• Journal of Korean Neurosurgical Society
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• v.64 no.1
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• pp.88-99
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• 2021

Objective : The treatment of choice for spinal epidural abscess (SEA) generally is urgent surgery in combination with intravenous antibiotic treatment. However, the optimal duration of antibiotic treatment has not been established to date, although 4-8 weeks is generally advised. Moreover, some researchers have reported that bacteremia is a risk factor for failure of antibiotic treatment in SEA. In this study, we investigated the clinical characteristics of SEA accompanied by bacteremia and also determined whether the conventional 4-8 weeks of antibiotic treatment is sufficient. Methods : We retrospectively reviewed the medical records and radiological data of 23 patients with bacterial SEA who underwent open surgery from March 2010 to April 2020. All patients had bacteremia preoperatively and underwent weeks of perioperative antibiotic treatments based on their identified organisms until all symptoms of infection disappeared. All patients underwent microbiological studies of peripheral blood, specimens from SEA and concomitant infections. The mean follow-up duration was 35.2 months, excluding three patients who died. Results : The male : female ratio was 15 : 8, and the mean age was 68.9 years. The SEA most commonly involved the lumbar spinal segment (73.9%), and the mean size was 2.9 vertebral body lengths. Mean time periods of 8.4 days and 16.6 days were required from admission to diagnosis and from admission to surgery, respectively. Concomitant infections more frequently resulted in delayed diagnosis (p=0.032), masking the symptoms of SEA. Methicillin-sensitive Staphylococcus aureus was the most commonly identified pathogen in both blood and surgical specimens. Seventeen patients (73.9%) showed no deficits at the final follow-up. The overall antibiotic treatment duration was a mean of 66.6 days, excluding three patients who died. This duration was longer than the conventionally advised 4-8 weeks (p=0.010), and psoas or paraspinal abscess required prolonged duration of antibiotic treatment (p=0.038). Conclusion : SEA accompanied by bacteremia required a longer duration (>8 weeks) of antibiotic treatment. In addition, the diagnosis was more frequently delayed in patients with concomitant infections. The duration of antibiotic treatment should be extended for SEA with bacteremia, and a high index of suspicion is mandatory for early diagnosis, especially in patients with concomitant infections.

• Korea Journal of Hospital Management
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.1-10
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• 2022

Background: This study aims to empirically compare and evaluate the current status of medical accessibility and health inequality between people with disabilities and without. We calculated the ACSC hospitalization rate, which is a medical accessibility index, for hypertension, a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease that accounts for more than 20% of deaths among people with disabilities using the 2016 National Health Insurance Big Data. Methods: The subjects of the study were a total of 601,520, including 64,018 people with disabilities and 537,501 people without. Logistic regression was performed to analyze the differences in hypertension hospitalization rates adjusted for demographic and sociological characteristics and disease characteristics using SAS 9.4 program. Results: Before adjusting for the characteristics, the hypertension hospitalization rate of people with disabilities was 1.55%, and the people without disabilities were 0.49%. After adjusting, it was found that people with disabilities were 2.11 times higher than people without disabilities, and it was statistically significant. Conclusion: The preventable hospitalization rate of people with disabilities is higher than that of people without, suggesting that the disabled have problems with access to medical care and health inequality. Therefore, the government's policy improvement is required to close the medical gap for the disabled.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.742-756
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• 2022

A flood of information has occurred with the rise of the internet and digital devices in the fourth industrial revolution era. Every millisecond, massive amounts of structured and unstructured data are generated; smartphones, wearable devices, sensors, and self-driving cars are just a few examples of devices that currently generate massive amounts of data in our daily. Machine learning has been considered an approach to support and recognize patterns in data in many areas to provide a convenient way to other sectors, including the healthcare sector, government sector, banks, military sector, and more. However, the conventional machine learning model requires the data owner to upload their information to train the model in one central location to perform the model training. This classical model has caused data owners to worry about the risks of transferring private information because traditional machine learning is required to push their data to the cloud to process the model training. Furthermore, the training of machine learning and deep learning models requires massive computing resources. Thus, many researchers have jumped to a new model known as "Federated Learning". Federated learning is emerging to train Artificial Intelligence models over distributed clients, and it provides secure privacy information to the data owner. Hence, this paper implements Federated Averaging with a Deep Neural Network to classify the handwriting image and protect the sensitive data. Moreover, we compare the centralized machine learning model with federated averaging. The result shows the centralized machine learning model outperforms federated learning in terms of accuracy, but this classical model produces another risk, like privacy concern, due to the data being stored in the data center. The MNIST dataset was used in this experiment.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.27 no.12
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• pp.161-169
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• 2022

With the development of mobile devices and global positioning systems, various location-based services can be utilized, which collects user's location information and provides services based on it. In this process, there is a risk of personal sensitive information being exposed to the outside, and thus Geo-indistinguishability (Geo-Ind), which protect location privacy of LBS users by perturbing their true location, is widely used. However, owing to the data perturbation mechanism of Geo-Ind, it is hard to accurately obtain the density distribution of LBS users from the collection of perturbed location data. Thus, in this paper, we aim to develop a novel method which enables to effectively compute the user density distribution from perturbed location dataset collected under Geo-Ind. In particular, the proposed method leverages Expectation-Maximization(EM) algorithm to precisely estimate the density disribution of LBS users from perturbed location dataset. Experimental results on real world datasets show that our proposed method achieves significantly better performance than a baseline approach.

• Journal of Advanced Navigation Technology
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.16-22
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• 2023

Terrorists have been attacking in the vulnerable points of aviation sector with the diverse methods of attacks. Recently, Vulnerability is increasing because the Modus Operandi of Terrorism is carried out by exploitation of people in the form of employee working in aviation sector whose role provides them with privileged access to secured locations, secured items or security sensitive information. Furthermore, cases of insider threat are rising across the world with the phenomenon of personal radicalization through internet and social network service. The government of ROK must respond to insider threat could exploit to acts of unlawful interference and the security regulations should be established to prevent from insider threat in advance refer to the acts of unlawful interference carried out in foreign countries and the recommendations by USA, UK and ICAO.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.31 no.6
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• pp.557-571
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• 2022

Landslides are often triggered by weak interlayers initiated in tailings dam foundations, and hazards gradually occur. This is serious for landslides in high tailings dams due to their high potential energy. Tailing samples with a fine-grained interlayer at a set dip angle were prepared. Consolidated undrained (CU) triaxial shear tests were carried out by using a high-pressure triaxial apparatus. The results were compared with the results under a low confining pressure. Four reasons were summarized for high tailings dams more prone to instability than low dams. The shear strength of the samples with dipping interlayers decreases with increasing dip angle. An obvious straight drop in the stress path after the peak occurs in samples with dipping interlayers at an angle of 60°. The effect of the interlayer on the mechanical behaviour of tailings is very sensitive, especially for the sample with a dipping interlayer at an angle of 60°. Shear slipping along the interlayer should be given more attention in tailings dams. Compared with the results under low confining pressure, the stress decreases continuously for the samples with dipping interlayers at large angles under high confining pressure. The positive pore pressure, which reduces the effective stress, occurred in tailings samples under high confining pressure. The residual strength of tailings under high confining pressure is smaller than that under low confining pressure. These factors increase the dam break risk and the disaster impact for high tailings dams.

• Korean Journal of Veterinary Service
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• v.45 no.1
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• pp.19-30
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• 2022

In this study, a simple loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) combined with visual detection method (vLAMP) assay was developed for the rapid and specific detection of African swine fever virus (ASFV), overcoming the shortcomings of previously described LAMP assays that require additional detection steps or pose a cross-contamination risk. The assay results can be directly detected by the naked eye using hydroxynaphthol blue after incubation for 40 min at 62℃. The assay specifically amplified ASFV DNA and no other viral nucleic acids. The limit of detection of the assay was <50 DNA copies/reaction, which was ten times more sensitive than conventional polymerase chain reaction (cPCR) and comparable to real-time PCR (qPCR). For clinical evaluation, the ASFV detection rate of vLAMP was higher than cPCR and comparable to OIE-recommended qPCR, showing 100% concordance, with a κ value (95% confidence interval) of 1 (1.00~1.00). Considering the advantages of high sensitivity and specificity, no possibility for cross-contamination, and being able to be used as low-cost equipment, the developed vLAMP assay will be a valuable tool for detecting ASFV from clinical samples, even in resource-limited laboratories.

• Asia-pacific Journal of Multimedia Services Convergent with Art, Humanities, and Sociology
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• v.7 no.12
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• pp.955-963
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• 2017

Nowadays, fintech becomes the key technology of the mobile banking and payments. Financial market is moved to fintech-based non-face-to-face trade/payment from traditional face-to-face process in Korea. Core of this transition is the smartphones, which have several sensitive sensors for personal identifications such as fingerprint and iris recognition sensors. But it has some originated security risks by data path attacks, for instance, hacking and pharming. Multi-level certification and security systems are applied to avoid these threats effectively, while these protections can be cause of some inconvenience for non-face-to-face certifications and financing processes. In this paper, I confirmed that it have sensible differences correspond with the data connection paths such as WiFi networks and mobile communication networks of the smartphones, and I propose a gradual certification method which alleviates the inconvenience by risk-level definitions of the data-paths.

• 한국노년학
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• v.31 no.3
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• pp.539-551
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• 2011

Purpose: This study was to investigate the factors influencing the fear of falling in frail elderly according to gender. Methods: The participants were the elderly over 65 years who were registered for case management for frail elderly of 253 public health centers. For data analysis, descriptive statistics and multiple logistic regression were performed using SPSS version 18.0. Results: Prevalence of fear of falling and the influential factors were different according to gender. 75.3% of the male elderly, 85.4% of the female elderly had the fear of falling. The predictors for men's fear of falling were static balance ability, experiences of previous falls, whereas for women static balance ability, TImed up and go, depression, experiences of previous falls, educational status were significant. Conclusion: Fear of falling and the influential factors of the frail elderly according to gender should be assessed regularly to find the high risk group. On the basis of that, prevention program for fear of falling and fall need to be developed and provided, which should be gender sensitive.

• Pediatric Infection and Vaccine
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.153-157
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• 2024

Septic arthritis of the manubriosternal joint is a rare condition, especially in adolescents, who often present with nonspecific symptoms that can mimic more common conditions such as musculoskeletal chest pain, costochondritis. Here, we report a case of septic arthritis in a 17-year-old girl and highlight the challenges in diagnosing and managing this condition in adolescents. Initially presenting with acute chest pain diagnosed as transient nonspecific chest pain, the patient's subsequent visits to the emergency department unveiled escalating symptoms, including high fever, prompting advanced imaging. Ultimately, the diagnosis of septic arthritis of the manubriosternal joint was confirmed, with blood culture growth revealing Methicillin-sensitive Staphylococcus aureus. Diagnostic delays have been attributed to the absence of typical symptoms and patient reluctance to be hospitalized. Our case emphasizes the importance of considering rare infectious etiologies in adolescents with chest pain and emphasizes the need for heightened suspicion in unusual anatomical sites. Further research is required to elucidate the pathogenesis and risk factors associated with this condition to aid in prompt diagnosis and treatment.