• Archives of Plastic Surgery
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• v.38 no.6
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• pp.747-754
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• 2011

Purpose: The Abbe flap procedure has been used to correct disharmony of the upper and lower lips as well as for making a philtrum for patients with secondary cleft lip deformities. But the Abbe flap procedure adds two scars in addition to the prior operative scar on the upper lip. This study was conducted to determine the treatment outcomes of esthetic subunit excision of the scar on the philtrum and Abbe flap coverage for correction of cleft lip deformities with photogrammetric analysis. Methods: This study investigated a total of 11 patients with cleft lip deformities who underwent scar excision with Abbe flap coverage, and the patients were followed up for at least 6 months. Under general anesthesia, a mushroom-shaped Abbe flap was drawn on the lower lip with a width of 8 mm and a height 1~2 mm longer than that of the philtral midline. The epidermis and dermis of the scar on the upper lip were excised. In the cases with alar base depression, the orbicularis oris muscle was split vertically and transposed to the alar base. The Abbe flap was harvested as a pedicled flap containing a small amount of muscle and this was rotated 180-degree to be inserted into the upper lip. Mucosa, muscle, subcutaneous tissue and skin were closed in layers. The flap was divided at the 7~14 postoperative day. The postoperative outcomes were evaluated by using photogrammetric analysis. Three indices were measured from the standard clinical photographs taken before and after the surgery. For anthroposcopic assessment, observers described the postoperative outcomes using an ordinary scale method. Results: The postoperative values obtained in the photogrammetric analysis showed improvement as compared with the preoperative ones. Improved anthroposcopic outcomes were also noted. Conclusion: Scar excision and Abbe flap coverage were proven to be effective in improving protrusion and the height of the upper lip, the scar of the upper lip and the symmetry of Cupid's bow and the philtral column, as well as formation of the philtral dimple.

• Health Policy and Management
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.58-89
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• 2008

The purpose of this study was to evaluate comparatively the content of the Expanded National Immunization Program according to the provision method between 2005 and 2006 in Korea. We assessed the impact of the mutually exclusive vaccination policy using the result reports of the 2005 and 2006 Demonstration Project and the related references by the content analysis. The public health centers paid vaccination fees to the private clinic and hospital in the 2005 Demonstration Project in Daegu metropolitan city and Gunpo city. But, the public health centers directly supplied free vaccination services to the children in the 2006 Demonstration Project in Gangneung city, Yangsan city, and Yeongi-gun. The total budgets of 2005 and 2006 Demonstration Project were 6.57 billion won and 0.65 billion won, respectively. The computerized registration rates and timeliness rates of administration of each vaccination had improved all in the 5 Demonstration Project regions. However, the computerized registration rates of most vaccination in Gunpo city were higher than those in the 2006 Demonstration Project regions except hepatitis B. Especially, the computerized registration rate of BCG was 48.3%, but the BCG coverage rate by the follow-up telephone survey was 99.8% in Daegu metropolitan city. The community parents in all the regions were satisfied because of expanding financial and geographical access to immunization coverage. In conclusions, from the aspect of the main outcomes, the implementation of two different financial immunization aids appears to be widely accepted among these parents and to have had an impact on vaccination coverage. In the future, the government must try to enact that the national immunization policy including under-immunised or incompletely immunised groups would be achieved by the affordable method of the public-private dynamics.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.2 no.8
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• pp.535-542
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• 2013

Since case-based reasoning(CBR) has many advantages, it has been used for supporting decision making in various areas including medical checkup, production planning, customer classification, and so on. However, there are several factors to be set by heuristics when designing effective CBR systems. Among these factors, this study addresses the issue of selecting appropriate neighbors in case retrieval step. As the criterion for selecting appropriate neighbors, conventional studies have used the preset number of neighbors to combine(i.e. k of k-nearest neighbor), or the relative portion of the maximum similarity. However, this study proposes to use the absolute similarity threshold varying from 0 to 1, as the criterion for selecting appropriate neighbors to combine. In this case, too small similarity threshold value may make the model rarely produce the solution. To avoid this, we propose to adopt the coverage, which implies the ratio of the cases in which solutions are produced over the total number of the training cases, and to set it as the constraint when optimizing the similarity threshold. To validate the usefulness of the proposed model, we applied it to a real-world target marketing case of an online shopping mall in Korea. As a result, we found that the proposed model might significantly improve the performance of CBR.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.16 no.6
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• pp.4067-4076
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• 2015

This study aims to examine the trend in household catastrophic medical expenditure according to the healthcare coverage types and its associated factors based on the raw data of the Korean Health Panel over the years 2008 to 2011. Correspondence analysis was used to investigate the trend in the incidence rates of annual catastrophic medical expenditure and generalized estimating equation to examine the factors influencing the incidence of catastrophic medical expenditure. The annual mean incidence rates of household catastrophic medical expenditure were 25.1%, 15.4%, 10.1%, 5.4% and 3.2% in the threshold levels of 10%, 15%, 20%, 30%, and 40% respectively. The incidence rate of household catastrophic medical expenditure was higher when the total annual household income was lower, the education level of the householder was lower, the healthcare coverage type was National Health Insurance, the householder had disability, the age of the householder was older, the number of household members was smaller, the subjective health status of household members was lower, and the prevalence rate of the chronic disease of the household was higher(p<0.05). Therefore, a policy for vulnerable households with older or patient members of chronic diseases should be established.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture
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• v.36 no.4
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• pp.27-35
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• 2008

The purpose of this study was to compare and apply quantitative indices for analyzing the total green space in an urban area, targeting Guro-Gu, Seoul. The indices were classified in terms of plane, solid and urban planning. The park area per person as an index of the park green's total volume was $2.34m^2$. This clearly shows the deficiency of park area. However, it did not reflect actual green space, since undesignated forests, rivers and green spaces in the city were excluded. Green coverage area per person in terms of plane was $18.85m^2$ and was useful as an index of actual urban planting, focusing on expansion of the green space. However, the conception of total volume of park green had limitation to be recognized as a unit of area. The number of trees and green area volume per person in terms of solid was 4.1 trees and $35.8m^2$, respectively. This enabled reflection on qualitative improvement plans such as increasing the volume of trees for the high density of developed areas.

• The Journal of Korean Medicine
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• v.35 no.3
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• pp.32-39
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• 2014

Objectives: Elementary school national textbooks of 2013 were analyzed to examine the contents related to Korean medicine in the Korean elementary school curriculum. Methods: The contents related to Korean medicine were identified in the 118 elementary school national textbooks of 2013, and their proportion in the total textbooks was calculated. The Korean medicine-related contents were also analyzed. Results: There were twelve parts related to Korean medicine in seven chapters in six courses, and four directly related words and eight indirectly related words were found in twelve parts. The total number of lines for the contents related to Korean medicine were 205, which occupied 0.063% in the total elementary school national textbooks. The contents occupied 0.013% in the second grade, 0.265% in the third grade, 0.036% in the fourth grade, and 0.042% in the fifth grade. Conclusion: The results show that the coverage of Korean medicine in the elementary school national textbooks in 2013 does not provide enough information on Korean medicine. To help people get to know about Korean medicine and use it in the right way, it would be necessary to include more information about Korean medicine in textbooks, and continuous interest as well as research will be needed.

• Korean Journal of Health Education and Promotion
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• v.30 no.1
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• pp.41-52
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• 2013

Objectives: Rural-urban differences in suicide have been observed in many settings. However, there has been little research addressing what factors can explain these differences. The purpose of this study was to analyze which compositional factors and contextual factors in local areas might be related to local suicide. Methods: The study design was cross-sectional. The data for 251 primary local governments on their age-standardized suicide mortality and their predefined indicators of compositional factors and contextual factors were obtained from Korean Statistical Information Service as of year 2010. Bivariate analysis including one-way ANOVA and chi-square test were used to identify the differences in local features by area type. Seven poisson regression models for each of total, males, and females were used to analyze which compositional and contextual factors were related to suicide. Results: There were differences in suicide between gu and goon in total, male, and female groups. For total, compositional factors including divorce and smoking rate, and contextual factors including financial independency, water and waterwaste coverage, and number of wastewater discharge factories were found to explain the urban-rural differences. Conclusions: This study provided some evidence that contextual factors at the local level as well as compositional factors are useful for predicting local suicide mortality.

• Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health
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• v.27 no.2 s.46
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• pp.337-365
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• 1994

Rubella is a viral disease with mild constitutional symptoms and generalized rashes. In childhood, it is an inconsequential illness, but when it occurs during early pregnant period, there are significant risks of heart defects, cataract, mental retardation to the fetus. The series of congenital defects induced by rubella is called 'congenital rubella syndrome'. Many research have been performed to find out more effective prevention program on rubella. The objectives of this study are, first, to calculate the incidence rate of acute rubella infection and congenital rubella syndrome in Korea, second, to evaluate economic efficiency of several rubella vaccination policies and to offer data for the most reasonable decision on vaccination policy. Study populations are 663,312 children of one year-old in 1992. The author has performed cost-benefit analyses according to the three vaccination policies-U.S.A.'s. U.K.'s and Sweden's. In this Study, the author got the incidence rate of acute rubella infection using the catalytic model. In the meantime, the author used 50 per 100,000 live births as the incidence rate of congenital rubella syndrome. The discount rate used in this study was 5 percent per annum. The sensitivity analyses were done with different discount rates (4%, 7%) and different incidence rate of congenital rubella syndrome (10,100 per 100,000 live births) : The study results are as follows: 1. Without vaccination, lifetime expenditures per patient for acute rubella infeciton amount to 14,822 won and the total expenditures to about 3.1 billion won. Meanwhile, lifetime expenditures per patient for congenital rubella syndrome amount to about 91 million won and the total expenditures to about 16.3 billion won without vaccination. 2. The cost of vaccination for a child of one year old was 2,322 won and the total cost for the one year old children was about 1.5 billion won (American style). The cost for vaccination of female children at fifteen was about 339 million won (Birtish style). And the cost of vaccination at one for both sex and female children at fifteen was about 1.9 billion won (Swedish style). 3. The benefit to cost ratios of vaccination of female children at fifteen that is the british mode of rubella vaccination, was 60.0 at the level of 80% population coverage and 48.6 at 100% coverage. It shows much higher benefit to cost ratio than those of the other two vaccination policies. 4. Both net benefits of vaccination at one (American style) and that of vaccinations at one and fifteen (Swedish style) range from about 17.0 billion to 17.8 billion won, those were larger than that of vaccinations of female children at fifteen (Birtish style, about 16.0 billion). 5. In marginal cost-benefit analysis of only additional program of revaccination, the benefit to cost ratios were 3.6 (80% coverage rate) or 0.6 (100% coverage rate). It implies that additional program was less efficient or inefficient. 6. In sensitivity analysis with different discount rates(4% or 7%) and different incidence rates of congenital rubella syndrome (10 or 100 per 100,000 live births), the benefit to cost ratios has fluctuated in wide range. However, all the ratios of vaccination of female children at fifteen were higher than those of the others. Even under the most conservative assumption, the benefit to cost ratios of all the rubella vaccination policies were higher than 3.3. In conclusion, all the rubella vaccination policies found to be cost-effective and particularly the vaccination of female children at fifteen was strongly recommended.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.131-137
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• 2010

Genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have greatly contributed to the identification of common variants responsible for numerous complex traits. There are, however, unavoidable limitations in detecting causal and/or rare variants for traits in this approach, which depends on an LD-based tagging SNP microarray chip. In an effort to detect potential casual and/or rare variants for complex traits, such as type 2 diabetes (T2D) and triglycerides (TGs), we conducted a targeted resequencing of loci identified by the Korea Association REsource (KARE) GWAS. The target regions for resequencing comprised whole exons, exon-intron boundaries, and regulatory regions of genes that appeared within 1 Mb of the GWA signal boundary. From 124 individuals selected in population-based cohorts, a total of 0.7 Mb target regions were captured by the NimbleGen sequence capture 385K array. Subsequent sequencing, carried out by the Roche 454 Genome Sequencer FLX, generated about 110,000 sequence reads per individual. Mapping of sequence reads to the human reference genome was performed using the SSAHA2 program. An average of 62.2% of total reads was mapped to targets with an average 22X-fold coverage. A total of 5,983 SNPs (average 846 SNPs per individual) were called and annotated by GATK software, with 96.5% accuracy that was estimated by comparison with Affymetrix 5.0 genotyped data in identical individuals. About 51% of total SNPs were singletons that can be considered possible rare variants in the population. Among SNPs that appeared in exons, which occupies about 20% of total SNPs, 304 nonsynonymous singletons were tested with Polyphen to predict the protein damage caused by mutation. In total, we were able to detect 9 and 6 potentially functional rare SNPs for T2D and triglycerides, respectively, evoking a further step of replication genotyping in independent populations to prove their bona fide relevance to traits.

• Journal of Korean Society on Water Environment
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• v.32 no.2
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• pp.142-148
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• 2016

The characterization of stormwater runoff from mix land-use catchments with an inadequate sewer network is a challenge. This study focused on characterizing stormwater runoff from the Paldang watershed area based on land-use type and sewer system coverage. A total of 76 sites were monitored during wet weather from seven different counties within Paldang watershed. Public sewer system (PSS) was installed at 48 sites, while 28 sites had no or individual sewer system (ISS) coverage. The results indicated that the sites included in the ISS group with higher forest and paddy land-use percentage exhibit higher values of average event mean concentrations (EMCs) and first flush intensity for suspended solids (SS), total nitrogen (TN), and total phosphorous (TP). In addition, upgrading runoff interception system can capture 59 % of the TP load in the first 43% of runoff within these sites. Similarly, rainfall depth and storm duration showed a positive correlation (R > 0.6) with nutrient loads within ISS group sites, as compared to PSS group. Therefore, these sites are likely to contribute higher TP and TN loads during heavier storm events and should be selected as priority management areas to combat the problem of eutrophication in Paldang reservoir.