• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.147-157
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• 2010

With the immergence of the iPhone, the interest in Smartphones is getting higher as services can be provided directly between service providers and consumers without the network operators. As the number of international tourists increase, individual tourists are also increasing. According to the WTO's (World Tourism Organization) prediction, the number of international tourists will be 1.56 billion in 2020,and the average growth rate will be 4.1% a year. Chinese tourists, in particular, are increasing rapidly and about 100 million will travel the world in 2020. In 2009, about 7.8 million foreign tourists visited Korea and the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism is trying to attract 12 million foreign tourists in 2014. A research institute carried out a survey targeting foreign tourists and the survey results showed that they felt uncomfortable with communication (about 55.8%) and directional signs (about 21.4%) when they traveled in Korea. To solve this inconvenience for foreign tourists, multilingual servicesfor traffic signs, tour information, shopping information and so forth should be enhanced. The appearance of the Smartphone comes just in time to provide a new service to address these inconveniences. Smartphones are especially useful because every Smartphone has GPS (Global Positioning System) that can provide users' location to the system, making it possible to provide location-based services. For improvement of tourists' convenience, Seoul Metropolitan Government hasinitiated the u-tour service using Kiosks and Smartphones, and several Province Governments have started the u-tourpia project using RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) and an exclusive device. Even though the u-tour or u-tourpia service used the Smartphone and RFID, the tourist should know the location of the Kiosks and have previous information. So, this service did not give the solution yet. In this paper, I developed a new convenient service which can provide location based information for the individual tourists using GPS, WiFi, and 3G. The service was tested at Insa-dong in Seoul, and the service can provide tour information around the tourist using a push service without user selection. This self-tour service is designed for providing a travel guide service for foreign travelers from the airport to their destination and information about tourist attractions. The system reduced information traffic by constraining receipt of information to tourist themes and locations within a 20m or 40m radius of the device. In this case, service providers can provide targeted, just-in-time services to special customers by sending desired information. For evaluating the implemented system, the contents of 40 gift shops and traditional restaurants in Insa-dong are stored in the CMS (Content Management System). The service program shows a map displaying the current location of the tourist and displays a circle which shows the range to get the tourist information. If there is information for the tourist within range, the information viewer is activated. If there is only a single resultto display, the information viewer pops up directly, and if there are several results, the viewer shows a list of the contents and the user can choose content manually. As aresult, the proposed system can provide location-based tourist information to tourists without previous knowledge of the area. Currently, the GPS has a margin of error (about 10~20m) and this leads the location and information errors. However, because our Government is planning to provide DGPS (Differential GPS) information by DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting) this error will be reduced to within 1m.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.119-142
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• 2015

With the explosive growth in the volume of information, Internet users are experiencing considerable difficulties in obtaining necessary information online. Against this backdrop, ever-greater importance is being placed on a recommender system that provides information catered to user preferences and tastes in an attempt to address issues associated with information overload. To this end, a number of techniques have been proposed, including content-based filtering (CBF), demographic filtering (DF) and collaborative filtering (CF). Among them, CBF and DF require external information and thus cannot be applied to a variety of domains. CF, on the other hand, is widely used since it is relatively free from the domain constraint. The CF technique is broadly classified into memory-based CF, model-based CF and hybrid CF. Model-based CF addresses the drawbacks of CF by considering the Bayesian model, clustering model or dependency network model. This filtering technique not only improves the sparsity and scalability issues but also boosts predictive performance. However, it involves expensive model-building and results in a tradeoff between performance and scalability. Such tradeoff is attributed to reduced coverage, which is a type of sparsity issues. In addition, expensive model-building may lead to performance instability since changes in the domain environment cannot be immediately incorporated into the model due to high costs involved. Cumulative changes in the domain environment that have failed to be reflected eventually undermine system performance. This study incorporates the Markov model of transition probabilities and the concept of fuzzy clustering with CBCF to propose predictive clustering-based CF (PCCF) that solves the issues of reduced coverage and of unstable performance. The method improves performance instability by tracking the changes in user preferences and bridging the gap between the static model and dynamic users. Furthermore, the issue of reduced coverage also improves by expanding the coverage based on transition probabilities and clustering probabilities. The proposed method consists of four processes. First, user preferences are normalized in preference clustering. Second, changes in user preferences are detected from review score entries during preference transition detection. Third, user propensities are normalized using patterns of changes (propensities) in user preferences in propensity clustering. Lastly, the preference prediction model is developed to predict user preferences for items during preference prediction. The proposed method has been validated by testing the robustness of performance instability and scalability-performance tradeoff. The initial test compared and analyzed the performance of individual recommender systems each enabled by IBCF, CBCF, ICFEC and PCCF under an environment where data sparsity had been minimized. The following test adjusted the optimal number of clusters in CBCF, ICFEC and PCCF for a comparative analysis of subsequent changes in the system performance. The test results revealed that the suggested method produced insignificant improvement in performance in comparison with the existing techniques. In addition, it failed to achieve significant improvement in the standard deviation that indicates the degree of data fluctuation. Notwithstanding, it resulted in marked improvement over the existing techniques in terms of range that indicates the level of performance fluctuation. The level of performance fluctuation before and after the model generation improved by 51.31% in the initial test. Then in the following test, there has been 36.05% improvement in the level of performance fluctuation driven by the changes in the number of clusters. This signifies that the proposed method, despite the slight performance improvement, clearly offers better performance stability compared to the existing techniques. Further research on this study will be directed toward enhancing the recommendation performance that failed to demonstrate significant improvement over the existing techniques. The future research will consider the introduction of a high-dimensional parameter-free clustering algorithm or deep learning-based model in order to improve performance in recommendations.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.15 no.9
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• pp.637-648
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• 2009

As the cost of disks decreases, PCs are soon expected to be equipped with a disk of 1TB or more. Assuming that a single person generates 1GB of data per month, 1TB is enough to store data for the entire lifetime of a person. This has lead to the growth of researches on lifelog management, which manages what people see and listen to in everyday life. Although many different lifelog management systems have been proposed, including those based on the relational data model, based on ontology, and based on file systems, they have all advantages and disadvantages: Those based on the relational data model provide good query processing performance but they do not support complex queries properly; Those based on ontology handle more complex queries but their performances are not satisfactory: Those based on file systems support only keyword queries. Moreover, these systems are lack of support for lifelog group management and do not provide a convenient user interface for modifying and adding tags (metadata) to lifelogs for effective lifelog search. To address these problems, we propose a lifelog management system based on the relational data model. The proposed system models lifelogs by using the relational data model and transforms queries on lifelogs into SQL statements, which results in good query processing performance. It also supports a simplified relationship query that finds a lifelog based on other lifelogs directly related to it, to overcome the disadvantage of not supporting complex queries properly. In addition, the proposed system supports for the management of lifelog groups by providing ways to create, edit, search, play, and share them. Finally, it is equipped with a tagging tool that helps the user to modify and add tags conveniently through the ion of various tags. This paper describes the design and implementation of the proposed system and its various applications.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.52
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• pp.277-312
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• 2018

First-order cybernetics during the 1940s and 1950s aimed for control of an observed system, while second-order cybernetics during the mid-1970s aspired to address the mechanism of an observing system. The former pursues an objective, subjectless, approach to a system, whereas the latter prefers a subjective, personal approach to a system. Second-order observation must be noted since a human observer is a living system that has its unique cognition. Maturana and Varela place the autopoiesis of this biological system at the core of second-order cybernetics. They contend that an autpoietic system maintains, transforms and produces itself. Technoscientific recreation of biological autopoiesis opens up to a new step in cybernetics: what I describe as third-order cybernetics. The formation of technoscientific autopoiesis overlaps with the Fourth Industrial Revolution or what Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee call the Second Machine Age. It leads to a radical shift from human centrism to posthumanity whereby humanity is mechanized, and machinery is biologized. In two versions of the novel Demon Seed, American novelist Dean Koontz explores the significance of technoscientific autopoiesis. The 1973 version dramatizes two kinds of observers: the technophobic human observer and the technology-friendly machine observer Proteus. As the story concludes, the former dominates the latter with the result that an anthropocentric position still works. The 1997 version, however, reveals the victory of the techno-friendly narrator Proteus over the anthropocentric narrator. Losing his narrational position, the technophobic human narrator of the story disappears. In the 1997 version, Proteus becomes the subject of desire in luring divorcee Susan. He longs to flaunt his male egomaniac. His achievement of male identity is a sign of technological autopoiesis characteristic of third-order cybernetics. To display self-producing capabilities integral to the autonomy of machinery, Koontz's novel demonstrates that Proteus manipulates Susan's egg to produce a human-machine mixture. Koontz's demon child, problematically enough, implicates the future of eugenics in an era of technological autopoiesis. Proteus creates a crossbreed of humanity and machinery to engineer a perfect body and mind. He fixes incurable or intractable diseases through genetic modifications. Proteus transfers a vast amount of digital information to his offspring's brain, which enables the demon child to achieve state-of-the-art intelligence. His technological editing of human genes and consciousness leads to digital standardization through unanimous spread of the best qualities of humanity. He gathers distinguished human genes and mental status much like collecting luxury brands. Accordingly, Proteus's child-making project ultimately moves towards technologically-controlled eugenics. Pointedly, it disturbs the classical ideal of liberal humanism celebrating a human being as the master of his or her nature.

• THE INTERNATIONAL COMMERCE & LAW REVIEW
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• v.31
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• pp.27-56
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• 2006

Today's financial institutions usually take environmental issues seriously into consideration as they could not evade lender liability in an increasing number of cases. On the international scene, a brand-new concept of the "Equator Principles" in the New Millenium has driven more and more international banks to adopt these Principles in project financing. Sustainable development has been a key word in understanding new trends of the governments, financial institutions, corporations and civic groups in the 21st century. The Equator Principles are a set of voluntary environmental and social guidelines for sustainable finance. These Principles commit bank officers to avoid financial support to projects that fail to meet these guidelines. The Principles were conceived in 2002 on an initiative of the International Finance Corporation(IFC), and launched in June 2003. Since then, dozens of major banks, accounting for up to 80 percent of project loan market, have adopted the Principles. Accordingly, the Principles have become the de facto standard for all banks and investors on how to deal with potential social and environmental issues of projects to be financed. Compliance with the Equator Principles facilitates for endorsing banks to participate in the syndicated loan and help them to manage the risks associated with large-scale projects. The Equator Principles call for financial institutions to provide loans to projects under the following circumstances: - The risk of the project is categorized in accordance with internal guidelines based upon the environmental and social screening criteria of the IFC. - For Category A and B projects, borrowers or sponsors are required to conduct a Social and Environmental Assessment, the preparation of which must meet certain requirements and satisfactorily address key social and environmental issues. - The Social and Environmental Assessment report should address baseline social and environmental conditions, requirements under host country laws and regulations, sustainable development, and, as appropriate, IFC's Environmental, Health and Safety Guidelines, etc. - Based on the Social and Environmental Assessment, Equator banks then make agreements with borrowers on how they mitigate, monitor and manage the risks through a Social and Environmental Management System. Compliance with the plan is included in the covenant clause of loan agreements. If the borrower doesn't comply with the agreed terms, the bank will take corrective actions. The Equator Principles are not a mere declaration of cautious banks but a full commitment of lenders. A violation of the Principles in the process of project financing, which led to an unexpected damage to the affected community, would not give rise to any specific legal remedies other than ordinary lawsuits. So it is more effective for banks to ensure consistent implementation of the Principles and to have them take responsible measures to solve social and environmental issues. Public interests have recently mounted up with respect to environmental issues on the occasion of the Supreme Court's decision (2006Du330) on the fiercely debated reclamation project at Saemangeum. The majority Justices said that the expected environmental damages like probable pollution of water and soil were not believed so serious and that the Administration should continue to implement the project seeking ways to make it more environment friendly. In this case, though the Category A Saemangeum Project was carried out by a government agency, the Supreme Court behaved itself as a signal giver to approve or stop the environment-related project like an Equator bank in project financing. At present, there is no Equator bank in Korea in contrast to three big banks in Japan. Also Korean contractors, which are aggressively bidding for Category A-type projects in South East Asia and Mideast, might find themselves in a disadvantageous position because they are generally ignorant of the environmental assessment associated with project financing. In this regard, Korean banks and overseas project contractors should care for the revised Equator Principles and the latest developments in project financing more seriously. It's because its scope has expanded to the capital cost of US$10 million or more across all industry sectors regardless of developing countries or not. It should be noted that, for a Korean bank, being an Equator bank is more or less burdensome in a short-term period, but it must be conducive to minimizing risks and building up good reputation in the long run.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.107-120
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• 2014

This study proposes a novel recommender system using the structural hole analysis to reflect qualitative and emotional information in recommendation process. Although collaborative filtering (CF) is known as the most popular recommendation algorithm, it has some limitations including scalability and sparsity problems. The scalability problem arises when the volume of users and items become quite large. It means that CF cannot scale up due to large computation time for finding neighbors from the user-item matrix as the number of users and items increases in real-world e-commerce sites. Sparsity is a common problem of most recommender systems due to the fact that users generally evaluate only a small portion of the whole items. In addition, the cold-start problem is the special case of the sparsity problem when users or items newly added to the system with no ratings at all. When the user's preference evaluation data is sparse, two users or items are unlikely to have common ratings, and finally, CF will predict ratings using a very limited number of similar users. Moreover, it may produces biased recommendations because similarity weights may be estimated using only a small portion of rating data. In this study, we suggest a novel limitation of the conventional CF. The limitation is that CF does not consider qualitative and emotional information about users in the recommendation process because it only utilizes user's preference scores of the user-item matrix. To address this novel limitation, this study proposes cluster-indexing CF model with the structural hole analysis for recommendations. In general, the structural hole means a location which connects two separate actors without any redundant connections in the network. The actor who occupies the structural hole can easily access to non-redundant, various and fresh information. Therefore, the actor who occupies the structural hole may be a important person in the focal network and he or she may be the representative person in the focal subgroup in the network. Thus, his or her characteristics may represent the general characteristics of the users in the focal subgroup. In this sense, we can distinguish friends and strangers of the focal user utilizing the structural hole analysis. This study uses the structural hole analysis to select structural holes in subgroups as an initial seeds for a cluster analysis. First, we gather data about users' preference ratings for items and their social network information. For gathering research data, we develop a data collection system. Then, we perform structural hole analysis and find structural holes of social network. Next, we use these structural holes as cluster centroids for the clustering algorithm. Finally, this study makes recommendations using CF within user's cluster, and compare the recommendation performances of comparative models. For implementing experiments of the proposed model, we composite the experimental results from two experiments. The first experiment is the structural hole analysis. For the first one, this study employs a software package for the analysis of social network data - UCINET version 6. The second one is for performing modified clustering, and CF using the result of the cluster analysis. We develop an experimental system using VBA (Visual Basic for Application) of Microsoft Excel 2007 for the second one. This study designs to analyzing clustering based on a novel similarity measure - Pearson correlation between user preference rating vectors for the modified clustering experiment. In addition, this study uses 'all-but-one' approach for the CF experiment. In order to validate the effectiveness of our proposed model, we apply three comparative types of CF models to the same dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the other comparative models. In especial, the proposed model significantly performs better than two comparative modes with the cluster analysis from the statistical significance test. However, the difference between the proposed model and the naive model does not have statistical significance.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea TC
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• v.49 no.1
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• pp.31-46
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• 2012

The most critical technology to implement ubiquitous health care is Ubiquitous Sensor Network (USN) technology which makes use of various sensor technologies, processor integration technology, and wireless network technology-Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and Wireless Sensor Network (WSN)-to easily gather and monitor actual physical environment information from a remote site. With the feature, the USN technology can make the information technology of the existing virtual space expanded to actual environments. However, although the RFID and the WSN have technical similarities and mutual effects, they have been recognized to be studied separately, and sufficient studies have not been conducted on the technical integration of the RFID and the WSN. Therefore, EPCglobal which realized the issue proposed the EPC Sensor Network to efficiently integrate and interoperate the RFID and WSN technologies based on the international standard EPCglobal network. The proposed EPC Sensor Network technology uses the Complex Event Processing method in the middleware to integrate data occurring through the RFID and the WSN in a single environment and to interoperate the events based on the EPCglobal network. However, as the EPC Sensor Network technology continuously performs its operation even in the case that the minimum conditions are not to be met to find complex events in the middleware, its operation cost rises. Moreover, since the technology is based on the EPCglobal network, it can neither perform its operation only for the sake of sensor data, nor connect or interoperate with each information system in which the most important information in the ubiquitous computing environment is saved. Therefore, to address the problems of the existing system, we proposed the design and implementation of USN integration management system. For this, we first proposed an integration system that manages RFID and WSN data based on Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). Secondly, we defined the minimum conditions of the complex events to detect unnecessary complex events in the middleware, and proposed an algorithm that can extract complex events only when the minimum conditions are to be met. To evaluate the performance of the proposed methods we implemented SIP-based integration management system.

• Korean Journal of Heritage: History & Science
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• v.53 no.4
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• pp.198-215
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• 2020

Official development assistance refers to assistance provided by governments and other public institutions in donor countries, aimed at promoting economic development and social welfare in developing countries. The purpose of this research is to examine the construction process of the "Myanmar Cultural Heritage Management System" that is underway as part of the ODA project to strengthen cultural and artistic capabilities and analyze the achievements and challenges of the Digital Cultural Heritage ODA. The digital cultural heritage management system is intended to achieve the permanent preservation and sustainable utilization of tangible and intangible cultural heritage materials. Cultural heritage can be stored in digital archives, newly approached using computer analysis technology, and information can be used in multiple dimensions. First, the Digital Cultural Heritage ODA was able to permanently preserve cultural heritage content that urgently needed digitalization by overcoming and documenting the "risk" associated with cultural heritage under threat of being extinguished, damaged, degraded, or distorted in Myanmar. Second, information on Myanmar's cultural heritage can be systematically managed and used in many ways through linkages between materials. Third, cultural maps can be implemented that are based on accurate geographical location information as to where cultural heritage is located or inherited. Various items of cultural heritage were collectively and intensively visualized to maximize utility and convenience for academic, policy, and practical purposes. Fourth, we were able to overcome the one-sided limitations of cultural ODA in relations between donor and recipient countries. Fifth, the capacity building program run by officials in charge of the beneficiary country, which could be the most important form of sustainable development in the cultural ODA, was operated together. Sixth, there is an implication that it is an ODA that can be relatively smooth and non-face-to-face in nature, without requiring the movement of manpower between countries during the current global pandemic. However, the following tasks remain to be solved through active discussion and deliberation in the future. First, the content of the data uploaded to the system should be verified. Second, to preserve digital cultural heritage, it must be protected from various threats. For example, it is necessary to train local experts to prepare for errors caused by computer viruses, stored data, or operating systems. Third, due to the nature of the rapidly changing environment of computer technology, measures should also be discussed to address the problems that tend to follow when new versions and programs are developed after the end of the ODA project, or when developers have not continued to manage their programs. Fourth, since the classification system criteria and decisions regarding whether the data will be disclosed or not are set according to Myanmar's political judgment, it is necessary to let the beneficiary country understand the ultimate purpose of the cultural ODA project.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.5 no.5
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• pp.1-15
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• 2004

In this paper, we explain the design and implementation of GWB(Gene WorkBench), which is a web-based, integrated system for efficiently managing and analyzing genomic sequences, Most existing software systems handling genomic sequences rarely provide both managing facilities and analyzing facilities. The analysis programs also tend to be unit programs that include just single or some part of the required functions. Moreover, these programs are widely distributed over Internet and require different execution environments. As lots of manual and conversion works are required for using these programs together, many life science researchers suffer great inconveniences. in order to overcome the problems of existing systems and provide a more convenient one for helping genomic researches in effective ways, this paper integrates both managing facilities and analyzing facilities into a single system called GWB. Most important issues regarding the design of GWB are how to integrate many different analysis programs into a single software system, and how to provide data or databases of different formats required to run these programs. In order to address these issues, GWB integrates different analysis programs byusing common input/output interfaces called wrappers, suggests a common format of genomic sequence data, organizes local databases consisting of a relational database and an indexed sequential file, and provides facilities for converting data among several well-known different formats and exporting local databases into XML files.

• Progress in Medical Physics
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.85-91
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• 2013

At present, megavoltage computed tomography (MVCT) is the only method used to correct the position of tomotherapy patients. MVCT produces extra radiation, in addition to the radiation used for treatment, and repositioning also takes up much of the total treatment time. To address these issues, we suggest the use of a video image-guided setup (VIGS) system for correcting the position of tomotherapy patients. We developed an in-house program to correct the exact position of patients using two orthogonal images obtained from two video cameras installed at $90^{\circ}$ and fastened inside the tomotherapy gantry. The system is programmed to make automatic registration possible with the use of edge detection of the user-defined region of interest (ROI). A head-and-neck patient is then simulated using a humanoid phantom. After taking the computed tomography (CT) image, tomotherapy planning is performed. To mimic a clinical treatment course, we used an immobilization device to position the phantom on the tomotherapy couch and, using MVCT, corrected its position to match the one captured when the treatment was planned. Video images of the corrected position were used as reference images for the VIGS system. First, the position was repeatedly corrected 10 times using MVCT, and based on the saved reference video image, the patient position was then corrected 10 times using the VIGS method. Thereafter, the results of the two correction methods were compared. The results demonstrated that patient positioning using a video-imaging method ($41.7{\pm}11.2$ seconds) significantly reduces the overall time of the MVCT method ($420{\pm}6$ seconds) (p<0.05). However, there was no meaningful difference in accuracy between the two methods (x=0.11 mm, y=0.27 mm, z=0.58 mm, p>0.05). Because VIGS provides a more accurate result and reduces the required time, compared with the MVCT method, it is expected to manage the overall tomotherapy treatment process more efficiently.