• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.33 no.5
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• pp.340-347
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• 2008

Dipstick urinalysis is used as a routine test for a screening test of UTI (urinary tract infection) in primary practice because urine dipstick test is simple. The result of dipstick urinalysis brings medical professionals to make a microscopic examination and urine culture for exact UTI diagnosis, therefore it is emphasized on a role of screening test. The objective of this study was to the classification between UTI patients and normal subjects using hybrid neural network classifier with enhanced clustering performance in urine dipstick screening test. In order to propose a classifier, we made a hybrid neural network which combines with RBF layer, summation & normalization layer and L VQ artificial neural network layer. For the demonstration of proposed hybrid neural network, we compared proposed classifier with various artificial neural networks such as back-propagation, RBFNN and PNN method. As a result, classification performance of proposed classifier was able to classify 95.81% of the normal subjects and 83.87% of the UTI patients, total average 90.72% according to validation dataset. The proposed classifier confirms better performance than other classifiers. Therefore the application of such a proposed classifier expect to utilize telemedicine to classify between UTI patients and normal subjects in the future.

• Urogenital Tract Infection
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.79-83
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• 2018

Purpose: The 5 alpha reductase inhibitor (5ARI) reduces the size of the prostate and alleviates lower urinary tract symptoms. After stopping 5ARI, the prostate quickly recovers to its pre-medication size. The purpose of this study was to investigate the factors affecting the restoration of prostate size after 5ARI discontinuation. Materials and Methods: Between March 2009 and May 2017, patients who visited an outpatient clinic and were diagnosed with benign prostatic hyperplasia were selected and start 5ARI medication. After 6 months of medication, the patients stopped medication for 1 year. Meanwhile, we measured the prostate volumes of patients 3 times (before and after medication, after discontinuation) and divide the patients into 3 groups (maintained, intermediate, and restored) with recovered prostate volume ratio. After classification, we investigated the relationship between the variable factors (age, serum prostate-specific antigen, initial volume, reduced volume after medication) between groups. Results: Among the 147 selected patients, the mean age and plasma PSA level were $61.6{\pm}7.9$ and $0.8{\pm}0.6$, respectively. The mean initial prostate volume was $32.3{\pm}4.2ml$, which reduced to $23.2{\pm}3.2ml$ after medication. After one year of discontinuation, the mean volume was $31.4{\pm}6.4ml$, with restoration to 101.5% of the reduced size. We noticed a tendency that patients with faster prostate volume recovery were generally older than those with slower recovery; however, this was not statistically significant. Other factors showed no relationship with prostate recovery. Conclusions: When using 5ARI in elderly patients, continuous treatment seems better than intermittent treatment. If discontinuation is needed, short term follow-up is recommended.