• Title/Summary/Keyword: simple before-after study method

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Comparison of clinical efficacy in epidural steroid injections through transforaminal or parasagittal approaches

  • Hong, Ji Hee;Park, Eun Kyul;Park, Ki Bum;Park, Ji Hoon;Jung, Sung Won
    • The Korean Journal of Pain
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    • v.30 no.3
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    • pp.220-228
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    • 2017
  • Background: The transforaminal (TF) epidural steroid injection (ESI) is suggested as more effective than the interlaminar (IL) route due to higher delivery of medication at the anterior epidural space. However, serious complications such as spinal cord injury and permanent neural injury have been reported. The purpose of this study is to evaluate and compare the clinical effectiveness, technical ease, and safety of the TF and parasagittal IL (PIL) ESI. Methods: A total of 72 patients were randomized to either the PIL group (n = 41) or the TF group (n = 31) under fluoroscopic guidance. Patients were evaluated for effective pain relief by the numerical rating scale (NRS) and Oswestry Disability Index (ODI) (%) before and 2 weeks after the ESI. The presence of concordant paresthesia, anterior epidural spread, total procedure time, and exposed radiation dose were also evaluated. Results: Both the PIL and TF approach produced similar clinically significant improvements in pain and level of disability. Among the 72 patients, 27 PIL (66%) and 20 TF (64%) patients showed concordant paresthesia while 14 (34%) and 11 (36%) patients in the same respective order showed disconcordant or no paresthesia. Radiation dose and total procedure time required were compared; the PIL group showed a significantly lower radiation dose ($30.2{\pm}12$ vs. $80.8{\pm}26.8$ [$Cgy/cm^2$]) and shorter procedure time ($96.2{\pm}31$ vs. $141.6{\pm}30$ seconds). Conclusions: ESI under fluoroscopic guidance with PIL or TF approach were effective in reducing the NRS and ODI. PIL ESI was a technically easier and simple method compared to TF ESI.

A Study on the Pixel-Parallel Usage Processing Using the Format Converter (포맷 변환기를 이용한 화소-병렬 화상처리에 관한 연구)

  • Kim, Hyeon-Gi;Lee, Cheon-Hui
    • The KIPS Transactions:PartA
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    • v.9A no.2
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    • pp.259-266
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    • 2002
  • In this paper we implemented various image processing filtering using the format converter. This design method is based on realized the large processor-per-pixel array by integrated circuit technology. These two types of integrated structure are can be classify associative parallel processor and parallel process DRAM (or SRAM) cell. Layout pitch of one-bit-wide logic is Identical memory cell pitch to array high density PEs in integrate structure. This format converter design has control path implementation efficiently, and can be utilize the high technology without complicated controller hardware. Sequence of array instruction are generated by host computer before process start, and instructions are saved on unit controller. Host computer is executed the pixel-parallel operation starting at saved instructions after processing start. As a result, we obtained three result that 1) simple smoothing suppresses higher spatial frequencies, reducing noise but also blurring edges, 2) a smoothing and segmentation process reduces noise while preserving sharp edges, and 3) median filtering may be applied to reduce image noise. Median filtering eliminates spikes while maintaining sharp edges and preserving monotonic variations in pixel values.

The contamination check before inoculation at the liquid Spawn on Flammulina velutipes (팽나무버섯 액체 종균의 접종 전 오염 검사)

  • Shim, Kyu-Kwang;Yoo, Young-Jin;Koo, Chang-Duck;Kim, Myung-Koon
    • Journal of Mushroom
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    • v.10 no.1
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    • pp.44-48
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    • 2012
  • In this study, whether Giemsa staining solution can accurately determine bacterial contamination of liquid spawn for Flammulina velutipes in a short period of time was investigated. Giemsa solution staining cells of blood, bone marrow, lymph node, malaria parasites, rickettsia et al. was prepared by dissolving basic methylene azul and methylene blue, and acidic eosine in methyl alcohol-glycerine. Supernatant samples of Flammulina velutipes liquid spawn cultured under explosive aeration were placed on a slide, mixed with Gimesa solution and examined with optical microscope after staining. In 40 to 60 seconds bacterial cells were distinguishable from soybean meal residual and hyphal cell fragments. Thus we conclude that microscopy using Gimesa staining solution is a quick, simple and accurate method for the mushroom growers to effectively use to detect bacterial contamination of the liquid spawn.

The Effects of Group Walking Exercise Program on Body Composition, Blood Lipids and Psychological Factors (집단 걷기운동이 여성의 체성분, 혈중지질 및 심리적인 요인에 미치는 효과)

  • Ko, Young-Aie;Hwang, In-Young;Baek, Hee-Chong
    • Research in Community and Public Health Nursing
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    • v.17 no.1
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    • pp.38-45
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    • 2006
  • Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a group walking exercise program on body composition, blood lipids and psychological factors at a community. Method: The subjects were 200 women(29 groups) who agreed to participate in group walking exercise for three months. Their ages ranged between 30 to 77 years. A simple walking exercise protocol was given to the participants, which was to do walking over three times a week and over thirty minutes each time. We compared the participants' body composition (BMI, PBF, BFM, FFM, WHR and VFA), blood lipids (HDL C, LDL C, total cholesterol, triglyceride) and exercise-self efficacy, self esteem, and quality of life before and after group walking. Collected data were analyzed through paired t test using the SAS program. Results: BMI. PBF, BFM, WHR, and VFA were significantly reduced (p<.01). However. FFM did not increase significantly (p=.416). There were significant changes in TC and TG (p<.01) but not in LDL C (P=.340). HDL C decreased but within the normal range. Exercise-self efficacy and quality of life did not increase significantly. Only self esteem increased significantly (p<.0001). Conclusion: Group walking exercise had positive effects on body composition, blood lipid and self esteem in community women.

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Diagnostic Value of Protein Ki67 (MIB-1) in Atypical Pap Smears of Postmenopausal Women

  • Fakhrjou, Ashraf;Dastranj-Tabrizi, Ali;Ghojazadeh, Morteza;Ghorashi, Sona;Velayati, Atefeh;Piri, Reza;Vahedi, Amir;Sayyah-Melli, Manizhe;Smaeili, Heydar-Ali;Bonakdari, Amir;Halimi, Monireh;Naghavi-Behzad, Mohammad
    • Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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    • v.14 no.8
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    • pp.4815-4818
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    • 2013
  • Background: Atrophic epithelium of cervix sampled from postmenopausal women may mimic high-grade cervical intraepithelial neoplasia in Papanicolaou-stained (Pap) smears. Ki-67 (MIB-1) protein presents on proliferating cells, and percentage of cells with positive nuclei provides a reliable tool for rapid evaluation of the growth fraction. The aim of this study was to determine the diagnostic value of protein Ki67 staining in atypical pap smears of postmenopausal women. Methods: In a case-control setting, pap smears of 75 women with an atypical pap smear (case group) and 75 with normal pap smears (controls) were obtained before and after estrogen treatment. Afterward, samples were exposed to the monoclonal antibody Ki-67 (MIB-1) and the immunohistochemically demonstrated Ki-67+ cells were compared. Results: Mean ages of cases and controls were $60.4{\pm}4.5$ and $59.9{\pm}4.3$ years respectively (P=0.50). There was one (2.7%) positive Ki-67 specimen in the case group, without any positive Ki-67 specimen in the control group (P=0.50). Conclusions: Measurement of proliferative activity index in Pap smears restrained with MIB1 is a simple, reliable, and cost-effective method for excluding negatives. This would imply that it might allow a substantial reduction of diagnostic estrogen courses and subsequent Pap smears in postmenopausal women with atypical findings.

Film Properties of Cold Blending Emulsion Between Poly(vinyl Acetate) and Poly(vinyl acetate-co-ethylene) Emulsion (Poly(vinyl acetate)와 Poly(vinyl acetate-co-ethylene) 에멀젼을 이용한 상온 블렌드 에멀젼의 Film 특성)

  • Kim, Ho-Young;Yoo, Sung-Hee;Choi, Yong-Hae
    • Journal of Adhesion and Interface
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    • v.12 no.4
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    • pp.117-124
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    • 2011
  • This study was made on the poly(vinyl acetate) (PVAc) and poly(vinyl acetate- ethylene) (VAE) emulsion polymer blend which used PVA as protective colloid, and the PVA used as protective colloid was existed in each emulsion film before blend and even in the film after the blend consecutively. It makes us expect excellent adhesive power among particles that form the blend. Emulsion blends with different Tg are important target of concerning, and PVAc/VAE emulsion blend suggested simple and excellent research method. As a result of blend, elongation was lowered by the increase of PVAc, and the plasticizer used in making PVAc affected on the Tg of blend and lowered Tg of VAE emulsion, and the synergy effect of two blends was seen for the tensile strength, thermal resistance, and adhesive strength.

A Study on Knowledge Entity Extraction Method for Individual Stocks Based on Neural Tensor Network (뉴럴 텐서 네트워크 기반 주식 개별종목 지식개체명 추출 방법에 관한 연구)

  • Yang, Yunseok;Lee, Hyun Jun;Oh, Kyong Joo
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.25 no.2
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    • pp.25-38
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    • 2019
  • Selecting high-quality information that meets the interests and needs of users among the overflowing contents is becoming more important as the generation continues. In the flood of information, efforts to reflect the intention of the user in the search result better are being tried, rather than recognizing the information request as a simple string. Also, large IT companies such as Google and Microsoft focus on developing knowledge-based technologies including search engines which provide users with satisfaction and convenience. Especially, the finance is one of the fields expected to have the usefulness and potential of text data analysis because it's constantly generating new information, and the earlier the information is, the more valuable it is. Automatic knowledge extraction can be effective in areas where information flow is vast, such as financial sector, and new information continues to emerge. However, there are several practical difficulties faced by automatic knowledge extraction. First, there are difficulties in making corpus from different fields with same algorithm, and it is difficult to extract good quality triple. Second, it becomes more difficult to produce labeled text data by people if the extent and scope of knowledge increases and patterns are constantly updated. Third, performance evaluation is difficult due to the characteristics of unsupervised learning. Finally, problem definition for automatic knowledge extraction is not easy because of ambiguous conceptual characteristics of knowledge. So, in order to overcome limits described above and improve the semantic performance of stock-related information searching, this study attempts to extract the knowledge entity by using neural tensor network and evaluate the performance of them. Different from other references, the purpose of this study is to extract knowledge entity which is related to individual stock items. Various but relatively simple data processing methods are applied in the presented model to solve the problems of previous researches and to enhance the effectiveness of the model. From these processes, this study has the following three significances. First, A practical and simple automatic knowledge extraction method that can be applied. Second, the possibility of performance evaluation is presented through simple problem definition. Finally, the expressiveness of the knowledge increased by generating input data on a sentence basis without complex morphological analysis. The results of the empirical analysis and objective performance evaluation method are also presented. The empirical study to confirm the usefulness of the presented model, experts' reports about individual 30 stocks which are top 30 items based on frequency of publication from May 30, 2017 to May 21, 2018 are used. the total number of reports are 5,600, and 3,074 reports, which accounts about 55% of the total, is designated as a training set, and other 45% of reports are designated as a testing set. Before constructing the model, all reports of a training set are classified by stocks, and their entities are extracted using named entity recognition tool which is the KKMA. for each stocks, top 100 entities based on appearance frequency are selected, and become vectorized using one-hot encoding. After that, by using neural tensor network, the same number of score functions as stocks are trained. Thus, if a new entity from a testing set appears, we can try to calculate the score by putting it into every single score function, and the stock of the function with the highest score is predicted as the related item with the entity. To evaluate presented models, we confirm prediction power and determining whether the score functions are well constructed by calculating hit ratio for all reports of testing set. As a result of the empirical study, the presented model shows 69.3% hit accuracy for testing set which consists of 2,526 reports. this hit ratio is meaningfully high despite of some constraints for conducting research. Looking at the prediction performance of the model for each stocks, only 3 stocks, which are LG ELECTRONICS, KiaMtr, and Mando, show extremely low performance than average. this result maybe due to the interference effect with other similar items and generation of new knowledge. In this paper, we propose a methodology to find out key entities or their combinations which are necessary to search related information in accordance with the user's investment intention. Graph data is generated by using only the named entity recognition tool and applied to the neural tensor network without learning corpus or word vectors for the field. From the empirical test, we confirm the effectiveness of the presented model as described above. However, there also exist some limits and things to complement. Representatively, the phenomenon that the model performance is especially bad for only some stocks shows the need for further researches. Finally, through the empirical study, we confirmed that the learning method presented in this study can be used for the purpose of matching the new text information semantically with the related stocks.

A Randomized Comparative Study of Blind versus Ultrasound Guided Glenohumeral Joint Injection of Corticosteroids for Treatment of Shoulder Stiffness

  • Lee, Hyo-Jin;Ok, Ji-Hoon;Park, In;Bae, Sung-Ho;Kim, Sung-Eun;Shin, Dong-Jin;Kim, Yang-Soo
    • Clinics in Shoulder and Elbow
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    • v.18 no.3
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    • pp.120-127
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    • 2015
  • Background: We prospectively compared the response to blind and ultrasound-guided glenohumeral injection of corticosteroids for treatment of shoulder stiffness. Methods: A total of 77 patients with shoulder stiffness between April 2008 and March 2012 were recruited. Patients were randomized to receive either a blind (group 1, n=39) or ultrasound-guided (group 2, n=38) glenohumeral injection of 40 mg triamcinolone. The clinical outcomes and shoulder range of motion (ROM) before injection, at 3, 6, and 12 months after injection and at the last follow-up were assessed. The same rehabilitation program was applied in both groups during the follow-up period. Results: There was no significant difference in demographic data on age, sex, ROM, and symptom duration before injection between groups (p>0.05). There were no significant differences in ROM including forward flexion, external rotation at the side, external rotation at $90^{\circ}$ abduction, and internal rotation, visual analogue scale for pain and functional outcomes including American Shoulder and Elbow Surgeons score, Simple Shoulder test between the two groups at any time point (p>0.05). Conclusions: Based on the current data, the result of ultrasound-guided glenohumeral injection was not superior to that of blind injection in the treatment of shoulder stiffness. We suggest that ultrasound-guided glenohumeral injection could be performed according to the patient's compliance and the surgeon's preference. Once familiar with the non-imaging-guided glenohumeral injection, it is an efficient and reliable method for the experienced surgeon. Ultrasound could be performed according to the surgeon's preference.

Establishment of the Heart Failure Model in Swine for the Experiment of the Pneumatic Ventricular Assist Device (공압식 심실보조기의 실험을 위한 돼지에서의 심부전 모델의 개발)

  • 박성식;서필원;이상훈;강봉진;문상호;김삼현
    • Journal of Chest Surgery
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    • v.36 no.3
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    • pp.123-130
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    • 2003
  • Background: In order to develop the acute heart failure model for the animal experiment of the pneumatic ventricular assist device, we decided to use young pig whose coronary artery distribution is almost the same as humans and also very cheap in price. The purpose of this study is to develop stable, reproducible acute ischemic heart failure model in swine using coronary artery ligation method. Material and Method: Five young pigs whose weights are the same as adult humans are under experiment. Each pig was under endotracheal intubation and connected to a mechanical ventilator. Through left lateral thoracotomy, we exposed the heart and induced ischemic heart failure by coronary artery ligation. The ligation began at the distal part of the left anterior descending coronary artery. After 5 minutes of initial ligation we reperfused the artery and then re-ligated. Before and after each ligation-reperfusion procedure we assessed the left ventricular end-diastolic pressure, arterial pressure, and cardiac index. We also measured left ventricular end-diastolic dimension, end-systolic dimension, fractional shortening, ejection fraction using intraoperative epicardial echocardiography. After appropriate heart failure was established with sequential (from distal part of LAD to proximal location) ligation-reperfusion-ligation procedure, we inserted the ventricular assist device and operated. Result: We established stable acute ischemic heart failure in 3 of 5 young pigs with this sequential ligation-reperfusion-ligation procedure, and could maintained 50% less ejection fraction before the procedure according to intraoperative epicardial echocardiography. We also observed no ventricular arrhythmia usually associated with simple coronary artery ligation in large animals and no cardiac arrest associated with ventricular arrhythmia or myocardial stunning. In pathologic specimen, we observed scattered ischemic myocardium in all around the ischemic field induced by coronary artery ligation. Conclusion: Under the concept of ischemic preconditioning, we developed safe and reproducible acute ischemic heart failure model in swine using sequential coronary artery ligation-reperfusion-ligation method.

Using Virtual Reality in Design of Street Space by Citizen Participation (주민참여형 가로공간설계에서 가상현실(VR)의 활용)

  • Lee, Seul-Bee;Eo, Sang-Jin;Ryu, Kyung-Moo;Kim, Young-Hwan
    • Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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    • v.19 no.2
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    • pp.77-85
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    • 2018
  • Recently, many people have attempted to combine the 4th industry in various fields. Citizen participation has also become more important in the policy making and decision making process. Therefore, this study examined ways to encourage citizen participation by integrating the 4th industry in the field of urban planning and design. The research method was to design street space using virtual reality, and to examine the preference of design and the satisfaction of using a virtual reality device for Cheongju citizens and residents. The main result is that the use of VR in the design process of street space can achieve a sufficient outcome in terms of inducing resident participation. The opinions of the respondents before and after the VR experience were different from each other. After the VR experience, understanding, participation and interest in design were improved. On the other hand, during the course of the study, there are many difficulties in obtaining a place that satisfied the conditions of the PC-VR equipment. Although it can be used by connecting a smart phone and a VR device, the constraint of free movement and degradation of the graphic quality are inevitable. In addition, it is difficult to operate simple interfaces because VR devices are not yet popularized. Accordingly, it will be necessary to popularize and commercialize VR equipment and establish a legal basis.