• Journal of Life Science
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• v.33 no.1
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• pp.64-72
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• 2023

Despite several advances in identification of cardiac transcription factors, there are still needs to find new bioactive molecules that promote cardiomyogenesis from stem cells to highly efficient myocardial differentiation. We analyzed Illumina expression microarray data of mouse embryonic stem cells (mESCs)-derived cardiomyocytes. 276 genes were upregulated (≥ 4fold) in mESCs-derived cardiomyocytes compared undifferentiated ESCs. Secreted phosphoprotein 2 (Spp2) is one of candidates and is known to inhibit bone morphogenetic protein 2 (BMP2) signal transduction as a pseudoreceptor for BMP2. However, its function in cardiomyogenesis is unknown. We confirmed that Spp2 expression increased during the differentiation into functional cardiomyocytes using mESCs, TC-1/Kh2 and E14. Interestingly, Spp2 secretion transiently increased 3 days after formation of embryoid bodies (EBs), indicating that the extracellular secretion of Spp2 is involved in the differentiation of ESCs into cardiomyocytes. To characterize Spp2, we performed experiments using the C2C12 mouse myoblast cell line, which has the property of shifting the differentiation pathway from myoblastic to osteoblastic by treatment with BMP2. Similar to the differentiation of ESCs, transcription of Spp2 increased as C2C12 myoblasts differentiated into myotubes. In particular, Spp2 secretion increased dramatically in the early stage of differentiation. Furthermore, treatment with Spp2-Flag recombinant protein promoted the differentiation of C2C12 myoblasts into myotubes. Taken together, we suggest a novel bioactive protein Spp2 that differentiates ESCs into cardiomyocytes. This may be useful for understanding the molecular pathways of cardiomyogenesis and for experimental or clinical promotion of stem cell therapy for ischemic heart diseases.

• The Transactions of the Korea Information Processing Society
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• v.13 no.6
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• pp.284-290
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• 2024

Speech emotion recognition (SER) is a technique that is used to analyze the speaker's voice patterns, including vibration, intensity, and tone, to determine their emotional state. There has been an increase in interest in artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, which are now widely used in medicine, education, industry, and the military. Nevertheless, existing researchers have attained impressive results by utilizing acted-out speech from skilled actors in a controlled environment for various scenarios. In particular, there is a mismatch between acted and spontaneous speech since acted speech includes more explicit emotional expressions than spontaneous speech. For this reason, spontaneous speech-emotion recognition remains a challenging task. This paper aims to conduct emotion recognition and improve performance using spontaneous speech data. To this end, we implement deep learning-based speech emotion recognition using the VGG (Visual Geometry Group) after converting 1-dimensional audio signals into a 2-dimensional spectrogram image. The experimental evaluations are performed on the Korean spontaneous emotional speech database from AI-Hub, consisting of 7 emotions, i.e., joy, love, anger, fear, sadness, surprise, and neutral. As a result, we achieved an average accuracy of 83.5% and 73.0% for adults and young people using a time-frequency 2-dimension spectrogram, respectively. In conclusion, our findings demonstrated that the suggested framework outperformed current state-of-the-art techniques for spontaneous speech and showed a promising performance despite the difficulty in quantifying spontaneous speech emotional expression.

• Journal of Energy Engineering
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.103-109
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• 2016

Polyethylene pipes has useful benefits which are anti-corrosive and flexible material, so it is used to gas pipes but also class 3 water pipes of nuclear power plant, process pipes of petrochemical plant and chemical plant. So the usage of polyethylene pipes is widely increased. But it has been limited for the usage of polyethylene, because it can not be directly detected to fusion joints by using non destructive evaluation. Polyethylene pipes are connected by two methods, one is butt fusion and the other is electrofusion. Butt fusion is widely used to connecting the pipes. It is proposed to method for determining the reliability of joints in this study that is detection of the melt flow zone at fusion joints. In this study, middle density polyethylene is used, outside diameter of the test specimen is 225mm and thickness is 20.5mm. Speed of ultrasonic of this test specimen is 2,200m/s. Test specimens were fabricated by varying the heating time which means from 0% to 130% applying time through heating plate to polyethylene for detecting melt flow zone. Also 4 additional test specimens were made, one was made that not scrapping attached surface of pipes but applying 100% of the proper heating time and the others were made to include of soil, gravel and vinly tape paper at fusion joints, that were also applied 100% of proper heating time. Ultrasonic testing to measure the melt flow zone of 20 test specimens was conducted by using 3.5MHz and 5.0MHz ultrasonic probes and melt flow zone measuring was conducted to three times at different point to one specimen. To differentiate the melt flow zone signal, post image processing was equally conducted to all test results and image levels, contrast, sharpen, threshold were adopted to all teat results and the test results were displayed gray scale. From the results, for the shorter heating times the reflection area of multiple echo have been increased, so the data was obtained from the position where it can be eliminated as much as possible. At 80% of proper heating time(168 sec.), the signal of melt flow zone was obtained clearly, so measuring could be conducted. From 7% of proper heating time(15 sec.) to shorter heating times. we could not obtain the signal because test specimen was not fused. From the result, we can verify that measuring of melt flow zone by using phased array ultrasonic imaging method is possible. And we can verify to complete and incomplete butt fusion by measuring the melt flow zone.

• Investigative Magnetic Resonance Imaging
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.100-106
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• 2000

Purpose : To evaluate the usefulness of cerebral blood flow measurement applied to perfusion weighted image with short-scan time single shot gradient echo-planar technique in measuring cerebral blood volume(rCBV) of normal rabbits. Materials and methods : With 2.1-3.6 kg weighted rabbits, image is acquired when they are in supine position in children positioner. Perfusion weighted image is acquired to 44 seconds per 1 second successively. After 4 seconds later, Gd-DTPA 2ml are injected into int. jugular vein with 2 ml per second and normal saline is also injected after that. Same technique is applied 2 times per 30 minites in same rabbit. After Image is obtained in two part of cerebral cortex at vertex, convexity, in one of basal ganglia with choosing about $3-5{\textrm{mm}^2}$ areas. Curve of signal intensity changes in time sequence is drawn. After this images are transmitted by PC and software IDL, regional cerebral blood volume is measured with imaging processing program made by us. Results : With 22 of 24 rabbits, satisfactory 1-2 signal intensity versus time curve is made. Cerebral blood capacity and contrast media stay time (ST) is measured in two cerebral cortex and basal ganglia refering in parietal cerebral cortex. Mean focal cerebral blood flow capacity ratio in cortex was $0.97{\pm}0.35$ and in basal ganglia, $0.99{\pm}0.37$, mean contrast media stay time in cortex was $9.83{\pm}1.63$ sec and in basal gaiglia, $9.42{\pm}1.14$ sec, but there was no statistically significant difference between two areas ($\rho$=0.05). Conclusion : In cerebral cortex and basal ganglia, there is no difference in mean focal blood volume and mean contrast stay time. Therefore, PWI is useful in cerebral blood flow and early diagnosis, prognosis of cerebral ischemic disease. Hereafter, it is helpful in analysing cerebral blood flow changes with comparison difference in rCBV between normal tissue and ischemic tissue, and that with DWI finding in infarcted patient.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.41-50
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• 2022

In this paper, a method to directly calculate the major elements of skin color such as melanin and hemoglobin from the RGB signal of the camera is proposed. The main elements of skin color typically measure spectral reflectance using specific equipment, and reconfigure the values at some wavelengths of the measured light. The values calculated by this method include such things as melanin index and erythema index, and require special equipment such as a spectral reflectance measuring device or a multi-spectral camera. It is difficult to find a direct calculation method for such component elements from a general digital camera, and a method of indirectly calculating the concentration of melanin and hemoglobin using independent component analysis has been proposed. This method targets a region of a certain RGB image, extracts characteristic vectors of melanin and hemoglobin, and calculates the concentration in a manner similar to that of Principal Component Analysis. The disadvantage of this method is that it is difficult to directly calculate the pixel unit because a group of pixels in a certain area is used as an input, and since the extracted feature vector is implemented by an optimization method, it tends to be calculated with a different value each time it is executed. The final calculation is determined in the form of an image representing the components of melanin and hemoglobin by converting it back to the RGB coordinate system without using the feature vector itself. In order to improve the disadvantages of this method, the proposed method is to calculate the component values of melanin and hemoglobin in a feature space rather than an RGB coordinate system using a feature vector, and calculate the spectral reflectance corresponding to the skin color using a general digital camera. Methods and methods of calculating detailed components constituting skin pigments such as melanin, oxidized hemoglobin, deoxidized hemoglobin, and carotenoid using spectral reflectance. The proposed method does not require special equipment such as a spectral reflectance measuring device or a multi-spectral camera, and unlike the existing method, direct calculation of the pixel unit is possible, and the same characteristics can be obtained even in repeated execution. The standard diviation of density for melanin and hemoglobin of proposed method was 15% compared to conventional and therefore gives 6 times stable.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.59-68
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• 1998

Digital hearing aids offer many advantages over conventional analog hearing aids. With the advent of high speed digital signal processing chips, new digital techniques have been introduced to digital hearing aids. In addition, the evaluation of new ideas in hearing aids is necessarily accompanied by intensive subject-based clinical tests which requires much time and cost. In this paper, we present an objective method to evaluate and predict the performance of hearing aid systems without the help of such subject-based tests. In the hearing impairment simulation(HIS) algorithm, a sensorineural hearing impairment medel is established from auditory test data of the impaired subject being simulated. Also, the nonlinear behavior of the loudness recruitment is defined using hearing loss functions generated from the measurements. To transform the natural input sound into the impaired one, a frequency sampling filter is designed. The filter is continuously refreshed with the level-dependent frequency response function provided by the impairment model. To assess the performance, the HIS algorithm was implemented in real-time using a floating-point DSP. Signals processed with the real-time system were presented to normal subjects and their auditory data modified by the system was measured. The sensorineural hearing impairment was simulated and tested. The threshold of hearing and the speech discrimination tests exhibited the efficiency of the system in its use for the hearing impairment simulation. Using the HIS system we evaluated three typical hearing aid algorithms.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.46 no.8
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• pp.22-30
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• 2009

Due to high levels of integration and complexity, the Network-on-Chip (NoC) approach has emerged as a new design paradigm to overcome on-chip communication issues and data bandwidth limits in conventional SoC(System-on-Chip) design. In particular, exponentially growing of energy consumption caused by high frequency, synchronization and distributing a single global clock signal throughout the chip have become major design bottlenecks. To deal with these issues, a globally asynchronous, locally synchronous (GALS) design combined with low power techniques is considered. Such a design style fits nicely with the concept of voltage-frequency-islands (VFI) which has been recently introduced for achieving fine-grain system-level power management. In this paper, we propose an efficient design methodology that minimizes energy consumption by VFI partitioning on an NoC architecture as well as assigning supply and threshold voltage levels to each VFI. The proposed algorithm which find VFI and appropriate core (or processing element) supply voltage consists of traffic-aware core graph partitioning, communication contention delay-aware tile mapping, power variation-aware core dynamic voltage scaling (DVS), power efficient VFI merging and voltage update on the VFIs Simulation results show that average 10.3% improvement in energy consumption compared to other existing works.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.41 no.11
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• pp.1653-1660
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• 2016

The synthetic aperture rardar (SAR) is an active sensor using microwaves. It transmits a microwave signal, called a chirp pulse, and receives the reflected signal in a moving platform such as satellite and unmanned aerial vehicle. Since this sensor uses microwaves that can penetrate the atmosphere, SAR generates the images regardless of light and weather conditions. However SAR operates on the moving platform, the Doppler shift and the side-looking observation method should be considered. In addtion, a residual image or ghost image can be occurred according to selection of the pulse repetition frequency (PRF). In this paper, a range design of the PRF for the L-band spaceborne SAR system is studied for prevention of SAR image distortion. And the system is studied for prevention of SAR image distortion. And the system parameter and the PRF are calibrated iteratively according to the proposed system design procedure and design constraints. The MATLAB based on SAR system simulator has been developed to verify the validity of calculated PRF. The developed simulator assumes that SAR sensor is operated by the PRF calculated from the design. The results of the simulator show that the targets in image has a valid peak to side-lobe ratio (PSLR) so that the PRF can be used for the spaceborne SAR sensor.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Surveying, Geodesy, Photogrammetry and Cartography
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• v.30 no.1
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• pp.87-96
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• 2012

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) announced that an earthquake of 9.0 magnitude had occurred near the east coast of Japan on March 11, 2011, resulting in a displacement of the crust of about 2.4 meters. The Korean peninsula is located on the Eurasian tectonic plate that stretches out to Japan; therefore, there is a high possibility of being affected by an earthquake. The Korean GPS CORS network operated by the National Geographic Information Institute (NGII) was processed for ten days before and after the earthquake. Both static and kinematic baseline processing were tested for the determination of crustal deformation. The static baseline processing was performed in two scenarios: 1) fixing three IGS stations in China, Mongolia and Russia; 2) fixing SUWN, one of the CORS networks in Korea, in order to effectively verify crustal deformation. All data processing was carried out using Bernese V5.0. The test results show that most of the parts of the Korean peninsula have moved to the east, ranging 1.2 to 5.6 cm, compared to the final solution of the day before the earthquake. The stations, such as DOKD and ULLE that are established on the islands closer to the epicenter, have clearly moved the largest amounts. Furthermore, the station CHJU, located on the southwestern part of Korea, presents relatively small changes. The relative positioning between CORS confirms the fact that there were internal distortions of the Korean peninsula to some extent. In addition, the 30-second interval kinematic processing of CORS data gives an indication of earthquake signals with some delays depending on the distance from the epicenter.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.29 no.1C
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• pp.102-110
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• 2004

In this paper, we propose a VLSI structure of real-time image compression and reconstruction processor using 2-D discrete wavelet transform and implement into a hardware which use minimal hardware resource using ASIC library. In the implemented hardware, Data path part consists of the DWT kernel for the wavelet transform and inverse transform, quantizer/dequantizer, the huffman encoder/huffman decoder, the adder/buffer for the inverse wavelet transform, and the interface modules for input/output. Control part consists of the programming register, the controller which decodes the instructions and generates the control signals, and the status register for indicating the internal state into the external of circuit. According to the programming condition, the designed circuit has the various selective output formats which are wavelet coefficient, quantization coefficient or index, and Huffman code in image compression mode, and Huffman decoding result, reconstructed quantization coefficient, and reconstructed wavelet coefficient in image reconstructed mode. The programming register has 16 stages and one instruction can be used for a horizontal(or vertical) filtering in a level. Since each register automatically operated in the right order, 4-level discrete wavelet transform can be executed by a programming. We synthesized the designed circuit with synthesis library of Hynix 0.35um CMOS fabrication using the synthesis tool, Synopsys and extracted the gate-level netlist. From the netlist, timing information was extracted using Vela tool. We executed the timing simulation with the extracted netlist and timing information using NC-Verilog tool. Also PNR and layout process was executed using Apollo tool. The Implemented hardware has about 50,000 gate sizes and stably operates in 80MHz clock frequency.