• Journal of Korean Neurosurgical Society
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• v.64 no.1
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• pp.4-12
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• 2021

Spinal metastases can present with varying degrees of mechanical instability. The Spinal Instability Neoplastic Score (SINS) was developed as a tool to assess spinal neoplastic-related instability while helping to guide referrals among oncology specialists. Some previous papers suggested that the SINS was accurate and reliable, while others disagreed with this opinion. We performed a systematic review regarding the SINS to evaluate its accuracy and precision in predicting vertebral compression fractures (VCFs). The 21 included studies investigated a total of 2118 patients. Thirteen studies dealt with the accuracy of SINS to predict post-radiotherapy VCFs, and eight dealt with the precision. Among 13 studies, 11 agreed that the SINS categories showed statistically significant accuracy in predicting VCF. Among eight studies, body collapse was effective for predicting VCFs in six studies, and alignment and bone lesion in two studies. Location has no statistical significance in predicting VCFs in any of the eight studies. The precision of SINS categories was substantial to excellent in six of eight studies. Among the six components of the SINS, the majority of the included studies reported that location showed near perfect agreement; body collapse, alignment, and posterolateral involvement showed moderate agreement; and bone lesion showed fair agreement. Bone lesion showed significant accuracy in predicting VCFs in half of eight studies, but displayed fair reliability in five of seven studies. Although location was indicated as having near perfect reliability, the component showed no accuracy for predicting VCFs in any of the studies and deleting or modifying the item needs to be considered. The SINS system may be accurate and reliable in predicting the occurrence of post-radiotherapy VCFs for spinal metastasis. Some components seem to be substantially weak and need to be revised.

• Journal of the Korea Organic Resources Recycling Association
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.151-163
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• 2022

This study was conducted to promote organic fertilizer(s) that sustain soil productivity for corn production and protect the environment as required by the Act on the promotion of eco-friendly agriculture. It was conducted at the research station of the Organic Agriculture Division of the National Institute of Agricultural. The treatments consisted of Compost (Com), Bokashi as fermented organic fertilizer (FOF), and mixed expeller pressed cake (PC). They were applied at 174 kg N /ha to field corn, together with a 'no fertilizer' check in Randomized Complete Block Design. At eight weeks after transplanting (WAT) corn, compost increased soil carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) to 7.48 and 0.76 g/kg respectively, while other fertilizers maintained the initial levels (before treatment application). At corn harvest (13 WAT), soil chemical properties (total C, total N, pH, electrical conductivity, P₂O₅, Ca, K, and Mg) were similar among all organic fertilizer treatments. For soil respiration, FOF increased soil CO₂ respiration by 31-76% above other fertilizer treatments. However, there were no prominent changes in the trends of CH₄ fluxes following the two mechanical weeding operations. Fermented organic fertilizer affected N₂O emissions between 87-96% lower than other fertilizer treatments. Compared to the initial microbial densities, FOF increased fungi and actinomycete colony foming unit by 25 and 16% at harvest. Therefore, the additional potential of improving soil biological fertility and local availability of raw materials make FOF a better option to sustain soil productivity while protecting the environment.

• Journal of the Korean GEO-environmental Society
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.5-12
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• 2011

In this paper, after studying structural performance for the representative corrugated steel plate used in Korea, we proposed the optimum shape for section of corrugated steel plate considering a width of steel plates that can be produced currently in the factory. Using AISI(1986) in examination for the performance of the corrugated steel plate, we determined the mechanical limit of the optimum sections considering shear force and bending moment of corrugated steel plate and also determined the geometric limit of them considering formability, shapes and ratio between width of steel plate before forming and that after forming. As a result of examination for performance of steel plate applying algorithm for searching optimal sections algorithm developed in this study to the existing representative corrugated steel plate, allowable force and moment of inertia indicated the maximum values at bending radius 76mm and internal bending angle $50^{\circ}$. And as an application result of the optimum design system that used SS490 with 1,550mm of width and 4,700mm of length considering current production situation in Korea, we developed the new section with more than 2 times of structural performance comparing with existing corrugated steel plate.

• Journal of Wetlands Research
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.189-200
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• 2021

To improve the water quality of agricultural reservoirs, constructed wetlands are applied in many places. These are technologies that establish ecosystems and important design factors include water depth distribution, inflow and outflow, water flow distribution, hydraulic residence time, water quality treatment efficiency, aspect ratio, and the distribution of open water and covered water surfaces. For high efficiency during the operation of a constructed wetland, the design needs to be optimized and this requires consideration of the different types and length of the intake dam as well as the type and connection of wetland cells. Therefore, this study was conducted to investigate and suggest factors that needs to be considered during the design and for efficient operation measures through field surveys of 23 constructed wetlands that have been established and operated in agricultural reservoirs. Results of the field investigation shows that several sites were being operated improperly due to the malfunctioning or failure of the water level sensors, sedimentation in the intake dam, and clogging of the mechanical sluice frames. In addition, it was found that as the length of the inlet channel increases, the ecological disconnection between the intake dam upstream and the wetland outlet downstream also increases and was identified as a problem. Most of the wetlands are composed of 2 to 5 cells which can result to poor hydraulic efficiency and difficulty in management if they are too large. Moreover, it was found that the flow through a small wetland can be inadequate when there are too many cells due to excessive amounts of headloss.

• Journal of Animal Science and Technology
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• v.63 no.2
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• pp.367-379
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• 2021

The objectives of this study were to evaluate convolutional neural network models and computer vision techniques for the classification of swine posture with high accuracy and to use the derived result in the investigation of the effect of dietary fiber level on the behavioral characteristics of the pregnant sow under low and high ambient temperatures during the last stage of gestation. A total of 27 crossbred sows (Yorkshire × Landrace; average body weight, 192.2 ± 4.8 kg) were assigned to three treatments in a randomized complete block design during the last stage of gestation (days 90 to 114). The sows in group 1 were fed a 3% fiber diet under neutral ambient temperature; the sows in group 2 were fed a diet with 3% fiber under high ambient temperature (HT); the sows in group 3 were fed a 6% fiber diet under HT. Eight popular deep learning-based feature extraction frameworks (DenseNet121, DenseNet201, InceptionResNetV2, InceptionV3, MobileNet, VGG16, VGG19, and Xception) used for automatic swine posture classification were selected and compared using the swine posture image dataset that was constructed under real swine farm conditions. The neural network models showed excellent performance on previously unseen data (ability to generalize). The DenseNet121 feature extractor achieved the best performance with 99.83% accuracy, and both DenseNet201 and MobileNet showed an accuracy of 99.77% for the classification of the image dataset. The behavior of sows classified by the DenseNet121 feature extractor showed that the HT in our study reduced (p < 0.05) the standing behavior of sows and also has a tendency to increase (p = 0.082) lying behavior. High dietary fiber treatment tended to increase (p = 0.064) lying and decrease (p < 0.05) the standing behavior of sows, but there was no change in sitting under HT conditions.

• Journal of the Korean Recycled Construction Resources Institute
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.571-580
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• 2020

In this study, an experimental study on storage media for thermal energy storage system was conducted. For thermal energy storage medium, concrete has excellent thermal and mechanical properties and also has various advantages due to its low cost. In addition, the ultra-high strength concrete reinforced by steel fibers exhibits excellent durability against exposure to high temperatures due to its high toughness and high strength characteristics. Moreover, the high thermal conductivity of steel fibers has an advantageous effect on heat storage and heat dissipation. Therefore, to investigate the temperature distribution characteristics of ultra-high-strength concrete, concrete blocks were fabricated and a heating test was performed by applying high-temperature thermal cycles. The heat transfer pipe was buried in the center of the concrete block for heat transfer by heat fluid flow. In order to explore the temperature distribution characteristics according to different shapes of the heat transfer pipe, a round pipe and a longitudinal fin pipe were used. The temperature distribution at the differnent thermal cycles were analyzed, and the thermal energy and the cumulated thermal energy over time were calculated and analyzed for comparison based on test results.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.446-452
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• 2021

As a higher standard for food consumption is required, the consumption of chicken meat that can satisfy the subdivided food preferences is increasing. In March 2003, the quality criteria for chicken carcasses notified by the Livestock Quality Assessment Service suggested quality grades according to fecal contamination and the size and weight of blood and bruises. On the other hand, it is too difficult for human inspection to qualify mass products, which is key to maintaining consistency for grading thousands of chicken carcasses. This paper proposed the computer vision algorithm as a non-destructive inspection, which can identify chicken carcass parts according to the detailed standards. To inspect the chicken carcasses conveyed at high speed, the image calibration was involved in providing robustness to the side effect of external lighting interference. The separation between chicken and background was achieved by a series of image processing, such as binarization based on Expectation Maximization, Erosion, and Labeling. In terms of shape analysis of chicken carcasses, the features are presented to reveal geometric information. After applying the algorithm to 78 chicken carcass samples, the algorithm was effective in segmenting chicken carcass against a background and analyzing its geometric features.

• The Journal of Korea Institute of Information, Electronics, and Communication Technology
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.22-28
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• 2021

Multivariate processes, such as chemical and mechanical process, power plants are operated in a state where several facilities are complexly connected, the fault of a particular system can also have fatal consequences for the entire process. In addition, since process data is measured in an unstable environment, outlier is likely to be include in the data. Therefore, monitoring technology is essential, which can remove outlier from measured data and detect failures in advance. In this paper, data obtained from dynamic and multivariate process models was used to detect fault in various type of processes. The dynamic process is a simulation of a process with autoregressive property, and the multivariate process is a model that describes a situation when a specific sensor fault. Mahalanobis distance was used to remove outlier contained in the data generated by dynamic process model and multivariate process model, and fault detection was performed using ICA. For comparison, we compared performance with and a conventional single ICA method. The proposed fault detection method improves performance by 0.84%p for bias data and 6.82%p for drift data in the dynamic process. In the case of the multivariate process, the performance was improves by 3.78%p, therefore, the proposed method showed better fault detection performance.

• The Korean Journal of Pain
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.58-65
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• 2021

Background: Supraspinal delivery of neurotensin (NTS), which may contribute to the effect of a systemically administered agonist, has been reported to be either pronociceptive or antinociceptive. Here, we evaluated the effects of systemically administered NTSR1 agonist in a rat model of neuropathic pain and elucidated the underlying supraspinal mechanism. Methods: Neuropathic pain was induced by L5 and L6 spinal nerve ligation in male Sprague-Dawley rats. The effects of intraperitoneally administered NTSR1 agonist PD 149163 was assessed using von Frey filaments. To examine the role of 5-HT neurotransmission, a serotonin (5-HT) receptor antagonist dihydroergocristine was pretreated intrathecally, and spinal microdialysis studies were performed to measure the change in extracellular level of 5-HT in response to PD 149163 administration. To investigate the supraspinal mechanism, NTSR1 antagonist 48692 was microinjected into the rostral ventromedial medulla (RVM) prior to systemic PD 149163. Additionally, the effect of intrathecal DHE on intra-RVM PD 149163 was assessed. Results: Intraperitoneally administered PD 149163 exhibited a dose-dependent attenuation of mechanical allodynia. This effect was partially reversed by intrathecal pretreatment with dihydroergocristine and was accompanied by an increased extracellular level of 5-HT in the spinal cord. The PD 149163-produced antinociception was also blocked by intra-RVM SB 48692. Direct injection of PD 149163 into the RVM mimicked the maximum effect of the same drug delivered intraperitoneally, which was reversed by intrathecal dihydroergocristine. Conclusions: These observations indicate that systemically administered NTSR1 agonist produces antinociception through the NTSR1 in the RVM, activating descending serotonergic projection to release 5-HT into the spinal dorsal horn.

• The Korean Journal of Pain
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.27-34
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• 2021

Background: Chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy (CIPN) is a major reason for stopping or changing anticancer therapy. Among the proposed pathomechanisms underlying CIPN, proinflammatory processes have attracted increasing attention. Here we assessed the role of prostaglandin D2 (PGD2) signaling in cisplatin-induced neuropathic pain. Methods: CIPN was induced by intraperitoneal administration of cisplatin 2 mg/kg for 4 consecutive days using adult male Sprague-Dawley rats. PGD2 receptor DP1 and/or DP2 antagonists were administered intrathecally and the paw withdrawal thresholds were measured using von Frey filaments. Spinal expression of DP1, DP2, hematopoietic PGD synthase (H-PGDS), and lipocalin PGD synthase (L-PGDS) proteins were analyzed by western blotting. Results: The DP1 and DP2 antagonist AMG 853 and the selective DP2 antagonist CAY10471, but not the DP1 antagonist MK0524, significantly increased the paw withdrawal threshold compared to vehicle controls (P = 0.004 and P < 0.001, respectively). Western blotting analyses revealed comparable protein expression levels in DP1 and DP2 in the spinal cord. In the CIPN group the protein expression level of L-PGDS, but not of H-PGDS, was significantly increased compared to the control group (P < 0.001). Conclusions: The findings presented here indicate that enhanced PGD2 signaling, via upregulation of L-PGDS in the spinal cord, contributes to mechanical allodynia via DP2 receptors in a cisplatin-induced neuropathic pain model in rats, and that a blockade of DP2 receptor activation may present a novel therapeutic target for managing CIPN.