• Korean Journal of Clinical Laboratory Science
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• v.49 no.4
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• pp.439-445
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• 2017

In recent years, change in life patterns gave rise to an increase in the number of families with companion animals, and as a result, frequent dermatophytes infections have been reported. Microsporum canis, Trichophyton mentagrophytes, and Trichophyton verrucosum, are among these species of zoophilic dermatophytes. Trichophyton mentagrophytes are transmitted to humans by contact with wild animals. Infection from it causes strong inflammation in humans. Conversely, Trichophyton verrucosum is transmitted by contact with cattles. Microsporum canis will become latent carriers in cats or dogs, causing infectious diseases when it comes in contact with humans. We investigated zoophilic dermatophytes isolated according to annual, sex, age, season, body sites, and clinical types between 2010 and 2016. According to our results, the isolation rate of zoophilic dermatophytes was 0.37%, among which, 88 T. mentagrophytes, 228 Microsporum canis, and 18 Trichophyton verrucosum were isolated in human. It is interesting to note that Microsporum canis has been on the rise since 2014. Microsporum canis and Trichophyton verrucosum were highly isolated in females, but T. mentagrophytes was isolated similarly in both sexes. According to an age-based survey, the isolation rate was higher in children younger than 10 years. Our results is a valuable data for predicting and studying the isolation of zoophilic dermatophytes in the future.

• Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases
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• v.62 no.1
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• pp.5-10
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• 2007

Background: Korean national guidelines for examining contacts with active pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) are a tuberculin skin test (TST) and chest radiographs. The treatment of a latent TB infection as performed only in those younger than six years of age who test positive for TST. Although there is a high incidence of active TB in young Korean soldiers, the current national guidelines for controlling contacts with active TB in soldiers are insufficient. This study highlights the problems with the Korean guidelines for controlling a TB outbreak in a small military unit. Material and Methods: In December of 2005, there was a tuberculosis outbreak in a military unit with a total of 464 soldiers in Kyung Gi province. The chest radiographs were taken of all the soldiers, and TST were carried out on 408 candidates. Results: In the first screening of the chest radiographs, two active TB patients were detected. By August of 2006, four additional cases were detected, making a total of six cases after the outbreak. All the patients showed active pulmonary TB or TB pleuritis. When the results of TST in the close contacts and non-close contacts were compared, there was a significant difference in the absolute size of the induration($9.70{\pm}7.50mm$ vs. $6.26{\pm}7.02mm$, p<0.001) as well as the ratio of patients showing an induration > 10mm (50.0% vs. 32.0%, p<0.001) and 15mm (33.2% vs. 20.9%, p= 0.005). Conclusion: Although the national guidelines for managing a TB outbreak in a military unit were followed, there were continuous instances of new active TB cases. This highlights the need for new guidelines to prevent the spread of TB.

• Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases
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• v.56 no.3
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• pp.268-279
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• 2004

Background : The tuberculin skin test has been used to diagnose latent tuberculosis infection, but is not widely used to diagnose or exclude pulmonary tuberculosis. The objective of this study was to evaluate the diagnostic utility of the tuberculin test in diagnosing and excluding pulmonary tuberculosis, and differentiating pulmonary tuberculosis from nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) pulmonary disease, when a sputum acid-fast bacilli (AFB) smear was positive. Material and Methods : From October 2002 to August 2003, among all the inpatients of the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Samsung Medical Center, 258 patients with clinical suspicion of pulmonary tuberculosis were enrolled and underwent a tuberculin test. Results : 156 males and 102 females were included, with a mean age of 57.5 years. The final diagnoses included lung cancer in 89 cases (34.5%), pulmonary tuberculosis in 59 cases (22.9%), bacterial pneumonia in 33 cases (12.8%) and NTM pulmonary disease in 24 cases (9.3%). The positive tuberculin test rate was higher in the tuberculosis than non-tuberculosis group; 81.4 (48/59) vs. 42.4% (81/199). (p<0.001). In 208 patients with a negative sputum AFB smear, the result of the tuberculin test was positive in 69.4% (25/36) of the tuberculosis group and in 44.8% (77/172) of the non-tuberculosis group (p=0.007), so a positive result of the tuberculin test could predict pulmonary tuberculosis with 69.4% sensitivity, 55.2% specificity, a 24.5% positive predictive value and a 89.6% negative predictive value. In 50 patients with a positive sputum AFB smear, the positive rates of the tuberculin test were 83.9% (26/31) in tuberculosis group and 21.1% (4/19) in NTM pulmonary disease group (p<0.001), so a positive result of the tuberculin skin test could predict pulmonary tuberculosis with 83.9% sensitivity, 78.9% specificity, a 86.7% positive predictive value and a 75.0% negative predictive value. Conclusion : The tuberculin test could be useful in excluding pulmonary tuberculosis when the sputum AFB smear is negative, and to differentiate pulmonary tuberculosis from NTM pulmonary disease when the sputum AFB smear is positive.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.155-174
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• 2022

From January 2020 to October 2021, more than 500,000 academic studies related to COVID-19 (Coronavirus-2, a fatal respiratory syndrome) have been published. The rapid increase in the number of papers related to COVID-19 is putting time and technical constraints on healthcare professionals and policy makers to quickly find important research. Therefore, in this study, we propose a method of extracting useful information from text data of extensive literature using LDA and Word2vec algorithm. Papers related to keywords to be searched were extracted from papers related to COVID-19, and detailed topics were identified. The data used the CORD-19 data set on Kaggle, a free academic resource prepared by major research groups and the White House to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, updated weekly. The research methods are divided into two main categories. First, 41,062 articles were collected through data filtering and pre-processing of the abstracts of 47,110 academic papers including full text. For this purpose, the number of publications related to COVID-19 by year was analyzed through exploratory data analysis using a Python program, and the top 10 journals under active research were identified. LDA and Word2vec algorithm were used to derive research topics related to COVID-19, and after analyzing related words, similarity was measured. Second, papers containing 'vaccine' and 'treatment' were extracted from among the topics derived from all papers, and a total of 4,555 papers related to 'vaccine' and 5,971 papers related to 'treatment' were extracted. did For each collected paper, detailed topics were analyzed using LDA and Word2vec algorithms, and a clustering method through PCA dimension reduction was applied to visualize groups of papers with similar themes using the t-SNE algorithm. A noteworthy point from the results of this study is that the topics that were not derived from the topics derived for all papers being researched in relation to COVID-19 (