• Journal of Oral Medicine and Pain
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• v.30 no.1
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• pp.69-77
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• 2005

The purposes of this study were to develop and introduce a novel intraoral appliance for bruxism composed of power switch and biofeedback device and further to examine inter- and intra-reliability of the appliance prior to clinical tests. The newly-developed appliance consisted of detection sensors, a central processing unit (CPU), a reactor and a storage unit and a displayer. Compact-sized, waterproof switches were selected as bruxism detection sensor and any sensor activation by clenching or grinding event was processed at the CPU and transmitted, by radio wave, to the reactor and storage unit and triggered auditory or vibratory signal, subsequently producing biofeedback to the patient with bruxism. The data on bruxing event in the storage unit can be displayed on the computer, making it possible analyzing frequency, duration and nature of bruxism. Cast models were obtained from ten volunteers with normal occlusion to evaluate reliability of the appliances. For inter-operator reliability on the intraoral appliances, each operator of the two fabricated the appliance for the same subject and compared the minimal contact forces provoking auditory biofeedback reaction in vertical, lateral and central directions. Intra-operator reliability was also investigated on the appliances made by a single operator at two separate times with an interval of two days. Conclusively, the newly-developed appliance is compact and safe to use in oral circumstance and easy to make. Furthermore, it had to be proven reliability excellent enough to apply in clinical settings. Thus, it is assumed that this appliance with the processor and the storage of data and auditory or vibratory biofeedback function is available and useful to analyze and control bruxism.

• Development and Reproduction
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.159-168
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• 2006

Rodents and many other mammals have two chemosensory systems that mediate responses to pheromones, the main and accessory olfactory system, MOS and AOS, respectively. The chemosensory neurons associated with the MOS are located in the main olfactory epithelium, while those associated with the AOS are located in the vomeronasal organ(VNO). Pheromonal odorants access the lumen of the VNO via canals in the roof of the mouth, and are largely thought to be nonvolatile. The main pheromone receptor proteins consist of two superfamilies, V1Rs and V2Rs, that are structurally distinct and unrelated to the olfactory receptors expressed in the main olfactory epithelium. These two type of receptors are seven transmembrane domain G-protein coupled proteins(V1R with $G_{{\alpha}i2}$, V2R with $G_{0\;{\alpha}}$). V2Rs are co-expressed with nonclassical MHC Ib genes(M10 and other 8 M1 family proteins). Other important molecular component of VNO neuron is a TrpC2, a cation channel protein of transient receptor potential(TRP) family and thought to have a crucial role in signal transduction. There are four types of pheromones in mammalian chemical communication - primers, signalers, modulators and releasers. Responses to these chemosignals can vary substantially within and between individuals. This variability can stem from the modulating effects of steroid hormones and/or non-steroid factors such as neurotransmitters on olfactory processing. Such modulation frequently augments or facilitates the effects that prevailing social and environmental conditions have on the reproductive axis. The best example is the pregnancy block effect(Bruce effect), caused by testosterone-dependent major urinary proteins(MUPs) in male mouse urine. Intriguingly, mouse GnRH neurons receive pheromone signals from both odor and pheromone relays in the brain and may also receive common odor signals. Though it is quite controversial, recent studies reveal a complex interplay between reproduction and other functions in which GnRH neurons appear to integrate information from multiple sources and modulate a variety of brain functions.

• 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.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SC
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• v.37 no.1
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• pp.40-48
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• 2000

1A novel bipolar linear transconductor and its application to operational transconductance amplifier(OTA) for low-voltage low-power signal processing is proposed. The transconductor consists of a npn differential-pair with emitter degeneration resistor and a pnp differential-pair connected to the npn differential-pair in cascade. The bias current of the pnp differential-pair is used with the output current of the npn differential-pair for wide linearity and temperature stability. The OTA consists of the linear transconductor and a translinear current cell followed by three current mirrors. The proposed transconductor has superior linearity and low-voltage low-power characteristics when compared with the conventional transconductor. The experimental results show that the transconductor with transconductance of 50 ${\mu}S$ has a linearity error of less than ${\pm}$0.06% over an input voltage range from -2V to +2V at supply voltage ${\pm}$3V. Power dissipation of the transconductor was 2.44 mW. A prototype OTA with a transconductance of 25 ${\mu}S$ has been built with bipolar transistor array. The linearity of the OTA was same as the proposed transconductor. The OTA circuit also exhibits a transconductance that is linearly dependent on a bias current varying over four decades with a sensitivity of 0.5 S/A.

• 대한공업교육학회지
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• v.34 no.2
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• pp.346-362
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• 2009

The purpose of this study was to develop the handy non-contact measurement device of the surface roughness by using the optical fiber sensor. The advantages of fiber optic sensors are high-speed responsibility, non-effect of the magnetic, convenience of the product and high precision. The measurement theory for surface roughness of optical fiber sensor is one to one correspondence between the reflected light intensity based on the surface roughness of the object and the measurement value of previously known for surface roughness. The reflected light intensity was determined using the distance to the surface from the sensor probe and the limit reflection angle based on the surface roughness. Therefore, in this study, the sensor probe was produced for determining the value of surface roughness only using the limit reflection angle based on the surface roughness with the fixed distance from the surface. A prototype measurement system was composed of a transmitting part, a receiving part and a signal processing circuit. The materials of standard measurement which was used in this experiment were SM45C, STS303 and Al60. According to the results of this study, approximation surface roughness formulas which was deduced from the correlation of between the standard surface roughness and the sensing output were verified that they were effect against the surface roughness measurement value of the option sample. And handy optical fiber surface roughness measurement device which was produced by an order was verified that it was effect for measuring of the precision surface roughness.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.29 no.11
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• pp.767-774
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• 2002

Conventional research on image restoration has focused on restoring degraded images resulting from image formation, storage and communication, mainly in the signal processing field. Related research on recovering original image information of caption regions includes a method using BMA(block matching algorithm). The method has problem with frequent incorrect matching and propagating the errors by incorrect matching. Moreover, it is impossible to recover the frames between two scene changes when scene changes occur more than twice. In this paper, we propose a method for recovering original images using EBMA(Extended Block Matching Algorithm) and a region compensation method. To use it in original image recovery, the method extracts a priori knowledge such as information about scene changes, camera motion and caption regions. The method decides the direction of recovery using the extracted caption information(the start and end frames of a caption) and scene change information. According to the direction of recovery, the recovery is performed in units of character components using EBMA and the region compensation method. Experimental results show that EBMA results in good recovery regardless of the speed of moving object and complexity of background in video. The region compensation method recovered original images successfully, when there is no information about the original image to refer to.

• Journal of the Korean Magnetics Society
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.23-31
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• 2011

From among the NDT (nondestructive testing) methods, the MFL (magnetic flux leakage) method is specially suitable for testing pipelines because pipeline has high magnetic permeability. The system applied to MFL method is called the MFL PIG. The previous MFL PIG showed high performance in detecting the metal loss and corrosions. However, MFL PIG is highly unlikely to detect the cracks which occur by exterior-interior pressure difference in pipelines and the shape of crack is long and very narrow. In MFL PIG, the magnetic field is performed axially and there is no changes of cross-sectional area at cracks that the magnetic field passes through. Cracks occur frequently in the pipelines and the risk of the accident from the cracks is higher than that from the metal loss and corrosions. Therefore, the new PIG is needed to be researched and developed for detecting the cracks. The circumferential MFL (CMFL) PIG performs magnetic fields circumferentially and can maximize the magnetic flux leakage at the cracks. In this paper, CMFL PIG is designed and the distribution of the magnetic fields is analyzed by using 3 dimensional nonlinear finite element method (FEM). In CMFL PIG, cracks, standards of NACE, are detectable. To estimate the shape of crack, the leakage of magnetic fields for many kinds of cracks is analyzed and the method is developed by signal processing.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.50 no.3
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• pp.102-112
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• 2013

In this paper, two step processing method of contour extraction and complement which contain hexagonal shape for low contrast and noisy images is proposed. This method is based on the combination of Laplacian-Gaussian filter and an idea of filters which are dependent on the shape. At the first step, an algorithm which has six masks as its extractors to extract the hexagonal edges especially in the corners is used. Here, two tricorn filters are used to detect the tricorn joints of hexagons and other four masks are used to enhance the line segments of hexagonal edges. As a natural image, a corneal endothelial cell image which usually has regular hexagonal form is selected. The edge extraction of hexagonal shapes in corneal endothelial cell is important for clinical diagnosis. The proposed algorithm and other conventional methods are applied to noisy hexagonal images to evaluate each efficiency. As a result, this proposed algorithm shows a robustness against noises and better detection ability in the aspects of the output signal to noise ratio, the edge coincidence ratio and the extraction accuracy factor as compared with other conventional methods. At the second step, the lacking part of the thinned image by an energy minimum algorithm is complemented, and then the area and distribution of cells which give necessary information for medical diagnosis are computed.

• Geophysics and Geophysical Exploration
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.54-60
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• 2018

The data acquired from seismic exploration can be used to detect the existence of oil and gas resources through appropriate processing and interpretation. The seismic attributes indicating the existence of resources are extracted from amplitude information, where the Q-factor representing intrinsic attenuation plays an useful role of hydrocarbon indicator. So, the accuracy of Q-factor estimation is very important to investigate the existence of resources. In this study, we calculated the Q-factor and analyzed the error rate through a numerical example. To mimic real data, random noise was added to the synthetic data. With the noise-added data, the Q-factor was estimated and the error rate was analyzed by using the spectral ratio method (SRM) and peak frequency shift method (PFSM). Both methods provided a relatively accurate Q-factor when the signal-to-noise ratio was 90 dB. However, the peak frequency shift method (PFSM) produced better results than the spectral ratio method (SRM) as the level of random noise increased.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.5 no.6
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• pp.357-361
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• 2011

In this study, the liquid-crystal optical modulation X-ray detection system using a CdS which is a family of II-IV compound semiconductor was proposed. The system consist of the detector, the signal processing part, the liquid-crystal driving parts, microcontroller, and I/O parts, and was designed to be suitable for miniaturization and portable. In addition, the system can measure a wide range X-ray by using the detecting range selection. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed system, the CdS sensor's output characteristics were confirmed in accordance with changes of dose, and excellent correlation was determined. And also, the optical penetration ratio was discussed in accordance with changes of the applied voltage by measuring the change of the liquid-crystal in accordance with changes of the applied voltage. Through these results, the characteristics of the liquid-crystal optical modulation system such as the excellent reproducibility and the noise immunity were confirmed. And we considered that the CdS cell-based liquid-crystal optical modulated portable X-ray detection system could be applied to compact, low-cost, portable system.