• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.26 no.8
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• pp.403-408
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• 2007

In a large corpus-based speech synthesizer, a break, which is a parameter influencing the naturalness and intelligibility, is used as an important feature during a unit selection process. Japanese is a language having intonations, which ate indicated by the relative differences in pitch heights and the APs(Accentual Phrases) are placed according to the changes of the accents while a break occurs on a boundary of the APs. Although a break can be predicted by using J-ToBI(Japanese-Tones and Break Indices), which is a rule-based or statistical approach, it is very difficult to predict a break exactly due to the flexibility. Therefore, in this paper, a method is to conduct a unit search by dividing breaks into two types, such as a fixed break and a flexible break, in order to use the advantages of a large-scale corpus, which includes various types of prosodies. As a result of an experiment, the proposed unit selection method contributed itself to enhance the naturalness of synthesized speeches.

• The Journal of Korean Society for Radiation Therapy
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.115-121
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• 2012

Purpose: The process of the proton treatment is done by comparing the DRR and DIPS anatomic structure to find the correction factor and use the PPS to use this factor in the treatment. For the accuracy of the patient set up, the PPS uses a 6 axis system to move. Therefore, there needs to be an evaluation for the accuracy between the PPS moving materialization and DIPS correction factor. In order to do this, we will use a self made PPS QA Phantom to measure the accuracy of the PPS. Materials and Methods: We set up a PPS QA Phantom at the center to which a lead marker is attached, which will act instead of the patient anatomic structure. We will use random values to create the 6 axis motions and move the PPS QA Phantom. Then we attain a DIPS image and compare with the DRR image in order to evaluate the accuracy of the correction factor. Results: The average correction factor, after moving the PPS QA Phantom's X, Y, Z axis coordinates together from 1~5 cm, 1 cm at a time, and coming back to the center, are 0.04 cm, 0.026 cm, 0.022 cm, $0.22^{\circ}$, $0.24^{\circ}$, $0^{\circ}$ on the PPS 6 axis. The average correction rate when moving the 6way movement coordinates all from 1 to 2 were 0.06 cm, 0.01 cm, 0.02 cm, $0.1^{\circ}$, $0.3^{\circ}$, $0^{\circ}$ when moved 1 and 0.02 cm, 0.04 cm, 0.01 cm, $0.3^{\circ}$, $0.5^{\circ}$, $0^{\circ}$ when moved 2. Conclusion: After evaluating the correction rates when they come back to the center, we could tell that the Lateral, Longitudinal, Vertical were all in the acceptable scope of 0.5 cm and Rotation, Pitch, Roll were all in the acceptable scope of $1^{\circ}$. Still, for a more accurate proton therapy treatment, we must try to further enhance the image of the DIPS matching system, and exercise regular QA on the equipment to reduce the current rate of mechanical errors.

• Polymer(Korea)
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• v.32 no.2
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• pp.163-168
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• 2008

Biomedical scaffold for tissue regeneration was fabricated by one of rapid prototyping processes, bioplotting system, with a biodegradable and biocompatible poly($\varepsilon$-carprolactone)(PCL). Through dynamic mechanical test, it was observed that the PCL scaffold manufactured by the bioplotting process has the superior mechanical properties compared to the conventional scaffold fabricated by a salt-leaching process, and the plotted scaffold could be employed as a potential scaffold to regenerating hard and soft tissue. The plotted scaffold was consisted of porous structures. which were interconnected with each pore to help cells be easily adhered and proliferated in the wall of pore tunnels, and metabolic nutrients can be transported within the matrix. By using the plotting system, we could adjust the pore size, porosity, strand pitch, and, strand diameter of PCL scaffolds, which were important parameters to control mechanical properties of the scaffolds, and consequently we could determine that the mechanically controlled scaffolds could be used as a matching scaffold for any required mechanical properties of the target organ. The fabricated 3D PCL scaffold showed enough possibility as a 3D biomedical scaffold, which was cell-cultured with chondrocytes.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2014.02a
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• pp.296-296
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• 2014

We investigate experimentally and theoretically the splitting of surface plasmon (SP) resonance peaks under TE- and TM-polarized illumination. The SP structure at infrared wavelength is fabricated with a 2-dimensional square periodic array of circular holes penetrating through Au (gold) film. In brief, the processing steps to fabricate the SP structure are as follows. (i) A standard optical lithography was performed to produce to a periodic array of photoresist (PR) circular cylinders. (ii) After the PR pattern, e-beam evaporation was used to deposit a 50-nm thick layer of Au. (iii) A lift-off processing with acetone to remove the PR layer, leading to final structure (pitch, $p=2.2{\mu}m$; aperture size, $d=1.1{\mu}m$) as shown in Fig. 1(a). The transmission is measured using a Nicolet Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) at the incident angle from $0^{\circ}$ to $36^{\circ}$ with a step of $4^{\circ}$ both in TE and TM polarization. Measured first and second order SP resonances at interface between Au and GaAs exhibit the splitting into two branches under TM-polarized light as shown in Fig. 1(b). However, as the incidence angle under TE polarization is increased, the $1^{st}$ order SP resonance peak blue-shifts slightly while the splitting of $2^{nd}$ order SP resonance peak tends to be larger (not shown here). For the purpose of understanding our experimental results qualitatively, SP resonance peak wavelengths can be calculated from momentum matching condition (black circle depicted in Fig. 2(b)), $k_{sp}=k_{\parallel}{\pm}iG_x{\pm}jG_y$, where $k_{sp}$ is the SP wavevector, $k_{\parallel}$ is the in-plane component of incident light wavevector, i and j are SP coupling order, and G is the grating momentum wavevector. Moreover, for better understanding we performed 3D full field electromagnetic simulations of SP structure using a finite integration technique (CST Microwave Studio). Fig. 1(b) shows an excellent agreement between the experimental, calculated and CST-simulated splitting of SP resonance peaks with various incidence angles under TM-polarized illumination (TE results are not shown here). The simulated z-component electric field (Ez) distribution at incident angle, $4^{\circ}$ and $16^{\circ}$ under TM polarization and at the corresponding SP resonance wavelength is shown in Fig. 1(c). The analysis and comparison of theoretical results with experiment indicates a good agreement of the splitting behavior of the surface plasmon resonance modes at oblique incidence both in TE and TM polarization.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.159-165
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• 2007

In this paper, we propose a new pre-selection of candidate units that is suitable for the unit selection based Japanese TTS system. General pre-selection method performed by calculating a context-dependent cost within IP (Intonation Phrase). Different from other languages, however. Japanese has an accent represented as the height of a relative pitch, and several words form a single accentual phrase. Also. the prosody in Japanese changes in accentual phrase units. By reflecting such prosodic change in pre-selection. the qualify of synthesized speech can be improved. Furthermore, by calculating a context-dependent cost within accentual phrase, synthesis speed can be improved than calculating within intonation phrase. The proposed method defines AP. analyzes AP in context and performs pre-selection using accentual phrase matching which calculates CCL (connected context length) of the Phoneme's candidates that should be synthesized in each accentual phrase. The baseline system used in the proposed method is VoiceText, which is a synthesizer of Voiceware. Evaluations were made on perceptual error (intonation error, concatenation mismatch error) and synthesis time. Experimental result showed that the proposed method improved the qualify of synthesized speech. as well as shortened the synthesis time.