• Journal of Acupuncture Research
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• v.33 no.1
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• pp.117-125
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• 2016

Objectives : The purpose of this report is to introduce a rare case of a patient with Chorea Hyperglycemia Basal Ganglia syndrome (C-H-BG) whose initial medical interventions were started 2 weeks after the onset, and to suggest the possibility of treatment using a combined Western-Korean medicine approach. Methods : A 75-year-old female C-H-BG patient complaining of persistent right-sided hemichorea was treated with a therapy that combined Korean and Western medicine from April 4, 2015 to April 29, 2015. Improvements of symptoms were measured by a motor assessment of Unified Huntington's Disease Rating Scale (UHDRS), Visual Analog Scale (VAS) and the number of involuntary movements. Results : Motor assessment of UHDRS, VAS and the number of involuntary movements all showed a gradually improving tendency during 26 days of admission treatment. However, the patient's hemichorea persisted. Conclusion : Rapid blood sugar control is the most important treatment for C-H-BG, because pathologic changes of basal ganglia seem to become irreversible as time goes by. A combined Western-Korean medicine approach to treating C-H-BG seems effective not only in reducing hemichorea, but also in the management of accompanying symptoms such as muscle pain and general weakness.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.51 no.7
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• pp.180-189
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• 2014

Display quality assessment has been a long standing issue due to the diversity of display devices and the rapid growth of display technology. The conventional display quality assessment methods are mostly those methods which evaluate qualities of a display by measuring physical quantities, but the results from the methods are not equal to the perceived results which are acquired with subjective experiments. Thus, we need to solve the above contrariety as well as establish the quantitative correlation between physical and perceived results. This paper proposes the systematic method of evaluating relative perceived qualities among various display devices and quantifies these relative perceived qualities. The proposed method is based on Analytic Network Process(ANP), which is one of the most popular decision making methods in the business administration field. We also adopted three evaluation criteria, which consist of color, shape and depth, in order to reflect the human visual system and chose eight sub-criteria related to display characteristics via question investigation. We carried out a subjective experiment and the proposed method which evaluated perceived qualities of two display devices(TFT-LCD, OLED) in order to prove the similarity between their results. As a result, it is proved that the order relationship between perceived qualities was the same as the order of results got through the subjective experiment.

• KOREAN JOURNAL OF CROP SCIENCE
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• v.31 no.3
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• pp.356-360
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• 1986

The potential of the chlorophyll fluorescence technique in screening eleven rice varieties for chill-sensitivity was assessed by measuring the change in the rate of rise of variable fluorescence (FR) and the maximum yield of variable fluorescence, F$\_$VAR/ (F$\_$MAX/-F$\_$0/) after 8 days chilling at 10$^{\circ}C$. The changes in both fluorescence parameters with chilling agreed well with visual assessments of injury carried out at the end of the chilling period. Furthermore, it was found that in the majority of the rice cultivars tested their chilling sensitivity agreed well with the rate of rise of chlorophyll fluorescence (F$\_$R/) measured at 25$^{\circ}C$. The method of chlorophyll fluorescence was rapid, reproducible, sensitive and non-destructive and it should be a valuable new tool in screening large numbers of closely related rice varieties for chilling sensitivity.

• Journal of Korean Neurosurgical Society
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• v.62 no.1
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• pp.61-70
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• 2019

Objective : Corpectomy of the first lumbar vertebra (L1) for the management of different L1 pathologies can be performed using either an anterior or posterior approach. The aim of this study was to evaluate the usefulness of a retroperitoneal extrapleural approach through the twelfth rib for performing L1 corpectomy. Methods : Thirty consecutive patients underwent L1 corpectomy between 2010 and 2016. The retroperitoneal extrapleural approach through the 12th rib was used in all cases to perform single-stage anterior L1 corpectomy, reconstruction and anterior instrumentation, except for in two recurrent cases in which posterior fixation was added. Visual analogue scale (VAS) was used for pain intensity measurement and ASIA impairment scale for neurological assessment. The mean follow-up period was 14.5 months. Results : The sample included 18 males and 12 females, and the mean age was 40.3 years. Twenty patients (67%) had sensory or motor deficits before the surgery. The pathologies encountered included traumatic fracture in 12 cases, osteoporotic fracture in four cases, tumor in eight cases and spinal infection in the remaining six cases. The surgeries were performed from the left side, except in two cases. There was significant improvement of back pain and radicular pain as recorded by VAS. One patient exhibited postoperative neurological deterioration due to bone graft dislodgement. All patients with deficits at least partially improved after the surgery. During the follow-up, no hardware failures or losses of correction were detected. Conclusion : The retroperitoneal extrapleural approach through the 12th rib is a feasible approach for L1 corpectomy that can combine adequate decompression of the dural sac with effective biomechanical restoration of the compromised anterior loadbearing column. It is associated with less pulmonary complication, no need for chest tube, no abdominal distention and rapid recovery compared with other approaches.

• Advances in concrete construction
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.171-183
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• 2020

The main objective of this study is the assessment of the ability of limestone mortars to resist to different chemical attacks. The ability of polypropylene (PP) fibres waste used as reinforcement of these concrete materials to enhance their durability is also studied. Crushed sand 0/2 mm which is a fine limestone residue obtained by the crushing of natural rocks in aggregates industry is used for the fabrication of the mortar. The fibres used, which are obtained from the waste of domestic plastic sweeps' fabrication, have a length of 20 mm and a diameter ranging between 0.38 and 0.51 mm. Two weight fibres contents are used, 0.5 and 1%. The durability tests carried out in this investigation included the water absorption by capillarity, the mass variation, the flexural and the compressive strengths of the mortar specimens immersed for 366 days in 5% sodium chloride, 5% magnesium sulphate and 5% sulphuric acid solutions. A mineralogical analysis by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and a visual inspection are used for a better examination of the quality of tested mortars and for better interpretation of their behaviour in different solutions. The results indicate that the reinforcement of limestone mortar by PP fibres waste is an excellent solution to improve its chemical resistance and durability. Moreover, the presence of PP fibres waste does not affect significantly the water absorption by capillarity of mortar nether its mass variation, when exposed to chloride and sulphate solutions. While in sulphuric acid, the mass loss is higher with the presence of PP fibres waste, especially after an exposure of 180 days. The results reveal that these fibres have a considerable effect of the flexural and the compressive behaviour of mortar especially in acid solution, where a reduction of strength loss is observed. The mineralogical analysis confirms the good behaviour of mortar immersed in sulphate and chloride solutions; and shows that more gypsum is formed in mortar exposed to acid environment causing its rapid degradation. The visual observation reveals that only samples exposed to acid attack during 366 days have showed a surface damage extending over a depth of approximately 300 ㎛.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.51 no.4
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• pp.509-523
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• 2016

The soil prediction can provide quantitative soil information for sustainable mountainous ecosystem management. Visible near infrared spectroscopy, one of soil prediction methods, has been applied to predict several soil properties with effective costs, rapid and nondesctructive analysis, and satisfactory accuracy. Spectral preprocessing is a essential procedure to correct noisy spectra for visible near infrared spectroscopy. However, there are no attempts to evaluate various spectral preprocessing methods. We tested 5 different pretreatments, namely continuum removal, Savitzky-Golay filter, discrete wavelet transform, 1st derivative, and 2nd derivative to predict soil carbon(C) and nitrogen(N). Partial least squares regression was used for the prediction method. The total of 153 soil samples was split into 122 samples for calibration and 31 samples for validation. In the all range, absorption was increased with increasing C contents. Specifically, the visible region (650nm and 700nm) showed high values of the correlation coefficient with soil C and N contents. For spectral preprocessing methods, continuum removal had the highest prediction accuracy(Root Mean Square Error) for C(9.53mg/g) and N(0.79mg/g). Therefore, continuum removal was selected as the best preprocessing method. Additionally, there were no distinct differences between Savitzky-Golay filter and discrete wavelet transform for visual assessment and the methods showed similar validation results. According to the results, we also recommended Savitzky-Golay filter that is a simple pre-treatment with continuum removal.

• The Journal of Korean Medicine
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• v.28 no.1 s.69
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• pp.87-93
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• 2007

Objectives : This study was to assess the effectiveness of Oriental medical treatment on carpal tunnel syndrome, comparing its outcome with that of Western medical treatment. Methods : After being diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome by electromyography, subjects were enrolled in Kyung Hee Medical Center from March 2006 to January 2007. We prescribed Kejibokryung-hwan to the Oriental medical therapy group (OM group) and NSAIDS to the Western medical therapy group (WM group). Effectiveness was assessed by degree of pain using visual analog scale (VAS) before and after 3 weeks' treatment. Adverse effects were also monitored. Results : There were 21 patients in the OM group and 19 in the WM group. No statistical significant difference was detected at the baseline assessment. After 3 weeks of medication, pain was reduced about 26% in the OM group and 46% in the WM group. These findings might be explained by that more than half of the WM group received local steroid injection, which has been known to have more rapid analgesic effect that oral medication. Although pain reduction rate was higher in the WM group than in the OM group, we suggest that Oriental medical treatment is still effective, faking into consideration the fact that completely recovered cases were found only in the OM group. No adverse effect was found in either of the groups. Conclusion : This work could help us to understand the effectiveness of Oriental medical treatment on carpal tunnel syndrome.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.28 no.6A
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• pp.765-778
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• 2008

Performance Profiles are essential to predict the performance variation over time for the bridge management system (BMS) based on risk management. In general, condition profiles based on experts opinion and/or visual inspection records have been used widely because obtaining profiles based on real performance is not easy. However, those condition profiles usually don't give a good consistency to the safety of bridges, causing practical problems for the effective bridge management. The accuracy of performance evaluation is directly related to the accuracy of BMS. The reliability of the evaluation is important to produce the optimal solution for distributing maintenance budget reasonably. However, conventional methods of bridge assessment are not suitable for a more sophisticated decision making procedure. In this study, a method to compute quantitative performance profiles has been proposed to overcome the limitations of those conventional models. In Bridge Management Systems, the main role of performance profiles is to compute and predict the performance of bridges subject to lifetime activities with uncertainty. Therefore, the computation time for obtaining an optimal maintenance scenario is closely related to the efficiency of the performance profile. In this study, the Response Surface Method (RSM) based on independent and important design variables is developed for the rapid computation. Steel box bridges have been investigated because the number of independent design variables can be reduced significantly due to the high dependency between design variables.

• Sleep Medicine and Psychophysiology
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.41-47
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• 2002

Objectives: In a number of simulated night shift studies, timed exposure to bright light improves sleep quality and work performance. We evaluated the effect of bright light on adaptation to night shift work with a field study. Methods: Five female nurses working shifts at Korea University Hospital were recruited for participation in this study. We investigated two series of six consecutive shift rotations comprising three day and three night shifts, using wrist Actigraphy, the Stanford Sleepiness Scale, Visual-analogue scales, STIM and tympanic membrane temperature for daytime sleep quality, alertness, subjective feeling, attention performance, and temperature rhythm. The subjects were exposed to bright light (2,500 lux) from 24:00 to 04:00 a.m. on three consecutive night shifts during the second series, whereas they worked under normal lightening (650 lux) conditions during the first series. Results: Actigraphic assessment of daytime sleep showed no significant difference between the first and third night shift in both baseline and light exposure phase. The mean lowest temperature shifted earlier during baseline phase but not during the light exposure phase. Also, the score for subjective feelings of depression, anxiety, physical discomfort and sleepiness was significantly higher in the third night shift than the first during baseline phase but not during the light exposure phase. Attention and attention switching ability was significantly improved in the third night shift compared to the first night during the light exposure phase but there were no significant changes during the baseline phase. Conclusion: This result suggests that there were no significant differences between the two phases in measures of quality of daytime sleep, but subjective feelings, attention and alertness were enhanced during light exposure. Although some placebo effects and learning effects might influence this result, bright light exposure between midnight and 4:00 a.m. may improve adaptation to night shift. In future, further controlled studies with a larger sample size, including melatonin measurement, are needed for real shift workers.