• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.31 no.4
• /
• pp.335-349
• /
• 2023

Bridges constantly undergo deterioration and damage, the most common ones being concrete damage and exposed rebar. Periodic inspection of bridges to identify damages can aid in their quick remediation. Likewise, identifying components can provide context for damage assessment and help gauge a bridge's state of interaction with its surroundings. Current inspection techniques rely on manual site visits, which can be time-consuming and costly. More recently, robotic inspection assisted by autonomous data analytics based on Computer Vision (CV) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been viewed as a suitable alternative to manual inspection because of its efficiency and accuracy. To aid research in this avenue, this study performs a comparative assessment of different architectures, loss functions, and ensembling strategies for the autonomous segmentation of bridge components and damages. The experiments lead to several interesting discoveries. Nested Reg-UNet architecture is found to outperform five other state-of-the-art architectures in both damage and component segmentation tasks. The architecture is built by combining a Nested UNet style dense configuration with a pretrained RegNet encoder. In terms of the mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) metric, the Nested Reg-UNet architecture provides an improvement of 2.86% on the damage segmentation task and 1.66% on the component segmentation task compared to the state-of-the-art UNet architecture. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that incorporating the Lovasz-Softmax loss function to counter class imbalance can boost performance by 3.44% in the component segmentation task over the most employed alternative, weighted Cross Entropy (wCE). Finally, weighted softmax ensembling is found to be quite effective when used synchronously with the Nested Reg-UNet architecture by providing mIoU improvement of 0.74% in the component segmentation task and 1.14% in the damage segmentation task over a single-architecture baseline. Overall, the best mIoU of 92.50% for the component segmentation task and 84.19% for the damage segmentation task validate the feasibility of these techniques for autonomous bridge component and damage segmentation using RGB images.

• The Journal of Engineering Geology
• /
• v.23 no.1
• /
• pp.19-27
• /
• 2013

Deformation of a slope at a coal waste depot and the natural slope under the depot was surveyed and investigated at Dogye village in Samcheock city, Gangwon Province. To investigate the behaviors of the slopes, wire sensors and a rain gauge were installed on the crest of the waste depot slope and inclinometers were installed in the natural slope. The results of deformation monitoring at the crest of the waste depot slope using wire sensors revealed increased deformation with increasing cumulative rainfall. The results of monitoring horizontal deformation of the natural slope revealed that maximum horizontal deformation was also affected by cumulative precipitation. However, the groundwater level at the natural slope showed no change with rainfall. These measurements confirm that deformation at coal mine waste depots is closely related to precipitation, indicating that self-loading at such depots increases with rainfall infiltration, thus causing deformation of the waste depot slope. In addition, increasing the self-load of the coal mine waste depot may cause deformation of the underlying natural slope.

• The Journal of Korean Physical Therapy
• /
• v.10 no.1
• /
• pp.1-6
• /
• 1998

The purpose of this study was to determine the of effective concentration of procaine iontophoresis for durarion of cutaneous local anesthesia. Forty-five healthy students with an age range of 19 to 34 years$(21\pm2.7)$, were participated in this study. The subjects were randomly assigned into 5 groups. Bach 9 subjects received iontophoresis on the flexor surface of dominant forearm with soft cotton pad $(3.5\times3.5cm)$ soaked in 2ml of $2\%$ (pH 5.28), $4\%$ (pH 5.12), $8\%$ (pH 4,98), $16\%$ (pH 4.72), $32\%$ (pH 4.52) procaine hydrochloride solution at 4mA for 10 minutes (total current 40mA min) using anodal direct current. The study was performed in a randomized, double-blind design, After procaine iontophoresis, the duration of anesthesia were evaluated at five minute intervals on five random locations in the iontophoretically area using a 21-gauge sterile hypodermic needle pressed with 1mm invagination unitl sharp pin-pricking pain sensation returned. The data were analyzed with one-way ANOVA to determine significant differences between groups. Duncan post hoc was performed at level .01. The relationship between anesthetic duration and procaine concentration was assessed with Pearson Product-Moment Correlation Coefficients. ANOVA tests showed significant differences in the anesthetic duration between the concentration of procaine solution (p<.001). Procaine iontophoresis with $4\%$ concentration produced cutaneous Socal anesthesia of significantly longer duration(15.56 min) than iontophoresis with $2\%,\;8\%,\;16\%$, and $32\%$ of procaine GCl(p<.01). Whereas the anesthetic duration had no correlation with concentration of procaine solution (r=-0.41, NS). These results support the $4\%$ procaine solution was an effective concentration of iontophoresis for induced cutaneous local anesthesia.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Environmental Restoration Technology
• /
• v.19 no.1
• /
• pp.25-43
• /
• 2016

This research was completed to provide fundamental data regarding the guidelines to installing and managing utility facilities & structures in wetland protected area to advance the functions and sustainable use of ecology services by preserving the ecology within wetland protected area. There were 5 on-site researching areas that were used as the main subject with these areas chosen and considered from 21 inland wetlands that have been designated and are being managed from the Ministry of Environment and by their designated dates as a wetland protected area. The utility facilities in these wetland areas were categorized by their types and a detailed on-site investigation was proceeded with investigation items chosen whereas these facilities are working by their roles from their location, size, used materials, types, information contents and etc., The results showed that regarding informational structures, several locations of information boards were distanced from the main exploring routes which did not consider the visitor's eye level which had their readability dropped and by sunlight, time lapse and water penetration, many information boards were damaged or corrupted so that it was hard to confirm the information noticed or understanding an image. Insufficient observation and educational structures were installed that considered the ecological characteristics of wild animals and their living conditions. Regarding convenience facilities, there were parking lots that were installed on the fore-land and to decrease non-point solution sources, some parking lots needed to be located in protected lowlands while some facilities' shape and colors did not harmonize with their natural surroundings, creating a sense of awareness, which will need some more consideration. As for safety facilities, they were very insufficient compared to other facilities. This means that additional safety structures are needed so that related personnel can be aware of where a visitor is located when an accident occurs. Protectional facilities strongly needed new structures and a management system to cut off entrances and do surveillance so that visitors do not go into areas outside of the managed areas and bring damages to restricted locations. Research labs needed to expand the use of automatic weather systems and water gauge equipments to build fundamental data regarding floodgates that are intimated to the forming of wetlands. Sensor cameras and other types of monitoring systems are needed to monitor the majority types of animals living in the wetlands as well.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
• /
• v.19 no.1
• /
• pp.672-679
• /
• 2018

This paper describes a methodology for shape design using an optimal design system, whereas generally a three dimensional analysis is required for such designs. An automatic finite element mesh generation technique, which is based on fuzzy knowledge processing and computational geometry techniques, is incorporated into the system, together with a commercial FE analysis code and a commercial solid modeler. Also, with the aid of multilayer neural networks, the present system allows us to automatically obtain a design window, in which a number of satisfactory design solutions exist in a multi-dimensional design parameter space. The developed optimal design system is successfully applied to evaluate the structures that are used. This study used a stress gauge to measure the maximum stress affecting the parts of the side housing bracket which are most vulnerable to cracking. Thereafter, we used a tool to interpret the maximum stress value, while maintaining the same stress as that exerted on the spot. Furthermore, a stress analysis was performed with the typical shape maintained intact, SM490 used for the material and the minimizing weight safety coefficient set to 3, while keeping the maximum stress the same as or smaller than the allowable stress. In this paper, a side housing bracket with a comparably simple structure for 36 tons was optimized, however if the method developed in this study were applied to side housing brackets of different classes (tons), their quality would be greatly improved.

• Journal of Life Science
• /
• v.13 no.5
• /
• pp.634-641
• /
• 2003

In order to examine whether arsenic, one of environmental stress, contribute to augumentation and relaxation of rat aorta, this study was performed in vivo and in vitro, using intacted or denuded rats aorta ring preparation, respectively. The carotid arterial pressure was recorded on an ink-writing physiograph(Grass Co. 79E) connected to strain gauge. The contractile response of vascular ring with or without endothelium preparation isolated from rat were determined in organ bath and was recorded on physiograph connected to isometric transducer. Vasopressin-,and phenylephrine- induced increase in arterial pressure significantly enhanced in arsenic-treated rats; increase of 19.1%, and 46.6%, respectively. Vascular contractile response was measured in vitro preparations exposed to 0, 0.5, 1, 2 and 4 mM of arsenic for 1, 3, 5 and 8 hours. The dose-vascular responses of phenylephrine augmented by increasing dose of arsenic in the strips exposed to arsenic for 8 hours, and did not augmented for 1, 3, 5 hours. The phenomenon was not affected by strips denuded endothelium. And the response of relaxation of rat aorta induced by nitroprusside was not influenced by arsenic stress, but acetylcholine was a little increased. compared to that of control. There were no significant difference in relaxation between control and arsenic treated rings with endothelium or denuded. All of the results, phenyleprine-induced vascular contraction was significantly enhanced in 4 mM arsenic-treated rat aortic rings compared with control, whether endothelium was present or denuded at 8 hours after arsenic treatment. It may be a mechanism by which long-term arsenic stresses play a role in development of hypertension.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
• /
• v.19 no.6
• /
• pp.614-627
• /
• 2018

Urban railway lines have been constructed adjacent to residential buildings and urban areas. The expansion of transportation networks and reconstruction of residential buildings in highly populated urban areas require deep excavations in areas adjacent to urban railways. Mobilized soil stresses and changes in the groundwater level induced by deep excavations results in track irregularities in urban railways. In this study, a three-dimensional finite difference model using the commercial program FLAC3D was adopted to estimate the horizontal displacements of earth retaining structures, settlements of backfill, the stability of track irregularity and underground box structure based on the criteria of each railway organization and its relationships. In deep excavations, a change in groundwater level induces relatively very small differences for track gauge irregularities, whereas relatively large differences for longitudinal irregularities of 72.5%, twist irregularities of 83.3%, cross level irregularities of 61.9%, and alignments of 43.3% were found to be the maximum differences when the horizontal displacement of earth retaining wall and settlement of backfill were 65.1% and 21.4%, respectively, because the groundwater level (GWL) on the ground surface-mobilized tensile strength of the underground box structure exceeds the allowable value. Therefore, three-dimensional numerical analysis was performed in this study. Overall, real-time monitoring should be carried out to prevent railway accidents in advance when a deep excavation adjacent to urban railway structures is constructed.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Railway
• /
• v.19 no.5
• /
• pp.629-637
• /
• 2016

In this paper, an investigation was conducted to evaluate the acoustic performance of low height noise barriers installed adjacent to rails; an easy-to-use approximation formula was suggested for the evaluation of insertion loss (IL), instead of using the boundary element method. At first, the acoustic performance of the low height noise barriers was measured in an anechoic chamber using a scaled down model; the overall IL according to the source location was analyzed with the equivalent IL contour line. Using the measurement results obtained from the scaled down model, an approximation formula was suggested for the IL of low height noise barriers having various shapes. Also, the prediction program was validated through a comparison between the actual measurement results in the anechoic chamber and the prediction results. Finally, using the prediction program, an approximation formula for IL was suggested for the low height noise absorption barriers. Considering the frequency characteristics of the noise sources of the train, the absorptive low height noise barriers have a 'ㄱ' type shape, a height of 1.0m, and a length of 0.5m when they are installed on the structure gauge for the train.

• Progress in Medical Physics
• /
• v.13 no.1
• /
• pp.9-14
• /
• 2002

We invented the newly developed Fractionated Stereotactic Radiotherapy(F.S.R.T) system using combined techniques of couch mounting and pedestal mounting system. Head fixation frame consists of a milled alluminium alloy(duralumin) and is placed to the couch. This frame immobilized patient head using the dental bite, 3.2 mm frontal and occipital thermoplastic mask. To evaluate the coordinate of target isocenter, Brown-Revert-Walls C.T localizer can be attached to this frame. And also, we developed the frame mounting system by developing the modification of pedestal mounting system. This system is fixed to couch floor and can be used to evaluate the isocenteric accuracy of gantry, couch and collimator in Q.A procedure. In order to measure the relocation accuracy, the acrylic phantom and the accurate pointers have been made. The repositioning of the targets in the phantom were estimated by comparing C.T coordinates and E.C.L portal films taken with anterior-posterior and right-left direction. From the results of experiments, the average distance errors between the target isocenter and its mean position were 0.71$\pm$0.19 for lateral, 0.45$\pm$0.15 for inferior-superior, 0.63$\pm$0.18 for anterior-posterior. And the maximum distance error was less than 1.3 mm. The new head fixation frame and frame mounting system were non-invasive, accurately relocatable, easy to use, very light and well tolerable by the results of phantom tests. The major advantage of using this frame mounting system is complete access to any point in the Patients cranium especially posterior direction

• The Journal of Advanced Prosthodontics
• /
• v.1 no.1
• /
• pp.19-25
• /
• 2009

STATEMENT OF PROBLEM. Primary stability at the time of implant placement is related to the level of primary bone contact. The level of bone contact with implant is affected by thread design, surgical procedure and bone quality, etc. PURPOSE. The aim of this study was to compare the initial stability of the various taper implants according to the thread designs, half of which were engaged to inferior cortical wall of type IV bone(Group 1) and the rest of which were not engaged to inferior cortical wall(Group 2) by measuring the implant stability quotient(ISQ) and the removal torque value(RTV). MATERIAL AND METHODS. In this study, 6 different implant fixtures with 10 mm length were installed. In order to simulate the sinus inferior wall of type IV bone, one side cortical bone of swine rib was removed. 6 different implants were installed in the same bone block following manufacturer s recommended procedures. Total 10 bone blocks were made for each group. The height of Group 1 bone block was 10 mm for engagement and that of group 2 was 13 mm. The initial stability was measured with ISQ value using Osstell $mentor^{(R)}$ and with removal torque using MGT50 torque gauge. RESULTS. In this study, we found the following results. 1. In Group 1 with fixtures engaged to the inferior cortical wall, there was no significant difference in RTV and ISQ value among the 6 types of implants. 2. In Group 2 with fixtures not engaged to the inferior cortical wall, there was significant difference in RTV and ISQ value among the 6 types of implants(P < .05). 3. There was significant difference in RTV and ISQ value according to whether fixtures were engaged to the inferior cortical wall or not(P < .05). 4. Under-drilling made RTV and ISQ value increase significantly in the NT implants which had lower RTV and ISQ value in Group 2(P < .05). CONCLUSIONS. Without being engaged to the inferior cortical wall fixtures had initial stability affected by implant types. Also in poor quality bone, under-drilling improved initial stability.