• Korean Journal of Head & Neck Oncology
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.41-46
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• 2003

Background and Objectives: Surgical ablation of tumors in the oral cavity and the oropharynx results in a three dimensional defect because of the needs to resect the adjacent area for the surgical margin. Although a variety of techniques are available, radial forearm free flap has been known as an effective method for this defect, which offers a thin, pliable, and relatively hairless skin and a long vascular pedicle. We report the clinical results of our 54 consecutive radial forearm free flaps used for oral cavity and oropharynx cancers. Materials and Methods: We reviewed the medical records of patients who were offered intraoral reconstruction with a radial forearm free flap after ablative surgery for oral cavity and oropharyngeal cancers from August 1994 to February 2003 and analyzed surgical methods, flap survival rate, complication, and functional results. Among these, 20 cases were examined with modified barium swallow to evaluate postoperative swallowing function and other 8 cases with articulation and resonance test for speech. We examined recovery of sensation with two-point discrimination test in 15 cases who were offered sensate flaps. Results: The primary sites were as follows : mobile tongue (18), tonsil (17), floor of mouth (4), base of tongue (2), soft palate (2), retromolar trigone (3), buccal mucosa (1), oro-hypopharynx (6), and lower lip (1). The paddles of flaps were tailored in multilobed designs from oval shape to tetralobed design and in variable size according to the defects after ablation. This procedures resulted in satisfactory flap success rate (96.3%) and showed good swallowing function and social speech. Eight of 15 cases (53.3%) who had offered sensate flap showed recovery of sensation between 1 and 6 postoperative months (average 2.6 month). Conclusion: The reconstruction with radial forearm free flap might be an excellent method for the maximal functional results after ablative surgery of oral cavity and oropharyngeal cancers that results in multidimensional defect.

• Journal of the Korean Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.301-307
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• 2004

The flap considered at first for the reconstruction of large maxillary defect, especially mid-face defect, is scapular free flap, because it provides ample composite tissue which can be designed 3-dimensionally for orbital, facial and oral reconstruction. In case of maxillary defect involving hard palate, however, this flap has some limitations. First, its bulk prevents oral function and physio-anatomic reconstruction of nasal and oral cavity. Second, mobility and thickness of cutaneous paddle covering the alveolar area reduce retention of tissue-supported denture and give rise to peri-implantitis when implant is installed. Third, lateral border of scapula that is to reconstruct maxillary arch and hold implants is straight, not U-shaped maxillary arch form. To overcome these problems, new concept of step prefabrication technique was provided to a 27-year-old male patient who had been suffering from a complete hard palate and maxillary alveolar ridge defect. In the first stage, scapular osteomuscular flap was elevated, tailored to fit the maxillary defect, particulated autologous bone was placed subperiosteally to simulate U-shaped alveolar process, and then wrapped up with split thickness skin graft(STSG, 0.3mm thickness). Two months later, thus prefabricated new flap was elevated and microtransferred to the palato-maxillary defect. After 6 months, 10 implant fixtures were installed along the reconstructed maxillary alveolus, with following final prosthetic rehabilitation. The procedure was very successful and patient is enjoying normal rigid diet and speech.

• Archives of Reconstructive Microsurgery
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.8-13
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• 2011

Purpose: A palatal defect following maxillectomy can cause multiple problems like the rhinolalia, leakage of foods into the nasal cavity, and hypernasality. Use of a prosthetic is the preferred method for obturating a palate defect, but for rehabilitating palatal function, prosthetics have many shortcomings. In a small defect, local flap is a useful method, however, the size of flap which can be elevated is limited. In 12 cases of palatomaxillary defect, we used various microvascular free flaps in reconstructing the palate and obtained good functional results. Method: Between 1990 and 2004, 12 patients underwent free flap operation after head and neck cancer ablation, and were reviewed retrospectively. Among the 12 free flaps, 6 were latissimus dorsi myocutaneous flaps, 3 rectus abdominis myocutaneous flaps, and 3 radial forearm flaps. Result: All microvascular flap surgery was successful. Mean follow up time was 8 months and after the follow up time all patients reported satisfactory speech and swallowing. Wound dehiscence was observed in 4 cases, ptosis was in 1 case and fistula was in 1 case, however, rhinolalia, leakage of food, or swallowing difficultly was not reported in the 12 cases. Conclusion: We used various microvascular flaps for palatomaxillary reconstruction. For 3-dimensional flap needs, we used the latissimus dorsi myocutaneous flap to obtain enough volume for filling the defect. Two-dimensional flaps were designed with latissimus dorsi myocutaneous flap, rectus abdominis flap and radial forearm flap. For cases with palatal defect only, we used the radial forearm flap. In palatomaxillary reconstruction, we can choose various free flap techniques according to the number of skin paddles and flap volume needed.

• Journal of the Korean Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons
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• v.33 no.2
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• pp.143-151
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• 2007

One of the treatment methods for maxillary cancers or infections in maxilla is maxillectomy. Palatal defect can be resulted from this operation and it may cause functional problems with swallowing and speech, and psychological problems of patients. After maxillectomy, as rehabilitation, there can be two options. One is a prosthodontic treatment using obturator and the other is surgical reconstruction of defect with graft. As both methods have advantages and disadvantages, in determining treatment method after maxillectomy, various factors have to be considered. The purpose of this study is to compare the prosthodontic group to surgical group after maxillectomy with elapsed days prior to commencement of postoperative oral feeding, and to analyze the results of prosthodontic treatment and surgical treatment. During the period from March of 2000 to June of 2006, 74 patients were treatment by prosthodontic methods for maxillary defect. Among these patients, patients who had only velopharyngeal deficiency after surgery, whose data were incomplete, whose causes of palatal defect were not the treatment of diseases in maxilla, and who already had palatal defect due to previous surgery were excluded in this study. The patients who underwent maxillectomy for the treatment of diseases in the maxilla and were treated immediately after operation using surgical reconstruction or prosthodontic rehabilitation were included in this study. The records of 43 patients were reviewed to compare and to analyze the prosthodontic treatment and surgical reconstruction after maxillectomy. The median of days elapsed prior to commencement of postoperative oral feeding in the prosthodontic group was compared with data of surgical group. The data was analyzed using the Mann-Whitney test (${\alpha}$=.05). Days elapsed prior to postoperative oral feeding commencement in the prosthodontic group were less than those in the surgical group.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.39 no.5
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• pp.447-453
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• 2020

In this paper, we propose a system to extract effective speaker representations from a speech signal using a deep learning method. Based on the fact that speech signal contains identity unrelated information such as text content, emotion, background noise, and so on, we perform a training such that the extracted features only represent speaker-related information but do not represent speaker-unrelated information. Specifically, we propose an auto-encoder based disentanglement method that outputs both speaker-related and speaker-unrelated embeddings using effective loss functions. To further improve the reconstruction performance in the decoding process, we also introduce a discriminator popularly used in Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) structure. Since improving the decoding capability is helpful for preserving speaker information and disentanglement, it results in the improvement of speaker verification performance. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method by improving Equal Error Rate (EER) on benchmark dataset, Voxceleb1.

• Archives of Plastic Surgery
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• v.42 no.4
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• pp.453-460
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• 2015

Background Reconstruction of oropharyngeal defects after resection of oropharyngeal cancer is a significant challenge. The purpose of this study is to introduce reconstruction using a combination of a buccinator myomucosal flap and a buccal fat pad flap after cancer excision and to discuss the associated anatomy, surgical procedure, and clinical applications. Methods In our study, a combination of a buccinator myomucosal flap with a buccal fat pad flap was utilized for reconstruction after resection of oropharyngeal cancer, performed between 2013 and 2015. After oropharyngectomy, the defect with exposed vital structures was noted. A buccinator myomucosal flap was designed and elevated after an assessment of the flap pedicle. Without requiring an additional procedure, a buccal fat pad flap was easily harvested in the same field and gently pulled to obtain sufficient volume. The flaps were rotated and covered the defect. In addition, using cadaver dissections, we investigated the feasibility of transposing the flaps into the lateral oropharyngeal defect. Results The reconstruction was performed in patients with squamous cell carcinoma. The largest tumor size was $5cm{\times}2cm(length{\times}width)$. All donor sites were closed primarily. The flaps were completely epithelialized after four weeks, and the patients were followed up for at least six months. There were no flap failures or postoperative wound complications. All patients were without dietary restrictions, and no patient had problems related to mouth opening, swallowing, or speech. Conclusions A buccinator myomucosal flap with a buccal fat pad flap is a reliable and valuable option in the reconstruction of oropharyngeal defects after cancer resection for maintaining functionality.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2005.06a
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• pp.1435-1438
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• 2005

In hands-free telephone systems, the received speech signal is fed back to the microphone and constitutes the so-called echo. To cancel the effect of this time-varying echo path, it is necessary to device an adaptive filter between the receiving and the transmitting ends. For a typical FIR realization, the length of the fullband adaptive filter results in high computational complexity and low convergence rate. Consequently, subband adaptive filtering schemes have been proposed to improve the performance. In this work, we use deterministic approach to analyze the relationship between fullband and subband adaptive filtering structures. With block adaptive filtering structure as an intermediate stage, the analysis is divided into two parts. First, to avoid aliasing, it is found that the matrix of block adaptive filters is in the form of pseudocirculant, and the elements of this matrix are the polyphase components of the fullband adaptive filter. Second, to transmit the near-end voice signal faithfully, the analysis and the synthesis filter banks in the subband adaptive filtering structure must form a perfect reconstruction pair. Using polyphase representation, the relationship between the block and the subband adaptive filters is derived.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• spring
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• pp.25-28
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• 2002

Voice activity detection is important Problem in the speech recognition and communication. This paper introduces feature parameter which is reconstructed by the spectral entropy of information theory for the robust voice activity detection in the noise environment, analyzes and compares it with the energy method of voice activity detection and performance. In experiment, we confirmed that the spectral entropy is more feature parameter than the energy method for the robust voice activity detection in the various noise environment.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• autumn
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• pp.3-6
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• 2000

CELP 계열 보코더중 인터넷 폰 및 화상회의를 목적으로 개발된 G.723.1 보코더에서는 LPC를 LSP로 변환하기 위해 LPC 계수를 이용한 다항식을 구성한 다음 근을 검색하는 방법을 사용하고 있다. 근 검색시에는 256/pi의 범위 안에서 동일한 간격을 갖는 코사인 테이블을 구성하여 순차적으로 검색하게 된다. LSF의 근들은 포만트가 존재하는 대역에서 근들이 나타나게 되므로 유성음의 경우 저주파수 대역에서 무성음의 경우 고주파수 대역에서 많이 분포하게 된다. 하지만 G.723.1에서 사용하는 코사인 테이블은 음성신호의 특성을 고려하지 않고 균등한 간격을 갖는 값들을 사용함으로 음질을 저해할 수 있는 요소를 갖고 있다. 따라서 본 논문에서는 음성의 특성을 고려한 코사인 테이블을 재구성함으로써 음질을 향상시킬 수 있었으며 주관적 음질평가인 MOS 시험결과 평균 1.8 정도의 음질향상을 가져올 수 있었다

• Archives of Craniofacial Surgery
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.53-57
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• 2010

Purpose: The radial forearm fasciocutaneous free flap is currently considered as the ideal free flap for reconstruction of mucosal and soft tissue defects of the palate. But the availability of stably attached oral and nasal mucosal lining is needed. In addition to this, for better operation field, operating convenience and esthetics, we planned a prelaminated radial forearm free flap. Methods: A 64-year-old male patient was admitted due to a $4{\times}4.5cm$ full through defect in the middle of the hard palate caused by peripheral T cell lymphoma with actinomycosis. In the first stage, the radial forearm flap was elevated, tailored to fit the hard palate defect, and then it positioned up-side down with split thickness skin graft. Two weeks later, the prelaminated radial forearm free flap was re-elevated and transferred to the palatal defect. One side covered with grafted skin was used to line the nasal cavity, and the other side (the cutaneous portion of the radial forearm flap) was used to line the oral cavity. Results: The prelamination procedure was relatively easy and useful. The skin graft was well taken to the flap. After 2nd stage operation, the flap survived uneventfully. There was no prolapse of the inset flap into the oral cavity and the cutaneous portion of the flap was mucosalized. The procedure was very successful and the patient can enjoy normal rigid diet and speech. Conclusion: The use of prelaminated radial forearm free flap for hard palate reconstruction is an excellent method to restore oral function. Based upon the result of this case, microvascular free flap transfer with prelaminated procedure is a valid alternative to the prosthetic obturator for palatal defect that provides an improved quality of life. It should be considered as an integral component of head and neck cancer therapy and rehabilitation.