of the lack of statistical significance, so that more strict clinical trials and long-term follow-up are needed, and both mITT and PP analyses should be used in such safety analyses.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.14 no.5
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• pp.3067-3074
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• 2013

Background: Faced with highly prevalent and recalcitrant cancer-related fatigue (CRF), together with the absence of any official guidelines on management, numerous groups have been striving to seek and test alternative therapies including acupuncture and moxibustion. However, different patients have various feedbacks, and the many clinical trials have given rise to varied conclusions. In terms of the therapeutic effect of acupuncture and moxibustion, there exist vast inconsistencies. Objective: The aim of the study was to evaluate the auxiliary effectiveness of acupuncture and moxibustion in the treatment of CRF, and to provide more reliable evidence to guide clinical practice. Methods: Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) published before December 2012 were all aggregated, focusing on evaluation of acupuncture or moxibustion for CRF. The quality of the included studies was assessed basing on Cochrane handbook 5.1.0, and the available data were analyzed with RevMan software (version 5.2.0). Descriptive techniques were performed when no available data could be used. Results: A total of 7 studies involving 804 participants were eligible. With real acupuncture versus sham acupuncture, subjects receiving true acupuncture benefited more in the reduction of fatigue. With real acupuncture versus acupressure or sham acupressure, fatigue level appeared 36% improved in the acupuncture group, but 19% in the acupressure group and only 0.6% with sham acupressure. When real acupuncture plus enhanced routine care was compared with enhanced routine care, the combination group improved mean scores for general fatigue, together with physical and mental fatigue. With real acupuncture versus sham acupuncture or wait list controls, the real acupuncture group displayed significant advantages over the wait list controls at 2 weeks for fatigue improvement and better well-being effects at 6 weeks. When moxibustion plus routine care was compared with routine care alone, the meta-analyses demonstrated the combination had a relatively significant benefit in improving severe fatigue and QLQ-C30. Conclusion: Up to the search date, there exist few high quality RCTs to evaluate the effect of acupuncture and moxibustion, especially moxibustion in English. Yet acupuncture and moxibustion still appeared to be efficacious auxiliary therapeutic methods for CRF, in spite of several inherent defects of the included studies. Much more high-quality studies are urgently needed.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.17 no.7
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• pp.3117-3122
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• 2016

Background: Health-care research is a neglected discipline in Pakistan and research related to esophageal cancer (ranks 9th in Pakistani males and 5th in females) is no exception in this regard. Particularly, there are no data available to delineate the overall status of esophageal cancer epidemiological studies in Pakistan. This study describes the first ever effort to make a systematic quantification, in an attempt to provide a road-map to all stakeholders for designing appropriate epidemiological, diagnostic and therapeutic strategies. Materials and Methods: International (PubMed, ISI Web of Knowledge) and local (PakMedinet) scientific databases as well as Google search engine were searched using specified keywords to extract relevant publication. Well-defined inclusion criteria were implemented to select publications for final analyses. All data were recorded by at least 3 authors and consensus data were entered into and analyzed for descriptive statistics (such as frequencies, percentages and annual growth rates) using Microsoft Excel and SPSS software. Results: A total of 79 publications fulfilled the inclusion criteria including 20 publications for which full texts were not available. Of the 79 publications, 59 (74.6%) were original/research publications, 5 (6.3%) were case reports, 4 (5.1%) were research communications, 2 (2.5%) were review articles, 1 was (1.2%) correspondence and 8 (10.1%) were undefined categories. Only 13 (<20%) cities of Pakistan contributed towards the 79 publications. On average, only 1.9 relevant publications/year were published from 1976 (year of first publication) to the present. Alarmingly, a decline in the annual growth at -4.1% was recorded in the last six years. Conclusions: Esophageal cancer research is largely unfathomed in Pakistan. Urgent/dramatic steps are required by all concerned to address this common (and under reported) cancer of Pakistan.

• Journal of Korean Library and Information Science Society
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.423-446
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• 2003

Library and information science professionals have to grasp user's needs and make the best decisions when designing, acquiring, and managing library information systems. However, it is not easy for them to make the decision owing to the lack of an understanding of the characteristics of a specific user group in computer-based information systems in libraries. The aim of this study was to provide information on the characteristics and abilities of specific user groups such as male & female student groups, undergraduate & graduate ones, Sciences and Humanities majored ones etc. The actual OPAC systems were searched by specific student user groups in selected academic libraries in both Republic of Korea and the States for the purpose(Author, Title, and Subject search). Ouestionnaire was prepared and administered to Korean college students in the city of Taegu, Korea and adjacent area. Two hundred and seven usable questionnaires were obtained and analyzed. These were analyzed using descriptive, inferential statistics, and SPSS software. The major findings by data analysis of this study were described in chapters 4 and 5 of this paper in detail. Also, conclusions were drawn from the findings in this paper, and recommendations were proposed when designing, adopting, or managing a new system.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.26 no.10
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• pp.1219-1229
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• 1999

일반적으로 AND, OR, NOT과 같은 연산자를 사용하는 불리언 질의는 사용자의 검색의도를 정확하게 표현할 수 있기 때문에 검색 전문가들은 불리언 질의를 사용하여 높은 검색성능을 얻는다고 알려져 있지만, 일반 사용자는 자신이 원하는 정보를 불리언 형태로 표현하는데 익숙하지 않다. 본 논문에서는 검색성능의 향상과 사용자 편의성을 동시에 만족하기 위하여 사용자의 자연어 질의를 확장 불리언 질의로 자동 변환하는 방법론을 제안한다. 먼저 자연어 질의를 범주문법에 기반한 구문분석을 수행하여 구문트리를 생성하고 연산자 및 키워드 정보를 추출하여 구문트리를 간략화한다. 다음으로 간략화된 구문트리로부터 명사구를 합성하고 키워드들에 대한 가중치를 부여한 후 불리언 질의를 생성하여 검색을 수행한다. 또한 구문분석의 오류로 인한 검색성능 저하를 최소화하기 위하여 상위 N개 구문트리에 대해 각각 불리언 질의를 생성하여 검색하는 N-BEST average 방법을 제안하였다. 정보검색 실험용 데이타 모음인 KTSET2.0으로 실험한 결과 제안된 방법은 수동으로 추출한 불리언 질의보다 8% 더 우수한 성능을 보였고, 기존의 벡터공간 모델에 기반한 자연어질의 시스템에 비해 23% 성능향상을 보였다. Abstract There have been a considerable evidence that trained users can achieve a good search effectiveness through a boolean query because a structural boolean query containing operators such as AND, OR, and NOT can make a more accurate representation of user's information need. However, it is not easy for ordinary users to construct a boolean query using appropriate boolean operators. In this paper, we propose a boolean query formulation method that automatically transforms a user's natural language query into a extended boolean query for both effectiveness and user convenience. First, a user's natural language query is syntactically analyzed using KCCG(Korean Combinatory Categorial Grammar) parser and resulting syntactic trees are structurally simplified using a tree-simplifying mechanism in order to catch the logical relationships between keywords. Next, in a simplified tree, plausible noun phrases are identified and added into the same tree as new additional keywords. Finally, a simplified syntactic tree is automatically converted into a boolean query using some mapping rules and linguistic heuristics. We also propose an N-BEST average method that uses top N syntactic trees to compensate for bad effects of single incorrect top syntactic tree. In experiments using KTSET2.0, we showed that a proposed method outperformed a traditional vector space model by 23%, and surprisingly manually constructed boolean queries by 8%.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.33 no.7
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• pp.370-379
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• 2006

Computational grid provides the environment which integrates v 따 ious computing resources. Grid environment is more complex and various than traditional computing environment, and consists of various resources where various software packages are installed in different platforms. For more efficient usage of computational grid, therefore, some kind of integration is required to manage grid resources more effectively. In this paper, a global scheduler is suggested, which integrates grid resources at meta level with applying various scheduling policies. The global scheduler consists of a mechanical part and three policies. The mechanical part mainly search user queues and resource queues to select appropriate job and computing resource. An algorithm for the mechanical part is defined and optimized. Three policies are user selecting policy, resource selecting policy, and executing policy. These can be defined newly and replaced with new one freely while operation of computational grid is temporarily holding. User selecting policy, for example, can be defined to select a certain user with higher priority than other users, resource selecting policy is for selecting the computing resource which is matched well with user's requirements, and executing policy is to overcome communication overheads on grid middleware. Finally, various algorithms for user selecting policy are defined only in terms of user fairness, and their performances are compared.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.211-219
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• 2012

This study was performed to search for correlation between activity limitation level and participation restriction of children with cerebral palsy by investigating the activity limitation level through the use of the GMFCS E&R and the MACS and by figuring out participation restriction level through questionnaire survey. This study was performed, from May 1, 2010 to August 31, 2010, on 152 children with cerebral palsy ranging from 4 to 12 years, who are receiving rehabilitation therapy in the hospitals and community clinics in Busan and Gyeongnam province. The levels of activity limitation were assessed by using GMFCS E&R and MACS, and a questionnaire survey was conducted for participation restriction of the participating children. Spearman rank correlation was used for correlation analysis with the statistical software, SPSS 12.0. Majority of the children scored level 5 in both GMFCS E&R and MACS which is high frequency of activity limitation levels. Children in these levels also showed severe or complete participation restriction for mobility, education, and social relations. The analysis showed a significantly positive correlation between activity limitation level and participation restriction. Therefore this study may be useful in assessing the functional movement component of participation in children with cerebral palsy and developing the intervention plan for participation.