• Biomedical Science Letters
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.17-23
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• 2009

The prevalence of patent foramen ovale (PFO) in healthy persons was estimated as about $10{\sim}25%$ and was up to 40% in patients with stroke. Transesophageal echocardiography (TEE) was considered to be the most sensitive method to detect PFO and was used as the gold standard. Transcranial doppler sonography (TCD) of the middle cerebral artery (MCA) during a contrast (saline bubble) injection has recently been proposed as an alternative detecting method for PFO. In this study, we would like to know the difference between TCD value and TEE value in subjects with cryptogenic ischemic stroke. We performed TCD and TEE tests to detect PFO on 64 patients (30 women and 34 men, mean age was 59.4 years) with cryptogenic ischemic stroke. PFO prevalence through TCD was 45.3% (29 of 64 patients) and the prevalence through TEE was 34.4% (22 of 64 patients). There was no statistical significance between PFO test and TCD test (P=0.206). But TCD had a sensitivity of 90.9% (20 of 22 patients), specificity of 78.6% (33 of 42 patients), positive predictive value of 69.0% (20 of 29 patients), and negative predictive value of 94.3% (33 of 35 patients). We concluded that TCD was a highly sensitive method for detecting a right-left shunt. Therefore, the non-invasive TCD test is a method more effective than the anti-invasive TEE test in the cost and evaluation of the existence or nonexistence of right to left shunt in addition to the screening method of the cerebrovascular disorder. Considering these points, TCD test could be recommended for patients with cryptogenic ischemic stroke as a useful and convenient method for screening of the existence or nonexistence of a right to left shunt caused by PFO.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.251-256
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• 2011

Virtual colonoscopy is favored over conventional colonoscopy because its non-invasive procedure can avoid complications that may happen in a conventional approach and because it can cleanse colon electronically instead of uncomfortable conventional colon cleansing. Electronic Colon Cleansing(ECC) has to deal with not only removing tagged fecal material but also recovering Partial Volume Effect(PVE) due to tagging material. This paper proposes an ECC method restoring inherent natural PVE while previous approaches focused only on reducing PVE due to tagged fecal material. The proposed method reduces PVE using 3-dimensional adaptive density correction and then replaces tagged fecal material into air. Next, it generates natural PVE for the replaced air adjacent to soft tissue and finally makes smooth transition of gray values for soft tissue adjacent to the replaced air. The proposed method applied to eleven patient data, and showed promising results.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.285-290
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• 1998

Growth information of crops is essential for efficient control of greenhouse environment. However, a few non-invasive and continuous monitoring methods of crop growth has been developed. A computer vision system with a CCD camera and a frame grabber was developed to conduct non-destructive and intact plant growth analyses. The developed system was evaluated by conducting the growth analysis of lettuce. A linear model that explains the relationship between the relative crop coverage by the crop canopy and dry weight of a lettuce was presented. It was shown that this measurement method could estimate the dry weight from the relative crop coverage by the crop canopy. The result also showed that there was a high correlation between the projected top leaf area and the dry weight of the lettuce.

• Annals of Clinical Neurophysiology
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.154-159
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• 1999

Magnetoencephalography (MEG), the measurement of magnetic fields produced by neuronal current associated with normal and pathologic brain activities, is a totally noninvasive method for localizing functional regions of the brain. During the past several years, many clinical research centers are working to expand various fundamental functional brain regions, which can be easily localized, as well as to characterize magnetic abnormalities which accompany a wide variety of cerebral disease. At present, MEG is used in a number of clinical centers throughout the world for the presurgical functional localization of eloquent cortex, and for the non-invasive localization of epileptiform activity. And also, non-invasiveness means that it can be used for screening and repetitive follow-up measurement without concern for adverse effects. As procedures for activating various functional brain regions are standardized, and as the effects of specific cerebral diseases on the MEG are carefully documented in controlled studies, the number of routine neurological applications for MEG will increase significantly. In this paper, the basic principles of MEG are reviewed briefly with its clinical application to neurologic disease.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.25-30
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• 1999

The effectiveness of many greenhouse environment control methodologies depends on the growth information of crops. Acquisition of the growth information of crops requires a non-invasive and continuous monitoring method. Crop growth monitoring system using digital imaging technique was developed to conduct non-destructive and intact plant growth analyses. The monitoring system automatically measures crop growth information sends an appropriate control signal to the nutrient solution supplying system. To develop the monitoring system, a linear model that explains the relationship between the fresh weight and the top projected leaf area of a lettuce plant was developed from an experiment. The monitoring system was evaluated buy successive lettuce growing experiments. Results of the experiments showed that the developed system could estimate the fresh weight of lettuce from a lettuce image by using the linear model and generate an EC control signal according to the lettuce growth stage.

• The Journal of the Korean dental association
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• v.22 no.1 s.176
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• pp.37-48
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• 1984

Clinical assessment of bone-graft healing in the maxillofacial region is generally limited to clinical evaluation, radiographs, and biopsy. Sequential interpretation of osseous repair, more sensitive than with conventional radiography is possible with a non-invasive, non-destructive radionuclide method. Technetium-99m radionuclide bone scan was used in the evaluation of the progress of osteogenic activity in autologous iliac bone graft and freeze-dried bone allograft of dog's mandible. Bone scan was performed at 1wk, 2wk, 4wk, 6wk, and 8wk after grafting. In autologous graft the activity ratio for the graft bone remained greater than that of the host since 2자 after grafting; however, in lyophilized allograft the activity ratio for graft bone was greater than that of the host at 6자 after grafting.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.16 no.8
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• pp.3505-3508
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• 2015

Background: Ras genes are thought to play an important role in human cancer since they have been found to be activated frequently in several types of tumors including breast cancer, where the overall incidence of K-RAS oncogene activation is 0-10%. Evaluation of K-RAS gene not only for mutational frequency but also for mutation types in this downstream signaling gene pathway is necessary to determine the mechanisms of action. The present study was conducted to test the hypothesis that K-RAS activation is involved in breast cancer risk of south Indian population. Materials and Methods: A total of 70 paired pathologically confirmed tumor and non-tumor tissues from the same breast cancer patients were analysed for most common K-RAS mutations of codon 12,13 and 61 by polymerase chain reaction followed by restriction digestion and direct nucleotide sequencing method. Results: We found that a high rate of homozygous and heterozygous mutations of codon 12, but not codon 13 and 61, may influence the invasive ductal carcinoma of breast risk in this study. Conclusions: Our study indicated that only codon 12 may be involved in initiating breast carcinogenesis in India.

• Journal of Chest Surgery
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• v.53 no.4
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• pp.233-241
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• 2020

Vagal damage and subsequent pyloric denervation inevitably occur during esophagectomy, potentially leading to delayed gastric emptying (DGE). The choice of an optimal pyloric procedure to overcome DGE is important, as such procedures can lead to prolonged surgery, shortening of the conduit, disruption of the blood supply, and gastric dumping/bile reflux. This study investigated various pyloric methods and analyzed comparative studies in order to determine the optimal pyloric procedure. Surgical procedures for the pylorus include pyloromyotomy, pyloroplasty, or digital fracture. Botulinum toxin injection, endoscopic balloon dilatation, and erythromycin are non-surgical procedures. The scope, technique, and effects of these procedures are changing due to advances in minimally invasive surgery and postoperative interventions. Some comparative studies have shown that pyloric procedures are helpful for DGE, while others have argued that it is difficult to reach an objective conclusion because of the variety of definitions of DGE and evaluation methods. In conclusion, recent advances in interventional technology and minimally invasive surgery have led to questions regarding the practice of pyloric procedures. However, many clinicians still perform them and they are at least somewhat effective. To provide guidance on the optimal pyloric procedure, DGE should first be defined clearly, and a large-scale study with an objective evaluation method will then be required.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.56 no.11
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• pp.2051-2057
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• 2007

In Oriental medicine, the status of a tongue is the important indicator to diagnose one's health like physiological and clinicopathological changes of inner parts of the body. The method of tongue diagnosis is not only convenient but also non-invasive and widely used in Oriental medicine. However, tongue diagnosis is affected by examination circumstances a lot like a light source, patient's posture and doctor's condition. To develop an automatic tongue diagnosis system for an objective and standardized diagnosis, segmenting a tongue is inevitable but difficult since the colors of a tongue, lips and skin in a mouth are similar. The proposed method includes preprocessing, graph-based over-segmentation, detecting positions with a local minimum over shading, detecting edge with color difference and estimating edge geometry from the probable structure of a tongue, where preprocessing performs down-sampling to reduce computation time, histogram equalization and edge enhancement. A tongue was segmented from a face image with a tongue from a digital tongue diagnosis system by the proposed method. According to three oriental medical doctors' evaluation, it produced the segmented region to include effective information and exclude a non-tongue region. It can be used to make an objective and standardized diagnosis.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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• 2022.11a
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• pp.541-543
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• 2022

In recent years, retinal disorders have become a serious health concern. Retinal disorders develop slowly and without obvious signs. To avoid vision deterioration, early detection and treatment are critical. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a non-invasive and non-contact medical imaging technique used to acquire informative and high-resolution image of retinal area and underlying layers. Disease signs are difficult to detect because OCT images have many areas which are not related to any disease. In this paper, we present a deep learning-based method to perform multi-label classification on a long-tailed OCT dataset. Our method first extracts the region of interest and then performs the classification task. We achieve 98% accuracy, 92% sensitivity, and 99% specificity on our private OCT dataset. Using the heatmap generated from trained convolutional neural network, our method is more robust and explainable than previous approaches because it focuses on areas that contain disease signs.