• Investigative Magnetic Resonance Imaging
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.139-145
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• 2011

Purpose : To assess the frequency and severity of acute adverse reactions to intravenous administration of gadolinium-based contrast agents using computerized reporting system at a single large academic institution. Materials and Methods : We assessed data from electronic hospital information system from October 2008 to December 2010. Reactions were classified as mild, moderate, or severe. We compared the frequency of adverse reactions among three contrast agents (Gd-BT-DO3A, Gd-DTPA and Gd-EOB-DTPA). Results : The total number of administrated contrast agents was 33,600, and the number of administration of Gd-BT-DO3A, Gd-DTPA and Gd-EOB-DTPA were 20,824 (62%), 10,417 (31%) and 2,359 (7%), respectively. Total 39 adverse reactions were reported accounting for 0.1161% of all administrations. The incidences of adverse reactions were 0.1248% (26/39, 67%) for Gd-BT-DO3A, 0.0768% (8/39, 21%) for Gd-DTPA, and 0.2120% (5/39, 13%) for Gd-EOB-DTPA. The difference of frequencies of adverse reaction among three contrast agents was not significant. Most cases of the adverse effect were mild (35/39, 89.7%). Moderate and severe adverse reactions were encountered in two patients, respectively. Conclusion : Among Koreans, adverse effects were rare, and especially, moderate to severe adverse reactions were much rarer. There was no difference among the frequencies of adverse reactions caused by three different contrast agents.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.47-53
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• 2015

Quantitative analysis of MR spectrum depending on mole concentration of the contrast media in cereberal metabolite phantom was performed. PRESS pulse sequence was used to obtain MR spectrum at 3.0T MRI system (Archieva, Philips Healthcare, Best, Netherland), and the phantom contains brain metabolites such as N-Acetyl Asparatate (NAA), Choline (Cho), Creatine (Cr) and Lactate (Lac). In this study, optimization of MRS PRESS pulse sequency depending on the concentration of contrast media (0, 0.1 and $0.3mmol/{\ell}$) was evaluated for various repetition time(TR; 1500, 1700 and 2000 ms). In control (cotrast-media-free) group, NAA and Cho signals were the highest at TR 2000 ms than at 1700 and 1500 ms. Cr had the highest peak signal at TR 1500 ms. When concentration of contrast media was $0.1mmol/{\ell}$, the metabolites were increased NAA 73%, Cho 249%, Cr 37% at TR 1700 ms compared with other TR, and also signal increased at $0.3mmol/{\ell}$, In $0.5mmol/{\ell}$ of contrast agent, cerebral metabolite peaks reduced, especially when TR 1500 ms and 2000 ms they decreased below those of control group. The ratio of metabolite peaks such as NAA/Cr and Cho/Cr decreased as the concentration of the contrast agent increased from 0.1 to $0.5mmol/{\ell}$. Authors found that the optimization of PRESS sequence for 0.3T MRS was as follows: low density of contrast agent ($0.1mmol/{\ell}$ and $0.3mmol/{\ell}$) made the highest signal intensity, while high density of contrast agent reveals the least reduction of signal intensity at 1700 ms. In conclusion, authors believe that it is helpful to reduce TR for acquiring maximum signal intensity.

• Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging
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• v.40 no.3
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• pp.169-176
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• 2006

Purpose: According to the development of CT scanner in PET/CT system, the role of CT unit as a diagnostic tool has been more important. To improve the diagnostic ability of CT scanner, it is a key aspect that CT scanning has to be performed with high dose energy and intravenous (IV) contrast. So we investigated the effect of IV contrast media on the maximum SUV (maxSUV) of normal tissues and pathologic lesions using PET/CT scanner with high dose CT scanning. Materials & Methods: The study enrolled 13 patients who required PET/CT evaluation. At first, the patients were performed whole body non-contrast CT (NCCT-120 kVp, 130 mAs) scan. Then contrast enhanced CT (CECT) scan was performed immediately. Finally PET scan was followed. The PET omission data were reconstructed twice, once with the NCCT and again with the CECT. We measured the maxSUV of 10 different body regions that were considered as normal in ail patients. Also pathologic lesions were investigated. Results: There were not seen focal artifacts in PET images based on CT with IV contrast agent. Firstly, 130 normal regions in 13 patients were evaluated. The maxSUV was significantly different between two PET images (p<0.00)). The maxSUV was $1.1{\pm}0.5$ in PET images with CECT-corrected attenuation and $1.0{\pm}0.5$ in PET images with NCCI-corrected attenuation. The limit of agreement was $0.1{\pm}0.3$ in Bland-Altman analysis. Especially there were significant differences in 6 of 10 regions, apex and base of the right lung, ascending aorta, segment 6 & segment 8 of the liver and spleen (p<0.05). Secondly, 39 pathologic lesions were evaluated. The maxSUV was significantly different between two PET images (p<0.001). The maxSUV was $4.7{\pm}2.0$ in PET images with CECT-corrected attenuation and $4.4{\pm}2.0$ in PET images with NCCT-corrected attenuation. The limit of agreement was $0.4{\pm}0.8$ in Bland-Altman analysis. Conclusion: Although there were increases of maxSUVs in the PET images based on CT with IV contrast agent, it was very narrow in the range of limit of agreement. So there was no significant effect to clinical interpretation for PET images that were corrected attenuation with high dose CT using IV contrast.

• Journal of Korea Technical Association of The Pulp and Paper Industry
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.30-40
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• 1999

The possibility of the characterization of sheet formation by image analysis with transmitted light was evaluated. Specific perimenter, average perimeter and variation could not be used to predict the sheet formation because there were no corrleation. Although image analysis method still have a lot of problems , it was found that the contrast intensity obtained by image analysis with transmitted light can be used to predict the sheet formation. In the case of highly filled sheet, the intensity of transmitted light was too low to characterize the sheet formation . However, it was possible to characterize the formation of unfilled heavy weight paper($\leq$200g/㎡).

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2004.08a
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• pp.101-106
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• 2004

In this paper, a blood vessel in an angiographic image, which plays an importance role in the diagnose diseases including in the eyes, brain and heart, is enhanced by using a directed diffusion technique. A fundamental component of the angiographic analysis is vessel segmentation that the proposed method provides a preprocessing of the image into a form suitable for human analysis, or more importantly, for machine analysis such the segmentation. Vessel enhancement is a challenging problem due to the complex nature of vascular trees and to imaging imperfections. Some parts of the inherent imperfections in angiography are the intensity inhomogeneity between the larger and smaller vessels, and another imperfection is the leakage of contrast agent into the background tissue that provides to low contrast between vessels and tissue. In the proposed scheme, the directed diffusion solves the problem by formulating a local geometric structure, which consists of direction and scale of the blood vessels. The diffusion process uses the local structure to enhance by a diffusivity tensor. The proposed algorithm can be applied to maintain sharpness and coherence-smooth the intra-regions into homogeneity better than traditional diffusion methods, which are Gaussian regulation and coherence enhancing diffusion.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.31 no.6
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• pp.427-433
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• 2010

Although tracking methods are efficient and popular for vessel segmentation, they require a seed to initiate an instance of tracking. In this paper, a new method to detect new seeds for tracking of arterial segments from CT angiography (CTA) and to construct a vascular structure is proposed. The proposed algorithm is based on shape analysis of connected components in a volume of interest around a vessel segment which was already extracted by tracking. The eigenvalues of the covariance matrix are used as the shape features for detection. The experimental results on actual clinical data showed that the results totally revealed the arterial tree not hindered by bone or veins. In visual comparison to a method which combines registration and subtraction of both pre-contrast and post-contrast CT volumes, the proposed method produced comparable results to the reference method and were confirmed of its feasibility for clinical use of reducing the cost and burden of patients.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.7 no.5
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• pp.469-482
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• 2010

This paper investigates the concrete permeability through a numerical and statistical approach. Concrete is considered as a random heterogeneous composite of three phases: aggregates, interfacial transition zones (ITZ) and matrix. The paper begins with some classical bound and estimate theories applied to concrete permeability and the influence of ITZ on these bound and estimate values is discussed. Numerical samples for permeability analysis are established through random aggregate structure (RAS) scheme, each numerical sample containing randomly distributed aggregates coated with ITZ and dispersed in a homogeneous matrix. The volumetric fraction of aggregates is fixed and the size distribution of aggregates observes Fuller's curve. Then finite element method is used to solve the steady permeation problem on 2D numerical samples and the overall permeability is deduced from flux-pressure relation. The impact of ITZ on overall permeability is analyzed in terms of ITZ width and contrast ratio between ITZ and matrix permeabilities. Hereafter, 3680 samples are generated for 23 sample sizes and 4 contrast ratios, and statistical analysis is performed on the permeability dispersion in terms of sample size and ITZ characteristics. By sample theory, the size of representative volume element (RVE) for permeability is then quantified considering sample realization number and expected error. Concluding remarks are provided for the impact of ITZ on concrete permeability and its statistical characteristics.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.10B no.6
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• pp.629-638
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• 2003

In this paper, we propose an improved method of watermarking to increase the invisibility of a watermark and robustness against attacks for the purpose of removing the embedded watermark. The proposed method adaptively selects DCT blocks and determines position and intensity for watermarking based on the characteristics of human visual system. The used features are texture, luminance and contrast. We show the experimental results against image processing attacks such as cropping, image enhancement, low pass filtering, and JPEG compression, and then discuss the performance of the proposed method.

• Language and Information
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.81-102
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• 2014

The purpose of this paper is to provide corpus-based quantitative analyses of HEART and HEAD in order to examine their actual usage status and to consider some cognitive linguistic aspects associated with their use. The two corpora COCA and COHA are used for analysis in this study. The analysis of COCA corpus reveals that the total frequency of HEAD is much higher than that of HEART, and that the figurative use of HEART (60%) is two times higher than its literal use (32%); by contrast, the figurative use of HEAD (41%) is a bit higher than its literal use (38%). Among all four genres, both lexemes occur most frequently in fictions and then in magazines. Over the past two centuries, the use of HEART has been steadily decreasing; by contrast, that the use of HEAD has been steadily increasing. It is assumed that the decreasing use of HEART has partially to do with the decrease in its figurative use and that the increasing use of HEAD is attributable to its diverse meanings, the increase of its lexical use, and the partial increase in its figurative use. The analysis of the collocation of verbs and adjectives preceding HEART and HEAD, as well the modifying and predicating forms of HEART and HEAD also provides some relevant information of the usage of the two lexemes. This paper showcases that the quantitative information helps understanding not only of the actual usage of the two lexemes but also of the cognitive forces working behind it.

• Journal of Home Health Care Nursing
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.60-69
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• 2022

Purpose: This study aimed to investigate the research trends concerning job satisfaction among hospital nurses. Methods: Articles published between 2008 to 2018 were searched. In the first search, 10,859 articles were extracted from academic databases, and 168 were included. Results: A total of 36 variables were explored regarding job satisfaction. Among the major variables, organizational commitmentandculture and justice had positive correlations withjobsatisfaction. In contrast, burnout, negative affectivity, and turnover intention had negative correlations with it. In the meta-analysis, according to the conceptual framework, salary and promotions showed significant positive correlations with job satisfaction. In contrast, professionaldevelopment showed a significantly negative correlation with it. Conclusion: Strategies to improve the variables corresponding to motivation factors are required to improve job satisfaction among hospital nurses. Furthermore, efforts to improve the nursing work environment corresponding to hygiene factors are also required for efficiency and rational management at the hospital level.