• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.16 no.10
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• pp.4421-4427
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• 2015

Objectives: To investigate the prognosis significance of preoperative serum alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) and the correlation with clinicopathological factors of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients who underwent hepatectomy. Materials and Methods: Clinicopathological data of retrospective analysis were collected for 251 HCC patients undergoing hepatectomy in this study. According to preoperative AFP level, patients were categorized into AFP-negative (0-20ng/mL) and AFP-positive (>20 ng/mL) groups for Kaplan-Meier analysis and Cox proportional hazard regression modeling. Results: The results demonstrated that increased AFP was associated with longer prothrombin time (PTs), liver capsule invasion, low grade differentiation, and late Barcelona Clinic Liver Center (BCLC) stage. Moreover, the female patients had a greater prevalence of increased preoperative AFP than male patients [284.8 (3.975-3167.5) vs (3.653-140.65); Z-2.895, p=0.004]. The 1-, 3-, and 5-year recurrence-free survival (RFS) rates were 78.1, 57.5, and 40.6 % in the AFP-negative group and 61.8, 37.7, and 31.4 %, respectively, in the AFP-positive group (log-rank test 8.312, p=0.004). The 1-, 3-, and 5-year overall survival (OS) rates were 94.4, 83.8, and 62.3% in the AFP-negative group and 87.2, 60.0, and 36.7%, respectively, in the AFP-positive group. The difference was statistically significant (log-rank test, 16.884, p=0.000). Cox proportional-hazards model identified preoperative AFP to be an independent prognostic predictor of overall survival. Conclusions: Preoperative serum AFP is an independent predictor of prognosis among HCC patients following surgical resection. Female patients have a higher preoperative AFP than their male counterparts.

• Journal of Korean Neurosurgical Society
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• v.54 no.5
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• pp.399-404
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• 2013

Objective : The authors conducted a retrospective cohort study to determine prognostic factors and treatment outcomes of brain metastases (BM) from breast cancer (BC) after Gamma Knife radiosurgery (GKS). Methods : Pathologic and clinical features, and outcomes were analyzed in a cohort of 62 patients with BM from BC treated by GKS. The Kaplan- Meier method, the log-rank test, and Cox's proportional hazards model were used to assess prognostic factors. Results : Median survival after GKS was 73.0 weeks (95% confidence interval, 46.0-100.1). HER2+ [hazard ratio (HR) 0.441; p=0.045], Karnofsky performance scale (KPS) ${\geq}70$ (RR 0.416; p=0.050) and systemic chemotherapy after GKS (RR 0.282; p=0.001) were found to be a favorable prognostic factor of overall survival. Actuarial local control (LC) rate were $89.5{\pm}4.5%$ and $70.5{\pm}6.9%$ at 6 and 12 months after GKS, respectively. No prognostic factors were found to affect LC rate. Uni- and multivariate analysis revealed that the distant control (DC) rate was higher in patients with; a small number (${\leq}3$) of metastasis (HR 0.300; p=0.045), no known extracranial metastasis (p=0.013, log-rank test), or the HER2+ subtype (HR 0.267; p=0.027). Additional whole brain radiation therapy and metastasis volume were not found to be significantly associated with LC, DC, or overall survival. Conclusion : The treatment outcomes of patients with newly diagnosed BM from BC treated with GKS could be affected primarily by intrinsic subtype, KPS, and systemic chemotherapy. Therapeutic strategy and prognosis scoring system should be individualized based on considerations of intrinsic subtype in addition to traditionally known parameters related to stereotactic radiosurgery.

• Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences
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• v.30 no.3
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• pp.320-327
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• 2017

Objective: The objective of this research was to estimate genetic correlations between number of piglets born alive in the first parity (NBA1), litter birth weight in the first parity (LTBW1), number of piglets weaned in the first parity (NPW1), litter weaning weight in the first parity (LTWW1), number of piglets born alive from second to last parity (NBA2+), litter birth weight from second to last parity (LTBW2+), number of piglets weaned from second to last parity (NPW2+) and litter weaning weight from second to last parity (LTWW2+), and to identify the percentages of animals (the top 10%, 25%, and 50%) for first parity and sums of second and later parity traits. Methods: The 9,830 records consisted of 2,124 Landrace (L), 724 Yorkshire (Y), 2,650 LY, and 4,332 YL that had their first farrowing between July 1989 and December 2013. The 8-trait animal model included the fixed effects of first farrowing year-season, additive genetic group, heterosis of the sow and the litter, age at first farrowing, and days to weaning (NPW1, LTWW1, NPW2+, and LTWW2+). Random effects were animal and residual. Results: Heritability estimates ranged from $0.08{\pm}0.02$ (NBA1 and NPW1) to $0.29{\pm}0.02$ (NPW2+). Genetic correlations between reproduction traits in the first parity and from second to last parity ranged from $0.17{\pm}0.08$ (LTBW1 and LTBW2+) to $0.67{\pm}0.06$ (LTWW1 and LTWW2+). Phenotypic correlations between reproduction traits in the first parity and from second to last parity were close to zero. Rank correlations between LTWW1 and LTWW2+ estimated breeding value tended to be higher than for other pairs of traits across all replacement percentages. Conclusion: These rank correlations indicated that selecting boars and sows using genetic predictions for first parity reproduction traits would help improve reproduction traits in the second and later parities as well as lifetime productivity in this swine population.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.61-97
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• 2008

This paper aims at analyzing the practice of job rotation in the Korean government and putting forward policy suggestions. The Korean government is often accused of low capacity and weak competitiveness, which mainly result from the low expertise of public officials. Considering the high quality of human resources flowing into the public sector in Korea, solutions should be found from the structure of the system. This paper regards frequent position changes due to excessive job rotation as a key factor undermining the accumulation of expertise and conducts in-depth analyses. The current practice of frequent rotation shows that the average tenure period of government officials at director level and above is only about one year, far shorter than those in major developed countries, which causes many problems such as low efficiency, lack of accountability and policy consistency, and low opportunity for accumulating expertise. Simple models are set up to analyze job rotation and other alternative personnel management systems. Analyses find that it would be desirable to have each individual experience various positions during the initial rotation period to find his/her own aptitude, and then accumulate expertise by settling in at a certain specialized field for a prolonged period of time based on the revealed aptitude in mid and high positions. This turns out to be in line with the structure of the Career Development Program which is being introduced. The model-based analysis of this paper distinguishes this study from preceding ones conducted in the traditional framework of personnel management study. Practical measures to mitigate the problems of frequent job rotation include rotating within the area of specialty, narrowing the scope of transfer, and reinforcing the minimum tenure period. However, since the current frequent rotation is fundamentally attributable to the rank system based on seniority, the present civil service classification system needs to be converted into a position classification system in the long run.

• Journal of Dental Rehabilitation and Applied Science
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• v.35 no.4
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• pp.220-227
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• 2019

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to compare the degree of tooth preparation abilities of students according to three self-assessment methods. Materials and Methods: forty-eight sophomores in Kyungpook National University College of Dentistry were divided into three experimental groups. Students performed tooth preparation of the left mandibular first molar for full gold crown. They performed self-assessment using the three methods (visual, digital, and putty index self-assessment group), and reperformed tooth preparation. An intraoral scanner was used to scan each tooth model (prepared tooth and unprepared tooth), and data were acquired in standard tessellation language (STL) file format. The STL files of prepared tooth and unprepared tooth were superimposed using the 3-dimensional analysis software (Geomagic control X). And the reduction amount was measured. In the statistical analysis, all values of reduction amount were analyzed with the Wilcoxon signed rank test and Kruskal-Wallis test (α = 0.05). Results: The three self-assessment methods showed statistically significant differences (P < 0.001). The putty index self-assessment group showed the highest reduction in error than the digital self-assessment method. Conclusion: Within limitations of this study, students showed significant differences in improvement of tooth preparation ability according to the three self-evaluation methods.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.1-10
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• 2001

The purpose of this thesis is to classify landscape-type of golf course, and t provide a better understanding of landscape of existing golf courses, seek a developed method for landscape, and other useful knowledge. In order to classify landscape type of the golf course, and analyze the preference for the determinants, we have selected 4 golf courses in Yongin, Kyonggi Province. The analysis in this study shows that a variable, 'familiarity' is the most potent influence of visual preference, (Sig 0.01), and it can be divided into five classes of landscape-type in golf course. More specifically, we conducted the analysis of the image of views and visual preference to bring out major factors which could decide visual preference in golf courses. The results between visual preference and physical variable are as follows; 1. It implies that a factor for a image of the view in golf course is analyzed by 4 districts from factor 1 to factor 4. An ability explaining those factors in the whole of variable quantity is 51.742%, implying factors for the image of the scene in golf courses are appeared as familiarity, changeableness, spaciousness, and naturalness. Among those factors, since familiarity(C.V.; 26.783%) and changeableness(C.V.; 112.200%) took high rank, this represents the fact that familiarity or changeableness highly affects the forming of image. 2. Defending on degree of image ability in golf course, we could classify as five types such as Type I, Type II, Type II, Type IV, and Type V. 3. As a result of calculating type of factor score, Type I had the lowest ranking in naturalness, and rather lower than others such as organization and spaciousness. The II is a top-ranked one in familiarity and naturalness, while it has the lowest ranking in spaciousness. Type III has the highest ranking in organization and preference. Type IV is the lowest-ranked one in familiarity and preference. Type IV is the lowest-ranked one is familiarity and preference. Type V has the highest ranking in spaciousness, but the lowest ranking in organization. 4. As a result of preference, Type III, Type II, Type V, Type I, and Type IV come out in order. That water-seen place type charges the highest rank shows the importance of changeable materials. 5. These factors-familiarity, organization, spaciousness and naturalness- are the major materials of the scene of view in golf courses. The possibility of how to use those for designing and making enhanced golf courses should be reinvestigated through these factors. Especially, it is acknowledged that the duction of changeableness, which is not mentioned in the study of informational approach, is much stimulating for the designing use. A further research on this theme should be made in the future, not limiting to the golf courses in Yongin.

• Journal of Gastric Cancer
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.268-278
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• 2021

Purpose: While several prognostic models for the stratification of death risk have been developed for patients with advanced gastric cancer receiving first-line chemotherapy, they have seldom been tested in the Chinese population. This study investigated the performance of these models and identified the optimal tools for Chinese patients. Materials and Methods: Patients diagnosed with metastatic or recurrent gastric adenocarcinoma who received first-line chemotherapy were eligible for inclusion in the validation cohort. Their clinical data and survival outcomes were retrieved and documented. Time-dependent receiver operating characteristic (ROC) and calibration curves were used to evaluate the predictive ability of the models. Kaplan-Meier curves were plotted for patients in different risk groups divided by 7 published stratification tools. Log-rank tests with pairwise comparisons were used to compare survival differences. Results: The analysis included a total of 346 patients with metastatic or recurrent disease. The median overall survival time was 11.9 months. The patients were different into different risk groups according to the prognostic stratification models, which showed variability in distinguishing mortality risk in these patients. The model proposed by Kim et al. showed relative higher predicting abilities compared to the other models, with the highest χ² (25.8) value in log-rank tests across subgroups, and areas under the curve values at 6, 12, and 24 months of 0.65 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.59-0.72), 0.60 (0.54-0.65), and 0.63 (0.56-0.69), respectively. Conclusions: Among existing prognostic tools, the models constructed by Kim et al., which incorporated performance status score, neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio, alkaline phosphatase, albumin, and tumor differentiation, were more effective in stratifying Chinese patients with gastric cancer receiving first-line chemotherapy.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.27 no.5
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• pp.794-807
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• 2022

Although registration of dogs is mandatory according to the revision of the Animal Protection Act, the registration rate is low due to the inconvenience of the current registration method. In this paper, a performance improvement study was conducted on the dog face recognition technology, which is being reviewed as a new registration method. Through deep learning learning, an embedding vector for facial recognition of a dog was created and a method for identifying each dog individual was experimented. We built a dog image dataset for deep learning learning and experimented with InceptionNet and ResNet-50 as backbone networks. It was learned by the triplet loss method, and the experiments were divided into face verification and face recognition. In the ResNet-50-based model, it was possible to obtain the best facial verification performance of 93.46%, and in the face recognition test, the highest performance of 91.44% was obtained in rank-5, respectively. The experimental methods and results presented in this paper can be used in various fields, such as checking whether a dog is registered or not, and checking an object at a dog access facility.

• Korean Journal of Radiology
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• v.22 no.12
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• pp.1974-1984
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• 2021

Objective: This study aimed to compare the efficacy between no-touch (NT) radiofrequency ablation (RFA) and conventional RFA using twin internally cooled wet (TICW) electrodes in the bipolar mode for the treatment of small hepatocellular carcinomas (HCC). Materials and Methods: In this single-center, two-arm, parallel-group, prospective randomized controlled study, we performed a 1:1 random allocation of eligible patients with HCCs to receive NT-RFA or conventional RFA between October 2016 and September 2018. The primary endpoint was the cumulative local tumor progression (LTP) rate after RFA. Secondary endpoints included technical conversion rates of NT-RFA, intrahepatic distance recurrence, extrahepatic metastasis, technical parameters, technical efficacy, and rates of complications. Cumulative LTP rates were analyzed using Kaplan-Meier analysis and the Cox proportional hazard regression model. Considering conversion cases from NT-RFA to conventional RFA, intention-to-treat and as-treated analyses were performed. Results: Enrolled patients were randomly assigned to the NT-RFA group (37 patients with 38 HCCs) or the conventional RFA group (36 patients with 38 HCCs). Among the NT-RFA group patients, conversion to conventional RFA occurred in four patients (10.8%, 4/37). According to intention-to-treat analysis, both 1- and 3-year cumulative LTP rates were 5.6%, in the NT-RFA group, and they were 11.8% and 21.3%, respectively, in the conventional RFA group (p = 0.073, log-rank). In the as-treated analysis, LTP rates at 1 year and 3 years were 0% and 0%, respectively, in the NT-RFA group sand 15.6% and 24.5%, respectively, in the conventional RFA group (p = 0.004, log-rank). In as-treated analysis using multivariable Cox regression analysis, RFA type was the only significant predictive factor for LTP (hazard ratio = 0.061 with conventional RFA as the reference, 95% confidence interval = 0.000-0.497; p = 0.004). There were no significant differences in the procedure characteristics between the two groups. No procedure-related deaths or major complications were observed. Conclusion: NT-RFA using TICW electrodes in bipolar mode demonstrated significantly lower cumulative LTP rates than conventional RFA for small HCCs, which warrants a larger study for further confirmation.

• Journal of Animal Science and Technology
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• v.48 no.2
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• pp.143-150
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• 2006

The data were collected in the dairy herd improvement program from January 2000 to July 2005. Test data included 825,157 records of first parity and animals with both parents known were included. This study aimed to describe the effect of incomplete lactation records of latest generation to the change in sire's breeding value using Random Regression model (RRM) in genetic evaluation. Estimation of genetic parameter and breeding value for sire used REMLF90 and BLUPF90 program. The phenotypic value on the number of test day records between group TD11, TD8, TD5, TD2 showed no large differences. For all the group heritability of test day milk yield range from 0.30 to 0.36. However TD2 group showed low heritability the least test day recode on the latest generation. The correlation of above 50% between test day and TD11(0.610), TD8(0.616), TD5(0.661) and TD2(0.682) with different records in latest generation. Sire's rank of breeding value varied widely depending on the records on the number of lactation from start to the latest generation. Study showed that change in breeding value ranked if daughter's test recode more so it should have at least 5 test day records. The use of RRM in dairy cattle genetic evaluation would be desirable if complete lactation records for latest generation daughters of young bulls when selection for proven bulls. Random Regression model (RRM) require at least 5 test-day lactation recode.