• Development and Reproduction
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.111-119
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• 2007

Differentiation of cells can be induced through modulation of endogenous regulators using exogenous factors. Useful transfection systems to transport a specific exogenous regulator into cell have been tried but still there are many obstacles to overcome. In this study, we examined the transfection efficiency of cell permeable peptides (CPPs) in mouse embryonic stem cell under the various conditions. To identify the CPP-mediated translocation of a protein, we employed recombinant CPP-enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP). Viability of R1 cells was different between experimental groups depending on the kind of CPP and the concentration of CPP-EGFP. Translocation of CPP-EGFPs into the R1 cells was not detected until 30 min after CPP-EGFPs treatment in all groups. After 1 hr, translocation of pEP-1-EGFP-N was detected, but it could not be detected in the other group. Transfection of pEP-1EGFP-N was independent on its concentration. The time course did not show saturation even after 24 hr in pEP-1-EGFP-N. These results showed that the permeability depended on the kind of CPP and the location of His-tag in the case of examined CPPs, and did not need biological energy. On summary, the efficiency of transfection of CPP-EGFP depends on the CPP sequences but the culture time is not a key factor in transfection for the mouse embryonic stem cell. For the future studies to improve the efficiency of translocation of protein into embryonic stem cells, it is needed to develop modified CPP or mediator. The studies would be very useful to induce the differentiation of embryonic stem cells.

• The Korean Journal of Nuclear Medicine Technology
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.62-69
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• 2012

Purpose: The present study has an objective of effectively separating and making observations on a portion of radiopharmaceutical excreted via digestive organ to remain in the organ and invade a heart shadow. Materials and methods: When heart shadow is blocked by the organ in tests during a resting phase and a loaded phase, additional images were obtained using immobilization device. The immobilization devices were used to tilt the upper body forward from supine position. Results: In the reconstructed image for the separated case, as compared with the case where a part of organ is overlapped with heart, in terms of an overall mean value for each parameter, the end-diastolic volume increased by 2.75 mL, the end-systolic volume decreased by 3.16 mL, the left ventricle cardiac coefficient increased by 3.58%, and the area of defect region decreased by 3.58 and 3.92 cm for loading and resting phase, respectively. Conclusions: In the present study with myocardial perfusion SPECT, overlapped areas of heart and other organs could be effectively separated and visualization by the use of an immobilization device.

• Journal of Chest Surgery
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• v.37 no.9
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• pp.768-773
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• 2004

Failure of mitral valve repair sometimes may be ascribed to severe or progressive alteration of the subvalvar apparatus. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of new chordae formation on mitral repair. Material and Method: From March 1997 to february 1999, 26 patients underwent mitral valve repairs with new chordae formation, we compared the symptoms and echocardiographic findings checked at preoperative state, and intraoperative period, discharge, and their last OPD visit. There were 45 male, and 11 female patients, and their mean age was 51.2$\pm$43.4 years. Etiology of the lesions was degenerative (18), rheumatic (6), infective (1) and ischemic (1). Chordal lesions were caused by rupture (18), elongation (6), and a combination of two causes (2). Associated lesions included atrial septal defect (2), tricuspid insufficiency (7), aortic insufficiency(4), and a combination of previous two factors (2). The number of mean artificial chordae was 3.6$\pm$1.6. Annuloplasty was per-formed in all cases. The CPB time was 182,1$\pm$63.7 minutes and the ACC time was 133.1$\pm$45.6 minutes. Aver-age follow up period was 49.2$\pm$7.1 months. Result: There was no early death. Early reoperation was performed in bud patients, one patient received mitral valve replacement because of an abnormality of annuloplasty and ano-ther received pericardiostomy due to postoperative pericardial effusion. During the follow up of 49.2$\pm$7.1 moths, there was no late mortality. Postoperative NYHA functional class checked at last OPD visit was class I in 22 patients (88%), class II in 2 (8%), and class III in 1 (4%). Regarding the late echocardiogram MR was absent in 20 patients (78%), 1 in 4 (15%), and II in 1 (4%). The postrepair mitral valve area was 2.2$\pm$0.35 $\textrm{cm}^2$ Conclusion: This study suggests that mitral valve repair using new chordae formation provides good early and mid term survivals and functional improvement. We think that the artificial chorda formation with polytetrafluoroethylene suture might be safe and effective technique for mitral valve repair.

• Korean Journal of Psychosomatic Medicine
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.77-88
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• 2003

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to compare reliability and validity of three Korean versions of the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia scale and to confirm the most reliable and validated Korean translation of the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale for both clinical and research purpose in Korea. The first one was a Korean version of the 20-Item Toronto Alexithymia Scale developed by Lee YH et al in 1996 which was designated as TAS-20K(1996) in this study. This scale had a problem with one item due to the cultural difference regarding the word 'analyzing' between western culture and Korean culture. The second one was the revised version of TAS-20K(1996) on that point by Lee YH et al in 1996 without validation which was designated as TAS-20K(2003) in this study. The third one was a 23-item Korean version developed by Sin HG and Won HT in 1997, which was somewhat different from the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale(TAS-20) in the number of total item, the content of some items and the scoring method. This scale was designated as S-TAS here. Methods: 408 medical students were tested with one scale composed of all the different items randomly arranged from the three versions. We evaluated goodness-of-fit and Cronbach $\alpha$ coefficients of three scales for reliability. We used confirmatory factor analysis to compare validity. Results: TAS-20K(2003) showed that it had better internal consistency than TAS-20K(1996), which implied that the cultural difference should be considered in the Korean translation. Both TAS-20K(2003) and S-TAS replicated three-factor structures and had adequacy of fit, good internal consistency and acceptable validity. However, S-TAS had one item with poor item-factor correlation and didn't show high correlation between item 2 and factor 1 as before in 1997. Conclusion: Although S-TAS had added 3 items and changed the content of two items, it didn't show better reliability and validity than TAS-20K(2003). Therefore it is proposed to use TAS-20K (2003) as the Korean version of the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale(TAS-20K) for international communication of results of Alexithymia research. It has good internal consistency and validity and maintains original items, the same construct and scoring method as the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale.

• Journal of Chest Surgery
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• v.40 no.12
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• pp.811-816
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• 2007

Background: We analyzed our experience of arrhythmia surgery in patients with congenital heart disease. Material and Method: A retrospective review was performed on 43 consecutive patients with congenital heart disease, who underwent arrhythmia surgery between June 1998 and June 2006. Result: The median age at surgery was 52 years ($4{\sim}75$ years). The most frequent cardiac anomaly was an atrial septal defect (23/43, 53.5%). The types of arrhythmias were atrial flutter-fibrillation, intermittent non-sustainable ventricular tachycardia and others in 37, 2 and 4, respectively. Arrhythmia surgery consisted of a bi-atrial maze operation in 18 patients (modified cox maze III procedure in 5 patients, and a right side maze plus pulmonary vein cryo-isolation in 13), right side maze operation in 18 patients, cavo-tricuspid isthmus cryoablation for benign atrial flutter in 4 patients, right ventricular endocardial cryoablation in 2 patients and extranodal cryoablation for atrioventricular node re-entry tachycardia in 1 patient. The median follow-up was 23.8 months ($1{\sim}95.2$ months). There was no early mortality, and one late non-cardiac related death. The overall rates of restored sinus rhythm before discharge and $3{\sim}6$ months after surgery were 79% and 81%, respectively (bi-atrial maze group: 72% and 83%, right-side maze group: 77%, 77%). Conclusion: Arrhythmias associated with congenital heart disease can be safely treated surgically with an excellent intermediate-term outcome.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute Of Construction Engineering and Management
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• autumn
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• pp.180-185
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• 2003

The increase of traffic over a bridge has been emerged as one of the most severe problems in view of bridge maintenance, since the load effect caused by the vehicle passage over the bridge has brought out a long-term damage to bridge structure, and it is nearly impossible to maintain operational serviceability of bridge to user's satisfactory level without any concern on bridge maintenance at the phase of completion. Moreover, bridge maintenance operation should be performed by regular inspection over the bridge to prevent structural malfunction or unexpected accidents front breaking out by monitoring on cracks or deformations during service. Therefore, technical breakthrough related to this uninterested field of bridge maintenance leading the public to the turning point of recognition is desperately needed. This study has the aim of development on automated inspection system to lower surface of bridge superstructures to replace the conventional system of bridge inspection with the naked eye, where the monitoring staff is directly on board to refractive or other type of maintenance .vehicles, with which it is expected that we can solve the problems essentially where the results of inspection are varied to change with subjective manlier from monitoring staff, increase stabilities in safety during the inspection, and make contribution to construct data base by providing objective and quantitative data and materials through image processing method over data captured by cameras. By this system it is also expected that objective estimation over the right time of maintenance and reinforcement work will lead enormous decrease in maintenance cost.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.1-15
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• 2006

In Korea, a resident registration card has various personal information such as a present address, a resident registration number, a face picture and a fingerprint. A plastic-type resident card currently used is easy to forge or alter and tricks of forgery grow to be high-degree as time goes on. So, whether a resident card is forged or not is difficult to judge by only an examination with the naked eye. This paper proposed an automatic recognition method of a resident card which recognizes a resident registration number by using a refined ART2-based RBF network newly proposed and authenticates a face picture by a template image matching method. The proposed method, first, extracts areas including a resident registration number and the date of issue from a resident card image by applying Sobel masking, median filtering and horizontal smearing operations to the image in turn. To improve the extraction of individual codes from extracted areas, the original image is binarized by using a high-frequency passing filter and CDM masking is applied to the binaried image fur making image information of individual codes better. Lastly, individual codes, which are targets of recognition, are extracted by applying 4-directional contour tracking algorithm to extracted areas in the binarized image. And this paper proposed a refined ART2-based RBF network to recognize individual codes, which applies ART2 as the loaming structure of the middle layer and dynamicaly adjusts a teaming rate in the teaming of the middle and the output layers by using a fuzzy control method to improve the performance of teaming. Also, for the precise judgement of forgey of a resident card, the proposed method supports a face authentication by using a face template database and a template image matching method. For performance evaluation of the proposed method, this paper maked metamorphoses of an original image of resident card such as a forgey of face picture, an addition of noise, variations of contrast variations of intensity and image blurring, and applied these images with original images to experiments. The results of experiment showed that the proposed method is excellent in the recognition of individual codes and the face authentication fur the automatic recognition of a resident card.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.111-125
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• 2011

Clustering is a process of grouping similar or relevant documents into a cluster and assigning a meaningful concept to the cluster. By this process, clustering facilitates fast and correct search for the relevant documents by narrowing down the range of searching only to the collection of documents belonging to related clusters. For effective clustering, techniques are required for identifying similar documents and grouping them into a cluster, and discovering a concept that is most relevant to the cluster. One of the problems often appearing in this context is the detection of a complex concept that overlaps with several simple concepts at the same hierarchical level. Previous clustering methods were unable to identify and represent a complex concept that belongs to several different clusters at the same level in the concept hierarchy, and also could not validate the semantic hierarchical relationship between a complex concept and each of simple concepts. In order to solve these problems, this paper proposes a new clustering method that identifies and represents complex concepts efficiently. We developed the Hierarchical Overlapping Clustering (HOC) algorithm that modified the traditional Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering algorithm to allow overlapped clusters at the same level in the concept hierarchy. The HOC algorithm represents the clustering result not by a tree but by a lattice to detect complex concepts. We developed a system that employs the HOC algorithm to carry out the goal of complex concept detection. This system operates in three phases; 1) the preprocessing of documents, 2) the clustering using the HOC algorithm, and 3) the validation of semantic hierarchical relationships among the concepts in the lattice obtained as a result of clustering. The preprocessing phase represents the documents as x-y coordinate values in a 2-dimensional space by considering the weights of terms appearing in the documents. First, it goes through some refinement process by applying stopwords removal and stemming to extract index terms. Then, each index term is assigned a TF-IDF weight value and the x-y coordinate value for each document is determined by combining the TF-IDF values of the terms in it. The clustering phase uses the HOC algorithm in which the similarity between the documents is calculated by applying the Euclidean distance method. Initially, a cluster is generated for each document by grouping those documents that are closest to it. Then, the distance between any two clusters is measured, grouping the closest clusters as a new cluster. This process is repeated until the root cluster is generated. In the validation phase, the feature selection method is applied to validate the appropriateness of the cluster concepts built by the HOC algorithm to see if they have meaningful hierarchical relationships. Feature selection is a method of extracting key features from a document by identifying and assigning weight values to important and representative terms in the document. In order to correctly select key features, a method is needed to determine how each term contributes to the class of the document. Among several methods achieving this goal, this paper adopted the $x^2$�� statistics, which measures the dependency degree of a term t to a class c, and represents the relationship between t and c by a numerical value. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the HOC algorithm, a series of performance evaluation is carried out by using a well-known Reuter-21578 news collection. The result of performance evaluation showed that the HOC algorithm greatly contributes to detecting and producing complex concepts by generating the concept hierarchy in a lattice structure.

• Archives of design research
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• v.19 no.5 s.67
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• pp.85-94
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• 2006

In the 2000s, character animation technique is used at domestic TV character animation ads of diverse items displaying new character patterns and expression techniques of a high level. This study intends to identify the characteristics of TV character animation ads based ell character aesthetic theory and advertising rhetoric theory, and based on these findings, analyze trend and stream of expression in TV character animation ads by examining and classifying advertisements released in the past four years by items, character patterns and expression techniques. The results showed that TV character animation ads have been concentrated on confectionery, beverages and foods in the past, but the items have been diversified through the years. With reference to character patterns, personal and animal characters had made the main pattern, but recently product, virtual and composite characters are on the increase. In expression techniques, cell animation technique was found to be the most frequently used technique, which was followed by full-3D, cell and live action, cell and 3D and the clay animation technique. A trend like this suggests that TV character animation advertising items will continue to increase in line with the participation level of targets. In the meantime, personal and animal characters will continue to make the leading character pattern, while virtual and composite character patterns emerge in new forms. In expression techniques, live action combined with 30 technique and techniques using new expression materials will appear with cell animation technique as a central figure. As a whole, Korean character animation advertisement is expected to keep on growing to a new dimension in the aspect of items, character patterns and expression technique.

• Cartoon and Animation Studies
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• s.38
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• pp.145-176
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• 2015

In animation, 'laughter' is an important factor for the fun. Dreamworks' animation is a successful popular animation. It has four series and spin-off animations, and settled as a successful case that created fun with strategic use of parody throughout the productions. Most preceding studies on this animation have focused on its humor, parody, and satire. However, not many studies have discussed its independent comedy as a piece of animation that satisfies the needs of public. This study considered that viewers' desire to watch an animation comes from their fantasies to discuss the comedy of based on its animated characters. Animated characters communicate with the public with wits that ignore the rules of reality. The characters that do not exist in reality are created and animated to turn the world of reality upside down. The comedy in comes from the entertaining deformation of the society's fixed ideas and prejudices. It is a fun variation of the ideology behind fairy tales created by the Disney animations to challenge Disney in the animation market in reality, and twisted the world of fairy tales in the story to quench the thirst of the public. 'Shrek', a monstrous character, stands in the center of the story. A monstrous character that always played an anti-role has become the main character to break the rule of fairy tales. This is the subjectivation of anti-character. Second, it is a new anti-character with an exaggerated and distorted body. Lord Farquad, who looks abject compared to the monstrous character for a person with so much power and ambition, brings laughter. Third, it is the variation of various characters from fairy tales. The conventional fairy tale characters, both animals and non-living things, come out of the box and appear as humorous characters that bring life to the story. uses comedy characters in the process of reinterpreting the fixed ideas, prejudices, and ideologies of the real world created by fairy tales. I hope that it helps Korean animations establish a successful format for creating characters that bring life to the stories.