• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.33 no.2
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• pp.72-77
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• 2012

Phase Contrast MR Angiography(PC MRA) is excellent MRA technique for measuring the velocity of vessels in the human body. PC MRA need to at least four images for angiogram reconstruction and it caused longer scan time. Therefore, we used keyhole imaging combined PC MRA to reduce the scan time. However, keyhole imaging can lead the erroneous effects as loss of phase information or frequency discontinuous. In this study, we applied the keyhole imaging combined 2D PC MRA for improving the temporal resolution and also measured the velocity to evaluate the accuracy of phase information. We used 0.32T MRI scanner(Magfinder II, Scimedix, Korea). Using the 2D PC MRA pulse sequence, the vascular images for a human brain targeted on the Superior Sagittal Sinus(SSS) were obtained. We applied tukey window function for keyhole images to minimize the ringing artifact and erroneous factors that are induced frequency discontinuous and phase information loss. We also applied zero-padded algorithm to peripheral missing k-space lines to compare keyhole imaging results and the artifact power(AP) value was measured on the complex difference images to validate the image quality. Consider as based on our results, heavy image distortions and artifacts were shown until using at least 50% keyhole factor. Using above the 50% keyhole factors are shown well reconstructed and matched for magnitude images and velocity information measurements. In conclusion, we confirmed the image quality and velocity information of keyhole technique combined 2D PC MRA. Especially, measured velocity information through the keyhole imaging combination was similar to the velocity information of full sampled k-space image despite of frequency discontinuous and phase information loss in the keyhole imaging reconstruction process. Consequently, the keyhole imaging combined 2D PC MRA will give some clinical usefulness and advantages as improving the temporal resolution and measuring the velocity information via selecting the appropriate keyhole factor at low tesla MRI system.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.19 no.10
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• pp.346-351
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• 2018

Metal three-dimensional (3D) printing technologies are mainly classified as powder bed fusion (PBF) and direct energy deposition (DED) methods according to the method of application of a laser beam to metallic powder. The DED method can be used to fabricate fine and hard 3D metallic structures by applying a strong laser beam to a thin layer of metallic powder. The PBF method involves slicing 3D graphics to be a certain height, laminating metal powders, and making a 3D structure using a laser. While the DED method has advantages such as laser cladding and metallic welding, it causes problems with low density when 3D shapes are created. The PBF method was introduced to address the structural density issues in the DED method and makes it easier to produce relatively dense 3D structures. In this paper, thin lines were produced by using PBF 3D printers with stainless-steel powder of roughly $30{\mu}m$ in diameter with a galvano scanner and fiber-transferred Nd:YAG laser beam. Experiments were carried out to find the optimal conditions for the width of a line depending on the processing times, laser power, spot size, and scan speed. The optimal conditions were two scanning processes in one line structure with a laser power of 30 W, spot size of $28.7{\mu}m$, and scan speed of 200 mm/s. With these conditions, a minimum width of about $85.3{\mu}m$ was obtained.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.33 no.12
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• pp.894-906
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• 2006

There are many difficulties to develop a mobile contents due to many constraints on mobile environments. It is difficult to make a good mobile contents with only visual reduction of existing contents on wire Internet. Therefore, it is essential to devise the data representation and to develop the authoring tool to meet the needs of the mobile contents market. We suggest the compact mobile contents to learn Chinese characters and developed its authoring tool. The animation which our system produces is realistic as if someone writes letters with pen or brush. Moreover, our authoring tool makes a user generate a Chinese character animation easily and rapidly although she or he has not many knowledge in computer graphics, mobile programming or Chinese characters. The method to generate the stroke animation is following: We take basic character shape information represented with several contours from TTF(TrueType Font) and get the information for the stroke segmentation and stroke ordering from simple user input. And then, we decompose whole character shape into some strokes by using polygonal approximation technique. Next, the stroke animation for each stroke is automatically generated by the scan line algorithm ordered by the stroke direction. Finally, the ordered scan lines are compressed into some integers by reducing coordinate redundancy As a result, the stroke animation of our system is even smaller than GIF animation. Our method can be extended to rendering and animation of Hangul or general 2D shape based on vector graphics. We have the plan to find the method to automate the stroke segmentation and ordering without user input.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.19 no.11
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• pp.375-382
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• 2019

Abnormalities of trophoblast due to early inflammation in pregnancy increase the expression of CRP and affect maternal-fetal interactions, leading to preterm birth and preeclampsia. However, biomarkers related to the regulation of CRP expression have not been found. In this study, miRNA associated with increased expression of CRP was identified and their expression was analyzed to reveal biomarkers involved in the regulation mechanism of trophoblast inflammation through miRNAs. miRNAs that were predicted to regulate CRP gene expression in miRNA databases (mirna, TargetScan, MicroCosm) were screened and HTR-8/SVneo cell lines were treated with LPS (20 ng/mL) to induce inflammatory responses in vitro, with selected miR-7, miR-150, miR-186 and miR-424. The expression was analyzed by qRT-PCR. As a result, expression of CRP was significantly increased in LPS-treated trophoblast (p<0.001) and miR-150 and miR-424 expression were significantly decreased (p<0.001). Thus, miR-150 and miR-424 are involved in the regulation of CRP expression in inflammatory-induced trophoblast and may be useful for the prenatal diagnosis of inflammatory obstetric diseases.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.17 no.7
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• pp.3437-3445
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• 2016

Background: There is an increasing concern in the role of microRNA (miRNA) in the pathogenesis of bone metastasis (BM) secondary to prostate cancer (CaP). In this exploratory study, we hypothesized that the expression of vinculin (VCL) and chemokine X3C ligand 1 (CX3CL1) might be down-regulated in clinical samples, most likely due to the post-transcriptional modification by microRNAs. Targeted genes would be up-regulated upon transfection of the bone metastatic prostate cancer cell line, PC3, with specific microRNA inhibitors. Materials and Methods: MicroRNA software predicted that miR-21 targets VCL while miR-29a targets CX3CL1. Twenty benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) and 16 high grade CaP formalin-fixed paraffin embedded (FFPE) specimens were analysed. From the bone scan results, high grade CaP samples were further classified into CaP with no BM and CaP with BM. Transient transfection with respective microRNA inhibitors was done in both RWPE-1 (normal) and PC3 cell lines. QPCR was performed in all FFPE samples and transfected cell lines to measure VCL and CX3CL1 levels. Results: QPCR confirmed that VCL messenger RNA (mRNA) was significantly down-regulated while CX3CL1 was up-regulated in all FFPE specimens. Transient transfection with microRNA inhibitors in PC3 cells followed by qPCR of the targeted genes showed that VCL mRNA was significantly upregulated while CX3CL1 mRNA was significantly down-regulated compared to the RWPE-1 case. Conclusions: The down-regulation of VCL in FFPE specimens is most likely regulated by miR-21 based on the in vitro evidence but the exact mechanism of how miR-21 can regulate VCL is unclear. Up-regulated in CaP, CX3CL1 was found not regulated by miR-29a. More microRNA screening is required to understand the regulation of this chemokine in CaP with bone metastasis. Understanding miRNA-mRNA interactions may provide additional knowledge for individualized study of cancers.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SC
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• v.45 no.2
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• pp.8-17
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• 2008

This paper proposes a robust license plate extraction method from images taken under unconstrained environments. Utilization of the color and the edge information in complementary fashion makes the proposed method deal with not only various lighting conditions, hilt blocking artifacts frequently observed in compressed images. Computational complexity is significantly reduced by applying Hough transform to estimate the skew angle, and subsequent do-skewing procedure only to the candidate regions. The true plate region is determined from the candidates under examination using clues including the aspect ratio, the number of zero crossings from vertical scan lines, and the number of connected components. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated using compressed images collected under various realistic circumstances. The experimental results show 94.9% of correct license plate extraction rate.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.45 no.11
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• pp.8-12
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• 2008

For the reduction of fabrication cost and process time of AC plasma display panel (PDP), indium tin oxide (ITO) layer was patterned as bus electrode using Nd:$YVO_4$ laser. In comparison with the chemically wet etched ITO patterns, laser ablated ITO patterns showed the formation of shoulders and ripple-like structures at the edge of the ITO lines. For the reduction of shoulders and ripple-like structures, pulse repetition rate and scan velocity of laser was changed. In addition, we analyzed a discharge characteristic of PDP test panel to observe how the shoulders and ripple-like structures influence on the PDP. Based on experimental results, the pattern etched at the 500 mm/s and 40 kHz was better than any other condition. From this experiment we could see the possibility of the laser direct patterning for the application to the patterning of ITO in AC-PDP.

• Korean Journal of Optics and Photonics
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.289-294
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• 2002

We propose optical true time-delays (TTDs) for phased-array antennas (PAAs) composed of 2${\times}$2 MEMS switches and fiber delay lines, and implement a TTD which shows a maximum scan angle of $120^{o}$ with $30^{o}$ resolution. Since this structure uses only one fixed wavelength laser diode, it provides several advantages such as easy control, high speed operation, and low cost compared with those of the optical TTDs using tunable laser sources. We design a four element linear PAA using the proposed TTDs at 10 ㎓. Simulation results show that the maximum gain is 11.6 dB at the radiation angle $0^{o}$, 11.2 dB at $\pm$$30^{o}$, and 10.6 dB at $\pm$$60^{o}$.

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
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• 2005.10a
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• pp.142-145
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• 2005

Since the successful launch of FORMOSAT -2 satellite by National Space Organization of Taiwan in May 2004, the Remote Sensing Instrument (RSI) on- board the FORMOSAT -2 has continuously acquired images at one panchromatic and four multi-spectral bands (http://www.nspo.org.tw). In general, the RSI performs well and receives high quality images which proved to be very useful for various applications. However, some RSI panchromatic products exhibit obvious trembling artifact that must be removed. Preliminary study reveals that the trembling artifact is caused by the instability of the spacecraft attitude. Though the magnitude of this artifact is actually less than half of a pixel, it affects the applicability of panchromatic products. A procedure removing this artifact is therefore needed for providing image products of consistent quality. Due to the nature of trembling artifact, it is impossible to describe the trembling amount by employing an analytic model. Relied only on image itself, an algorithm determining trembling amount and removing accordingly the trembling artifact is proposed. The algorithm consists of 3 stages. First, a cross-correlation based scheme is used to measure the relative shift between adjacent scan lines. Follows, the trembling amount is estimated from the measured value. For this purpose, the Fourier transform is utilized to characterize random shifts in frequency domain. An adaptive estimation method is then applied to deduce the approximate trembling amount. In the subsequent stage, image re-sampling operation is applied to restore the trembling-free product. Experimental results show that by applying the proposed algorithm, the unpleasant trembling artifact is no longer evident.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.45 no.7
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• pp.1-8
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• 2008

We fabricated flexible electrophoretic display(EPD) driven by organic thin film transistors(OTFTs) on plastic substrate. We designed the W/L of OTFT to be 15, considering EPD's transient characteristics. The OTFTs employed bottom contact structure and used Al for gate electrode, the cross-linked polyvinylphenol for gate insulator, pentacene for active layer. The plastic substrate was coated by PVP barrier layer in order to remove the islands which were formed after pre-shrinkage process and caused the electrical short between bottom scan and top data metal lines. Pentacene active layer was confined within the gate electrodes so that the off current was controlled and reduced by gate electrodes. Especially, PVA/Acryl double layers were inserted between EPD panel and OTFT-backplane in order to protect OTFT-backplane from the damages created by lamination process of EPD panel on the backplane and also accommodate pixel electrodes through via holes. From the OTFT-backplane the mobility was $0.21cm^2/V.s$, Ion/Ioff current ratio $10^5$. The OTFT-EPD panel worked successfully and demonstrated to display some patterns.