• Progress in Medical Physics
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.91-98
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• 2012

Verification of internal organ motion during treatment and its feedback is essential to accurate dose delivery to the moving target. We developed an offline based internal organ motion verification system (IMVS) using cine EPID images and evaluated its accuracy and availability through phantom study. For verification of organ motion using live cine EPID images, a pattern matching algorithm using an internal surrogate, which is very distinguishable and represents organ motion in the treatment field, like diaphragm, was employed in the self-developed analysis software. For the system performance test, we developed a linear motion phantom, which consists of a human body shaped phantom with a fake tumor in the lung, linear motion cart, and control software. The phantom was operated with a motion of 2 cm at 4 sec per cycle and cine EPID images were obtained at a rate of 3.3 and 6.6 frames per sec (2 MU/frame) with $1,024{\times}768$ pixel counts in a linear accelerator (10 MVX). Organ motion of the target was tracked using self-developed analysis software. Results were compared with planned data of the motion phantom and data from the video image based tracking system (RPM, Varian, USA) using an external surrogate in order to evaluate its accuracy. For quantitative analysis, we analyzed correlation between two data sets in terms of average cycle (peak to peak), amplitude, and pattern (RMS, root mean square) of motion. Averages for the cycle of motion from IMVS and RPM system were $3.98{\pm}0.11$ (IMVS 3.3 fps), $4.005{\pm}0.001$ (IMVS 6.6 fps), and $3.95{\pm}0.02$ (RPM), respectively, and showed good agreement on real value (4 sec/cycle). Average of the amplitude of motion tracked by our system showed $1.85{\pm}0.02$ cm (3.3 fps) and $1.94{\pm}0.02$ cm (6.6 fps) as showed a slightly different value, 0.15 (7.5% error) and 0.06 (3% error) cm, respectively, compared with the actual value (2 cm), due to time resolution for image acquisition. In analysis of pattern of motion, the value of the RMS from the cine EPID image in 3.3 fps (0.1044) grew slightly compared with data from 6.6 fps (0.0480). The organ motion verification system using sequential cine EPID images with an internal surrogate showed good representation of its motion within 3% error in a preliminary phantom study. The system can be implemented for clinical purposes, which include organ motion verification during treatment, compared with 4D treatment planning data, and its feedback for accurate dose delivery to the moving target.

• Journal of environmental and Sanitary engineering
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• v.20 no.1 s.55
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• pp.64-75
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• 2005

The total production of food waste was about 11,398ton/day('03) in Korea. Also, food waste was treated by landfill, incineration, reuse and anaerobic digestion. The method of food waste treatment depended primarily on landfill. However, the method of landfill causing social problems was prevented to treat food waste in the first of January 2005.12) Thus, anaerobic digestion is an important method to treat food waste because of possibility of energy recovery as methane gas. In this study, the possibility of food waste treatment containing high organic material and low pH in the one stage anaerobic reactor to save cost and time and energy recovery using $CH_{4}$ gas by the hybrid anaerobic reactor (HAR) was measured. The HAR was designed by combing the merits of the anaerobic filter (AF) to minimize the microorganism shock when food waste of very low pH was injected and up-flow anaerobic sludge blanket (UASB) to prevent from plugging and channeling phenomena by large suspended solids when semi solids were injected. Granule was packed in the section of HAR. The purpose of the BMP experiment was to measure the amount of methane generated when organic material was resolved under anaerobic conditions, to grasp bio resolution of organic material. Total accumulated methane production per VS amount was $0.471(m^{3}/\cal{kg}\;VS)$. So, the value was about $81.2\%$ of theoretical methane production which was $0.58(m^{3}/\cal{kg}\;VS)$ by elementary analysis and organic matter removal velocity (K) was $0.18(d^{-1})$. From these results, food waste was treated by anaerobic treatment. From this study, $CH_{4}$ generation from food waste (11,398 ton/day) could be estimated. By using an energy conversion factor of Braun's study, $5.97KWh/m^{3}\;CH4,\;60\%\;of\;CH_{4}$ gas generation, the amount of total energy producing food waste is to 6,727MWh/day. It could be confirmed that energy recovery using $CH_{4}$ gas was possible. Above these results, food waste containing organic matters of high concentration could be treated in HRT 30 days under an anaerobic condition, using the hybrid anaerobic reactor and reuse of $CH_{4}$ gas was possible.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.23 no.6
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• pp.507-520
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• 2007

Satellite passive microwave(PM) sensors have been observing polar sea ice concentration(SIC), ice temperature, and snow depth since 1970s. Among them SIC is playing an important role in the various studies as it is considered the first factor for the monitoring of global climate and environment changes. Verification and correction of PM SIC is essential for this purpose. In this study, we calculated SIC from KOMPSAT-1 EOC images obtained from Arctic sea ice edges from July to August 2005 and compared with SSM/I SIC calculated from NASA Team(NT) algorithm. When we have no consideration of sea ice types, EOC and SSM/I NT SIC showed low correlation coefficient of 0.574. This is because there are differences in spatial resolution and observing time between two sensors, and the temporal and spatial variation of sea ice was high in summer Arctic ice edge. For the verification of SSM/I NT SIC according to sea ice types, we divided sea ice into land-fast ice, pack ice, and drift ice from EOC images, and compared them with SSM/I NT SIC corresponding to each ice type. The concentration of land-fast ice between EOC and SSM/I SIC were calculated very similarly to each other with the mean difference of 0.38%. This is because the temporal and spatial variation of land-fast ice is small, and the snow condition on the ice surface is relatively dry. In case of pack ice, there were lots of ice ridge and new ice that are known to be underestimated by NT algorithm. SSM/I NT SIC were lower than EOC SIC by 19.63% in average. In drift ice, SSM/I NT SIC showed 20.17% higher than EOC SIC in average. The sea ice with high concentration could be included inside the wide IFOV of SSM/I because the drift ice was located near the edge of pack ice. It is also suggested that SSM/I NT SIC overestimated the drift ice covered by wet snow.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.37 no.3
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• pp.379-394
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• 2021

Air pollution data in South Korea is provided on a real-time basis by Air Korea stations since 2005. Previous studies have shown the feasibility of gridding air pollution data, but they were confined to a few cities. This paper examines the creation of nationwide gridded maps for PM10 concentration using 333 Air Korea stations with variogram optimization and ordinary kriging. The accuracy of the spatial interpolation was evaluated by various sampling schemes to avoid a too dense or too sparse distribution of the validation points. Using the 114,745 matchups, a four-round blind test was conducted by extracting random validation points for every 365 days in 2019. The overall accuracy was stably high with the MAE of 5.697 ㎍/m³ and the CC of 0.947. Approximately 1,500 cases for high PM10 concentration also showed a result with the MAE of about 12 ㎍/m³ and the CC over 0.87, which means that the proposed method was effective and applicable to various situations. The gridded maps for daily PM10 concentration at the resolution of 0.05° also showed a reasonable spatial distribution, which can be used as an input variable for a gridded prediction of tomorrow's PM10 concentration.

• Journal of Chest Surgery
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• v.40 no.3 s.272
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• pp.215-219
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• 2007

Background: Due to the advancement of video assisted thoracoscopic techniques, an operation for primary spontaneous pneumothorax is now considered a common procedure. However, whether a preventive operation is necessary when a contralateral bulla is found on High Resolution Computed Tomography (HRCT) at the time of the first primary spontaneous pneumothorax attack is still unknown. In this retrospective study, it was our intension to find whether contralateral bullae are related to the occurrence of pneumothorax. Material and Method: Between January 1999 and April 2006, 550 patients were admitted to the Chungnam University hospital with primary spontaneous pneumothorax, which was confirmed by the HRCT scans in 190 patents. In these 190 patients, 159 had not received a bilateral operation after their first primary spontaneous pneumothorax attack. In these 159 patients, the relationship between the presence of contralateral bullae and the occurrence of pneumothorax was measured. Result: In these 159 patients, 67 had contralateral bullae confirmed inform the HRCT scan, and 92 had no visible contralateral bullae, During the follow up period, 6 patients (8.9%) with contralateral bullae had an occurrence of contralateral pneumothorax, and 5 patients (5.4%) without contralateral bullae had an occurrence of contralateral pneumothorax. (p=0.529 [Fisher's exact test]) Conclusion: In patients with unilateral primary pneumothorax, an HRCT scan is a useful way of confirming contralateral pulmonary bullae. However, the presence of bullae is not a significant predictive sign of an occurrence of contralateral pneumothorax. Also, surgery for pneumothorax is not completely uncomplicated, and bilateral surgery is still doubtful. A further prospective study will be required to find the relationship between the bullae found on HRCT and the occurrence of pneumothorax.

• The Korean Journal of Mycology
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.7-14
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• 2006

Entomopathogenic fungus Cordyceps militaris is famous for its medicinal efficacies. It has been reported to have various pharmacological activities such as anti-tumour, insecticidal, antibacterial, immunomodulatory and antioxidant. In this study, we investigated the effect of the extract of C. militaris (MPUN8501), which was identified by the analysis of the nucleotide sequences of 5.8S ribosomal RNA, on the function of liver. C. militaris powder was extracted using hot water extracts method as time, volume and temperature and using method as differential polarity of organic solvent. Each fraction was tested for the improvement of hepatic enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) and acetaldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH) activity. The BuOH extracts (CME) had highest activity which was used for the test of toxicity and efficacy of C. militaris. The enhancing effect of CME on the activity of ADH and ALDH was much more than medicine, drink, natural tea etc. Thus CME promoted the resolution of alcohol and acetaldehyde in rats, inducing recovery to normal condition rapidly. Furthermore, oral administration of CME effectively protected the carbon tetrachloride-induced acute hepatic injury as revealed by the hematological parameters (levels of sGOT and sGPT) and histological observation. CME was ascertained to be safe by regulatory toxicity studies of single dose toxicity and genotoxicity. These results suggest that CME would be useful for the maintaining normal hepatic activity as a functional health food.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.38 no.6_1
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• pp.1505-1514
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• 2022

Image matching is a crucial preprocessing step for effective utilization of multi-temporal and multi-sensor very high resolution (VHR) satellite images. Deep learning (DL) method which is attracting widespread interest has proven to be an efficient approach to measure the similarity between image pairs in quick and accurate manner by extracting complex and detailed features from satellite images. However, Image matching of VHR satellite images remains challenging due to limitations of DL models in which the results are depending on the quantity and quality of training dataset, as well as the difficulty of creating training dataset with VHR satellite images. Therefore, this study examines the feasibility of DL-based method in matching pair extraction which is the most time-consuming process during image registration. This paper also aims to analyze factors that affect the accuracy based on the configuration of training dataset, when developing training dataset from existing multi-sensor VHR image database with bias for DL-based image matching. For this purpose, the generated training dataset were composed of correct matching pairs and incorrect matching pairs by assigning true and false labels to image pairs extracted using a grid-based Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) algorithm for a total of 12 multi-temporal and multi-sensor VHR images. The Siamese convolutional neural network (SCNN), proposed for matching pair extraction on constructed training dataset, proceeds with model learning and measures similarities by passing two images in parallel to the two identical convolutional neural network structures. The results from this study confirm that data acquired from VHR satellite image database can be used as DL training dataset and indicate the potential to improve efficiency of the matching process by appropriate configuration of multi-sensor images. DL-based image matching techniques using multi-sensor VHR satellite images are expected to replace existing manual-based feature extraction methods based on its stable performance, thus further develop into an integrated DL-based image registration framework.

• Korean Journal of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.153-163
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• 2017

The objective of this study is to enhance the model's speed of estimating weather variables (e.g., minimum/maximum temperature, sunshine hour, PRISM (Parameter-elevation Regression on Independent Slopes Model) based precipitation), which are applied to the Agrometeorological Early Warning System (http://www.agmet.kr). The current process of weather estimation is operated on high-performance multi-core CPUs that have 8 physical cores and 16 logical threads. Nonetheless, the server is not even dedicated to the handling of a single county, indicating that very high overhead is involved in calculating the 10 counties of the Seomjin River Basin. In order to reduce such overhead, several cache and parallelization techniques were used to measure the performance and to check the applicability. Results are as follows: (1) for simple calculations such as Growing Degree Days accumulation, the time required for Input and Output (I/O) is significantly greater than that for calculation, suggesting the need of a technique which reduces disk I/O bottlenecks; (2) when there are many I/O, it is advantageous to distribute them on several servers. However, each server must have a cache for input data so that it does not compete for the same resource; and (3) GPU-based parallel processing method is most suitable for models such as PRISM with large computation loads.

• The Korean Journal of Nuclear Medicine Technology
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.62-68
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• 2014

Purpose: After I-131 therapy, SPECT/CT is useful in identifying location of thyroid remnants and metastasis of thyroid cancers. An excessive uptake of thyroid leads to a ringing artifact in the SPECT images. The aim of this study is to investigate and suggest a proper post filters to remove ringing artifact and produce better image quality. Materials and Methods: A low-cost, customized thyroid-mimicking phantom, consisting of an acrylic bottle and a hollow sphere was used for SPECT/CT Discovery (GE Healthcare, USA). It was filled with I-131 solution. The ratio of hollow sphere to background were varied as 50:1, 200:1, 1000:1 and 4000:1. Acquired images were reconstructed by OSEM (2 iterations, 10 subsets) with and without Evolution (resolution recovery correction, GE). Three different post-filters were applied; Butterworth (cut off: 0.38 to 0.58 with intervals of 0.05), Hanning (cut off: 0.8 to 1 with intervals of 0.05) and Gaussian (FWHM: 3 to 5 with intervals of 0.5) filters. Contrast, background variability, air area variability, and full width half maximum (FWHM) were compared. Results: Higher contrasts were obtained from the SPECT images with Evolution than without Evolution. In the case of images without Evolution, image distortion such as star artifact was generated. For all sphere-to-background ratio, the Butterworth filter showed better constrasts and FWHMs than other two filters, but the ringing artifact was still generated in all studies except 50:1 and it was decreased as cutoff value was increased. The ringing artifact didn't appear with Hanning and Gaussian filters at all studies, however constrats and FWHMs with Gaussian was worse than Hanning filter. For the images having ringing artifacts, the background variability and air area variability were increased. Conclusion: In this study, we suggested that it is desirable to use Hanning filter when the ringing artifact is generated and to use Butterworth filter when ringing artifact is not generated in I-131 SPECT.

• The Korean Journal of Nuclear Medicine
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• v.38 no.6
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• pp.528-531
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• 2004

Purpose: PET has some disadvantage in the imaging of small animal due to poor resolution. With the advent of microPET scanner, it is possible to image small animals. However, the image quality was not good enough as human image. Due to larger brain, cat brain imaging was superior to mouse or rat. In this study, we established the cat brain infarction model and evaluate it and its temporal charge using microPET scanner. Materials and Methods: Two adult male cats were used. Anesthesia was done with xylazine and ketamine HCl. A burr hole was made at 1cm right lateral to the bregma. Collagenase type IV 10 ${\mu}l$ was injected using 30 G needle for 5 minutes to establish the infarction model. $^{18}F$-FDG microPET (Concorde Microsystems Inc., Knoxville, TN) scans were performed 1, 11 and 32 days after the infarction. In addition, $^{18}F$-FDG PET scans were performed using human PET scanner (Gemini, Philips medical systems, CA, USA) 13 and 47 days after the infarction. Results: Two cat brain infarction models were established. The glucose metabolism of an infarction lesion improved with time. An infarction lesion was also distinguishable in the human PET scan. Conclusion: We successfully established the cat brain infarction model and evaluated the infarcted lesion and its temporal change using $^{18}F$-FDG microPET scanner.