• Journal of Hospice and Palliative Care
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.1-10
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• 2024

This article underscores the importance of integrating comprehensive palliative care for noncancer patients who are undergoing hemodialysis, with an emphasis on the aging populations in Asian nations such as Taiwan, Japan, the Republic of Korea, and China. As the global demographic landscape shifts towards an aging society and healthcare continues to advance, a marked increase has been observed in patients undergoing hemodialysis who require palliative care. This necessitates an immediate paradigm shift to incorporate this care, addressing the intricate physical, psychosocial, and spiritual challenges faced by these individuals and their families. Numerous challenges impede the provision of effective palliative care, including difficulties in prognosis, delayed referrals, cultural misconceptions, lack of clinician confidence, and insufficient collaboration among healthcare professionals. The article proposes potential solutions, such as targeted training for clinicians, the use of telemedicine to facilitate shared decision-making, and the introduction of time-limited trials for dialysis to overcome these obstacles. The integration of palliative care into routine renal treatment and the promotion of transparent communication among healthcare professionals represent key strategies to enhance the quality of life and end-of-life care for people on hemodialysis. By embracing innovative strategies and fostering collaboration, healthcare providers can deliver more patient-centered, holistic care that meets the complex needs of seriously ill patients within an aging population undergoing hemodialysis.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.49 no.8
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• pp.27-34
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• 2012

In this paper, the implementation of high throughput two-dimensional (2-D) $8{\times}8$ forward and inverse integer DCT transform for H.264 is presented. The forward and inverse transforms are represented using simple shift and addition operations. Matrix decomposition and matrix operation such as the Kronecker product and direct sum are used to reduce the computation complexity. The proposed design uses integer computations and does not use transpose memory and hence, the resource consumption is also reduced. The maximum operating frequency of the proposed pipelined architecture is 1.184 GHz, which achieves 25.27 Gpixels/sec throughput rate with the hardware cost of 44864 gates. High throughput and low hardware makes the proposed design useful for real time H.264/AVC high definition processing.

• Journal of Food Hygiene and Safety
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.206-212
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• 1998

An improved antibody-coated sensor system based on quartz crystal microbalance was developed for the detection of Salmonella spp. An antibody against Salmonella common structural antigen was immobilized onto one gold electrode of the piezoelectric quartz crystal surface by various immobilization procedures. The best results in sensitivity and stability were obtained with the thin layers of protein A and 3,3'-dithiopropionimidate.2HCI(DTBP), a homobifunctional thiol-cleavable crosslinker. After the addition of a S. typhimurium suspension into a reaction cell with 0.1 M sodium phosphate buffer, pH 7.2, the resonant frequency owing to S. typhimurium adsorption decreased conspicuously. The antibody-immobilized crystals prepared by the gold-protein A complex formation and DTBP thiolation showed the frequency shifts of 80 and 283 Hz, respectively. The time required for maximum frequency shift was about 30~60 min. The antibody-coated crystal could be reused for 6~8 consecutive assays.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.28 no.7A
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• pp.547-556
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• 2003

This paper proposes a novel arithmetic unit over GF(2$^{m}$ ) for low-area elliptic curve cryptographic processor. The proposed arithmetic unit, which is linear feed back shift register (LFSR) architecture, is designed by using hardware sharing between the binary GCD algorithm and the most significant bit (MSB)-first multiplication scheme, and it can perform both division and multiplication in GF(2$^{m}$ ). In other word, the proposed architecture produce division results at a rate of one per 2m-1 clock cycles in division mode and multiplication results at a rate of one per m clock cycles in multiplication mode. Analysis shows that the computational delay time of the proposed architecture, for division, is less than previously proposed dividers with reduced transistor counts. In addition, since the proposed arithmetic unit does not restrict the choice of irreducible polynomials and has regularity and modularity, it provides a high flexibility and scalability with respect to the field size m. Therefore, the proposed novel architecture can be used for both division and multiplication circuit of elliptic curve cryptographic processor. Specially, it is well suited to low-area applications such as smart cards and hand held devices.

• International Journal of Oral Biology
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• v.40 no.1
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• pp.51-61
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• 2015

Shikonin, a major ingredient in the traditional Chinese herb Lithospermumerythrorhizon, exhibits multiple biological functions including antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, and antitumor effects. It has recently been reported that shikonin displays antitumor properties in many cancers. This study was aimed to investigate whether shikonin could inhibit oral squamous carcinoma cell (OSCC) growth via mechanisms of apoptosis and cell cycle arrest. The effects of shikonin on the viability and growth of OSCC cell line, SCC25 cells were assessed by MTT assay and clonogenic assays, respectively. Hoechst staining and DNA electrophoresis indicated that the shikonin-treated SCC25 cells were undergoing apoptosis. Western blotting, immunocytochemistry, confocal microscopy, flow cytometry, MMP activity, and proteasome activity also supported the finding that shikonin induces apoptosis. Shikonin treatment of SCC25 cells resulted in a time- and dose-dependent decrease in cell viability, inhibition of cell growth, and increase in apoptotic cell death. The treated SCC25 cells showed several lines of apoptotic manifestation as follows: nuclear condensation; DNA fragmentation; reduced MMP and proteasome activity; decrease in DNA contents; release of cytochrome c into cytosol; translocation of AIF and DFF40 (CAD) onto the nuclei; a significant shift in Bax/Bcl-2 ratio; and activation of caspase-9, -7, -6, and -3, as well as PARP, lamin A/C, and DFF45 (ICAD). Shikonin treatment also resulted in down-regulation of the G1 cell cycle-related proteins and up-regulation of $p27^{KIP1}$. Taken together, our present findings demonstrate that shikonin strongly inhibits cell proliferation by modulating the expression of the G1 cell cycle-related proteins, and that it induces apoptosis via the proteasome, mitochondria, and caspase cascades in SCC25 cells.

• The Korean Journal of Emergency Medical Services
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.71-85
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• 2006

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship among the variables, personality type, stress, and job satisfaction in firefighters. Methods: The questionnaire research was conducted for field service firefighters who work in two cities for the period of June 20, 2005 through July 20, 2005. A total number of 308 data were used for this analysis. For analysis of the data, the SPSSWIN 10.0 program was used to analyze descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, t-test and one-way ANOVA. Results: The mean score of subjects' stress was 3.30 and the mean score of job satisfaction was 2.86. There were significant differences on stress and job satisfaction by general characteristics. Stress was significantly differed by field of working. Job satisfaction was significantly differed by marital status and field of working. Also, there were significant differences on stress and job satisfaction by characteristics related to working. Stress was significantly differed by sleeping time at night shift, witness their superior's or companion's death or injury, and a threat to death or injury. Job satisfaction was significantly differed by an aptitude for field of working and wish to change the field of working. But there was no significant differences on stress and job satisfaction by personality type. There was statistically significant negative correlation between stress and job satisfaction. Conclusion: Strategies that can decrease their stress need to be developed to increase job satisfaction.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.562-568
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• 2016

In this paper, we focus on recognition of speed-limit signs among a few types of traffic signs because speed-limit sign is closely related to safe driving of drivers. Although histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) and local binary patterns (LBP) are representative features for object recognition, these features have a weakness with respect to rotation, in that it does not consider the rotation of the target object when generating patterns. Therefore, this paper propose the fast rotation-invariant binary patterns (FRIBP) algorithm to generate a binary pattern that is robust against rotation. The proposed FRIBP algorithm deletes an unused layer of the histogram, and eliminates the shift and comparison operations in order to quickly extract the desired feature. The proposed FRIBP algorithm is successfully applied to German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark (GTSRB) datasets, and the results show that the recognition capabilities of the proposed method are similar to those of other methods. Moreover, its recognition speed is considerably enhanced than related works as approximately 0.47second for 12,630 test data.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.15 no.8
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• pp.4742-4748
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• 2014

A semi-automatic clutch was developed for drivers of vehicles with manual transmission. The clutch is operated by pressing a switch on the gear stick without stepping on a clutch pedal when the driver wants to shift gears. To automatic control a clutch, driving information is provided by sensors installed under the vehicle. On the other hand, sensors are prone to failure under severe driving conditions and a long time is needed to install or repair these sensors in the vehicle. In this paper, a semi-automatic clutch that received driving information by CAN communication from the ECU was developed and a pneumatic actuator was used to operate the clutch. The semi-automatic clutch by a pneumatic cylinder was operated with a supply air pressure of more than 3bar.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.41 no.2
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• pp.163-171
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• 2016

In order to detect the exact position of high-speed train, it is necessary to obtain location information from the transponder tag installed along the track. In this paper, we proposed parallel descrambling scheme for high-speed railway transponder system, which aims for reducing the processing time required to decode telegram. Since a telegram is stored in a tag after information bits are scrambled by an encoder, decoding procedure includes descrambling of received telegram to recover the original information bits. By analyzing the structure of the descrambling shift register circuit, we proposed a parallel descrambling scheme for fast decoding of telegram. By comparing the required number of clocks, it is shown that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms the original one.

• The Korea Journal of Herbology
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.33-42
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• 2013

Objective : Morus alba Linne Root Bark (MRAL) is a medicinal herb in Korean Medicine, known for its anti-inflammatory and anti-allergic properties. However, its mechanisms of action and the cellular targets have not yet been found and the study was developed to investigate the allergic suppressive effect of MRAL. The purpose of this study is to investigate the allergic suppressive effects of MRAL on activation of MC/9 mast cells. Methods : Cytotoxic activity of MRAL (50, 100, 200, 400 ${\mu}g/mL$) on MC/9 mast cells measured using EZ-Cytox cell viability assay kit (WST reagent). The levels of interleukin-5 (IL-5), IL-13 and IL-4, IL-5, IL-6, IL-13 mRNA expression were measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and real-time PCR respectively. The expression of transcription factors such as GATA-1, GATA-2, NFAT, AP-1 and NF-${\kappa}B$ p65 DNA binding activity were measured by western blot and electrophoresis mobility shift assay (EMSA). Results : Our results indicated that MRAL (50 ${\mu}g/mL$, 100 ${\mu}g/mL$) significantly inhibited PMA/Ionomycin-induced production of IL-5 and IL-13 and the expression of IL-4, IL-5, IL-6 and IL-13 mRNA in MC/9 mast cells. Moreover, MRAL (50 ${\mu}g/mL$, 100 ${\mu}g/mL$) inhibited PMA/Ionomycin-induced GATA-1, GATA-2, NFAT-1, NFAT-2, c-Fos protein expression and NF-${\kappa}B$ p65 DNA binding activity in MC/9 mast cells. Conclusions : In conclusion, we suspect the anti-allergenic activities of MRAL, may be related to the regulation of transcription factors GATA-1, GATA-2, NFAT-1, NFAT-2, c-Fos and NF-${\kappa}B$ p65 DNA binding assay causing inhibition of Th2 cytokines IL-5 and IL-13 in mast cells.