• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.54 no.7
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• pp.535-544
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• 2021

Agricultural water occupies 48% of water demand, and management of agricultural reservoirs is essential for water resources management within agricultural basins. For more efficient use of agricultural water, monitoring the distribution of water resources in agricultural reservoirs and agricultural basins is required. Therefore, in this study, three threshold determination methods (i.e., fixed threshold, Otsu threshold, Kittler-Illingworth (KI) threshold) were compared to detect terrestrial water bodies using Sentinel-1 images for 3 years from 2018 to 2020. The purpose of this study was to evaluate methods for determining threshold values to more accurately estimate the reservoir area. In addition, by analyzing the relationship between the water surface and water storage at the Edong, Gosam, and Giheung reservoirs, water storage based on the SAR image was estimated and validated with observations. The thresholding method for detecting a waterbody was found to be the most accurate in the case of the KI threshold, and the water storage estimated by the KI threshold indicated a very high agreement (r = 0.9235, KGE' = 0.8691). Although the seasonal error characteristics were not observed, the problem of underestimation at high water levels may occur; the relationship between the water surface and the water storage could change rapidly. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the relationship between the water surface area and water storage through ground observation data for a more accurate estimation of water storage. If the use of SAR data through water resources satellites becomes possible in the future, based on the results of this study, it is judged that it will be beneficial for monitoring water storage and managing drought.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.37 no.3
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• pp.531-542
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• 2021

Open-pit mines require constant monitoring as they can cause surface changes and environmental disturbances. In open-pit mines, there is little vegetation at the mining site and can be monitored using InSAR (Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar) coherence imageries. In this study, activities occurring in mine were analyzed by applying the recently developed InSAR coherence-based NDAI (Normalized Difference Activity Index). The March 5 Youth Mine is a North Korean mine whose development has been expanded since 2008. NDAI analysis was performed with InSAR coherence imageries obtained using Sentinel-1 SAR images taken at 12-day intervals in the March 5 Youth Mine. First, the area where the elevation decreased by about 75.24 m and increased by about 9.85 m over the 14 years from 2000 was defined as the mining site and the tailings piles. Then, the NDAI images were used for time series analysis at various time intervals. Over the entire period (2017-2019), average mining activity was relatively active at the center of the mining area. In order to find out more detailed changes in the surface activity of the mine, the time interval was reduced and the activity was observed over a 1-year period. In 2017, we analyzed changes in mining operations before and after artificial earthquakes based on seismic data and NDAI images. After the large-scale blasting that occurred on 30 April 2017, activity was detected west of the mining area. It is estimated that the size of the mining area was enlarged by two blasts on 30 September 2017. The time-averaged NDAI images used to perform detailed time-series analysis were generated over a period of 1 year and 4 months, and then composited into RGB images. Annual analysis of activity confirmed an active region in the northeast of the mining area in 2018 and found the characteristic activity of the expansion of tailings piles in 2019. Time series analysis using NDAI was able to detect random surface changes in open-pit mines that are difficult to identify with optical images. Especially in areas where in situ data is not available, remote sensing can effectively perform mining activity analysis.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.38 no.2
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• pp.139-151
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• 2022

SAGD (Steam-Assisted Gravity Drainage) method is widely used for oil recovery in oil sands regions. The SAGD operation causes surface displacement, which can affect the stability of oil recovery plants and trigger various geological disasters. Therefore, it isimportant to monitor the surface displacement due to SAGD in the oil sands region. In this study, the surface displacement due to SAGD operations of the Athabasca oil sands region in Alberta, Canada, was observed by applying Permanent Scatterer Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PSInSAR) technique to the Sentinel-1 time series SAR data acquired from 2016 to 2021. We also investigated the construction and expansion of SAGD facilitiesfrom Landsat-7/8 time seriesimages, from which the characteristics of the surface displacement according to the oil production activity of SAGD were analyzed. Uplift rates of 0.3-2.5 cm/yr in the direction of line of sight were observed over the SAGDs and their vicinity, whereas subsidence rates of -0.3--0.6 cm/yr were observed in areas more than several kilometers away from the SAGDs and not affected by oil recovery activities. Through the analysis of Landsat-7/8 images, we could confirm that the SAGDs operating after 2012 and showing high oil production activity caused uplift rates greater than 1.6 cm/yr due to the subsurface steam injection. Meanwhile, very small uplift rates of several mm per year occurred over SAGDs which have been operated for a longer period of time and show relatively low oil production activity. This was probably due to the compression of reservoir sandstone due to continuous oil recovery. The subsidence observed in areas except for the SAGDs and their vicinity estimated to be a gradual land subsidence caused by melting of the permafrost. Considering the subsidence, it was expected that the uplift due to SAGD operation would be greater than that observed by the PSInSAR. The results of this study confirm that the PSInSAR can be used as an effective means for evaluating productivity and stability of SAGD in the extreme cold regions.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.55 no.6
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• pp.393-404
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• 2022

Reliable terrestrial rainfall observations from satellites at finer spatial resolution are essential for urban hydrological and microscale agricultural demands. Although various traditional "top-down" approach-based satellite rainfall products were widely used, they are limited in spatial resolution. This study aims to assess the potential of a novel "bottom-up" approach for rainfall estimation, the parameterized SM2RAIN model, applied to the C-band SAR Sentinel-1 satellite data (SM2RAIN-S1), to generate high-spatial-resolution terrestrial rainfall estimates (0.01° grid/6-day) over Central South Korea. Its performance was evaluated for both spatial and temporal variability using the respective rainfall data from a conventional reanalysis product and rain gauge network for a 1-year period over two different sub-regions in Central South Korea-the mixed forest-dominated, middle sub-region and cropland-dominated, west coast sub-region. Evaluation results indicated that the SM2RAIN-S1 product can capture general rainfall patterns in Central South Korea, and hold potential for high-spatial-resolution rainfall measurement over the local scale with different land covers, while less biased rainfall estimates against rain gauge observations were provided. Moreover, the SM2RAIN-S1 rainfall product was better in mixed forests considering the Pearson's correlation coefficient (R = 0.69), implying the suitability of 6-day SM2RAIN-S1 data in capturing the temporal dynamics of soil moisture and rainfall in mixed forests. However, in terms of RMSE and Bias, better performance was obtained with the SM2RAIN-S1 rainfall product over croplands rather than mixed forests, indicating that larger errors induced by high evapotranspiration losses (especially in mixed forests) need to be included in further improvement of the SM2RAIN.

• Research in Plant Disease
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• v.28 no.4
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• pp.221-230
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• 2022

The fire blight caused by Erwinia amylovora (Ea) was first reported in 2015 in Korea, and the disease has rapidly spread to 22 regions until 2021. In Korea, all host plants in the apple and pear orchards where fire blight occurred should be eliminated and buried by the Plant Protection Act. To prevent the spread of the disease, all burial sites were prohibited from planting the new host plants for the next three years. To confirm the eradication efficiency of Ea and the reoccurrence of fire blight, the surveillance facilities were established on three burial sites from 2019 to 2020 in Anseong-si, Gyeonggi-do, and Chungju-si, Chungcheongbuk-do. As host plants, five apple trees of fire blight-susceptible cultivar 'Fuji', were planted in each facility. All facilities were enclosed with fences and nets and equipped with two CCTVs, motion sensors, and several other sensors for recording weather conditions to monitor the environment of the sentinel plants in real-time. The sentinel plants were checked for the reoccurrence of fire blight routinely. Suspicious plant parts were collected and analyzed for Ea detection by loop-mediated isothermal amplification polymerase chain reaction and conventional polymerase chain reaction. Until November 2022, Ea has not been detected in all sentinel plants. These results might support that the burial control of infected plants in soil works efficiently to remove Ea and support the possibility to shorten the prohibition period of host plant establishment in the burial sites.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.40 no.1
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• pp.19-31
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• 2024

Ports are vital social infrastructures that significantly influence both people's lives and a country's economy. In South Korea, the aging of port infrastructure combined with the increased frequency of various natural disasters underscores the necessity of displacement monitoring for safety management of the port. In this study, the time-series displacements of Yeongilman Port and surrounding areas in Pohang, South Korea, were measured by applying Permanent Scatterer Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PSInSAR) to Sentinel-1 SAR images collected from the satellite's ascending (February 2017-July 2023) and descending (February 2017-December 2021) nodes, and the displacement associated with the 2017 Pohang earthquake in the port was analyzed. The southern (except the southernmost) and central parts of Yeongilman Port showed large displacements attributed to construction activities for about 10 months at the beginning of the observation period, and the coseismic displacement caused by the Pohang earthquake was up to 1.6 cm of the westward horizontal motion and 0.5 cm of subsidence. However, little coseismic displacement was observed in the southernmost part of the port, where reclamation was completed last, and in the northern part of the oldest port. This represents that the weaker the consolidation of the reclaimed soil in the port, the more vulnerable it is to earthquakes, and that if the soil is very weakly consolidated due to ongoing reclamation, it would not be significantly affected by earthquakes. Summer subsidence and winter uplift of about 1 cm have been repeatedly observed every year in the entire area of Yeongilman Port, which is attributed to volume changes in the reclaimed soil due to temperature changes. The ground of the 1st and 2nd General Industrial Complexes adjacent to Yeongilman Port subsided during the observation period, and the rate of subsidence was faster in the 1st Industrial Complex. The 1st Industrial Complex was observed to have a westward horizontal displacement of 3 mm and a subsidence of 6 mm as the coseismic displacement of the Pohang earthquake, while the 2nd Industrial Complex was analyzed to have been little affected by the earthquake. The results of this study allowed us to identify the time-series displacement characteristics of Yeongilman Port and understand the impact of earthquakes on the stability of a port built by coastal reclamation.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.5_3
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• pp.949-965
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• 2023

In this study, we propose a method to monitor the surface area of agricultural reservoirs in South Korea using Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar images and the deep learning model, Swin Transformer. Utilizing the Google Earth Engine platform, datasets from 2017 to 2021 were constructed for seven agricultural reservoirs, categorized into 700 K-ton, 900 K-ton, and 1.5 M-ton capacities. For four of the reservoirs, a total of 1,283 images were used for model training through shuffling and 5-fold cross-validation techniques. Upon evaluation, the Swin Transformer Large model, configured with a window size of 12, demonstrated superior semantic segmentation performance, showing an average accuracy of 99.54% and a mean intersection over union (mIoU) of 95.15% for all folds. When the best-performing model was applied to the datasets of the remaining three reservoirsfor validation, it achieved an accuracy of over 99% and mIoU of over 94% for all reservoirs. These results indicate that the Swin Transformer model can effectively monitor the surface area of agricultural reservoirs in South Korea.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.40 no.2
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• pp.229-241
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• 2024

With the advancement of big data processing technology using cloud platforms, access, processing, and analysis of large-volume data such as satellite imagery have recently been significantly improved. In this study, the Change Detection Method, a relatively simple technique for retrieving soil moisture, was applied to the backscattering coefficient values of pre-processed Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite imagery product based on Google Earth Engine (GEE), one of those platforms, to estimate the surface soil moisture for six observatories within the Yongdam Dam watershed in South Korea for the period of 2015 to 2023, as well as the watershed average. Subsequently, a correlation analysis was conducted between the estimated values and actual measurements, along with an examination of the applicability of GEE. The results revealed that the surface soil moisture estimated for small areas within the soil moisture observatories of the watershed exhibited low correlations ranging from 0.1 to 0.3 for both VH and VV polarizations, likely due to the inherent measurement accuracy of the SAR satellite imagery and variations in data characteristics. However, the surface soil moisture average, which was derived by extracting the average SAR backscattering coefficient values for the entire watershed area and applying moving averages to mitigate data uncertainties and variability, exhibited significantly improved results at the level of 0.5. The results obtained from estimating soil moisture using GEE demonstrate its utility despite limitations in directly conducting desired analyses due to preprocessed SAR data. However, the efficient processing of extensive satellite imagery data allows for the estimation and evaluation of soil moisture over broad ranges, such as long-term watershed averages. This highlights the effectiveness of GEE in handling vast satellite imagery datasets to assess soil moisture. Based on this, it is anticipated that GEE can be effectively utilized to assess long-term variations of soil moisture average in major dam watersheds, in conjunction with soil moisture observation data from various locations across the country in the future.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.13 no.11
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• pp.5385-5389
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• 2012

Introduction: Sentinel lymph node biopsy (SLNB) is a precise procedure for lymphatic staging in early breast cancer. In a valid SLNB procedure, axillary lymph node dissection (ALND) can be omitted in nodenegative cases without compromising patient safety. In this study, detection rate, accuracy and false negative rate of SLNB for breast cancer was evaluated in a setting with simple modified conventional pathology facilities without any serial sectioning or immunohistochemistry. Material and Medthod: Patients with confirmed breast cancer were enrolled in the study. SLNB and ALND were performed in all cases. Lymph node metastasis was evaluated in SLN and in nodes removed by ALND to determine the false negative rate. Pathologic assessment was carried out only by modified conventional technique with only 3 sections. Detection rate was determined either by lymphoscintigraphy or during surgery. Results: 78 patients with 79 breast units were evaluated. SLN was detected in 75 of 79 cases (95%) in lymphoscintigraphy and 76 of 79 cases (96%) during surgery. SLN metastases was detected in 30 of 75 (40%) cases either in SLNB and ALND groups. Accuracy of SLNB method for detecting LN metastases was 92%. False negative rate was 3 of 30 of positive cases: 10%. In 7 of 10 cases with axillary lymphadenopathy, LN metastastates was detected. Conclusion: SLNB is recommended for patients with various tumor sizes without palpable lymph nodes. In modified conventional pathologic examination of SLNs, at least macrometastases and some micrometastases could be detected similar to ALND. Consequently, ALND could be omitted in node-negative cases with removal of all palpable LNs. We conclude that SLNB, as one of the most important developments in breast cancer surgery, could be expanded even in areas without sophisticated pathology facilities.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.17 no.sup3
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• pp.179-183
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• 2016

Breast cancer is the most prevalent type of cancer among women around the world, and mortality is primarily caused by micro-metastatic disease. The complex mechanisms of breast cancer invasion and metastasis are intrinsically related to the malignant cell type so that early detection of micro-metastases can help prolongation of survival for patient. The aim of the present research work was evaluation of the expression status of mammoglobin protein as a candidate molecular marker in the negative sentinel lymph node (SLN). Fifty tumor specimens, and 50 normal adjacent breast tissue samples from the same patients were selected on the basis of having more than 10% tumor content for RNA extraction from SLNs. Tumor samples and normal adjacent breast tissue were archived in the form of frozen fresh tissue in liquid nitrogen. Real-time PCR was performed on a Bioner life express gradient thermal cycler system. Mammoglobin gene overexpression in breast cancer metastasis was investigated. Single marker results were mammaglobin 66.7% and CK19 50.0%, with 58.3% for the two in combination. Due to improved outcome with at least 3 genes (83.3%), it seems, triple marker evaluation will be most likely useful for detecting micro-metastases instead of studying separate genes.