• Journal of Science and Technology Studies
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.45-78
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• 2012

What is a disaster? And what can science and technology studies tell us about it? There might be numerous definitions about disaster. In this article, we will posit that disaster is an incident when sociotechnical system actor-network broke down against the other force in their "trial of strength". This is a process that punctualized actor-network is depunctualized, and a status that readiness-to-hand of Being recedes while pesentness-at-hand of tool-being comes forward. Using the concept of disaster as a case study, we will consider how Latourian ontology overlaps with Heideggerian philosophy of technology. This STS approach which hasn't been previously studied might provide us with new theoretical framework that enables us to construe the assemblage of technoscience and nature-society in the field of PUS or NPSS.

• Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health
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• v.44 no.4
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• pp.141-148
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• 2011

Annual epidemics of seasonal influenza occur during autumn and winter in temperate regions and have imposed substantial public health and economic burdens. At the global level, these epidemics cause about 3-5 million severe cases of illness and about 0.25-0.5 million deaths each year. Although annual vaccination is the most effective way to prevent the disease and its severe outcomes, influenza vaccination coverage rates have been at suboptimal levels in many countries. For instance, the coverage rates among the elderly in 20 developed nations in 2008 ranged from 21% to 78% (median 65%). In the U.S., influenza vaccination levels among elderly population appeared to reach a "plateau" of about 70% after the late 1990s, and levels among child populations have remained at less than 50%. In addition, disparities in the coverage rates across subpopulations within a country present another important public health issue. New approaches are needed for countries striving both to improve their overall coverage rates and to eliminate disparities. This review article aims to describe a broad conceptual framework of vaccination, and to illustrate four potential determinants of influenza vaccination based on empirical analyses of U.S. nationally representative populations. These determinants include the ongoing influenza epidemic level, mass media reporting on influenza-related topics, reimbursement rate for providers to administer influenza vaccination, and vaccine supply. It additionally proposes specific policy implications, derived from these empirical analyses, to improve the influenza vaccination coverage rate and associated disparities in the U.S., which could be generalizable to other countries.

• Journal of Genetic Medicine
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.1-10
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• 2012

About 7% of all breast cancer (BC) cases result from a genetic predisposition, and approximately 1,000 patients develop hereditary BC (HBC) every year in Korea. BRCA1 and BRCA2 are the primary genes underlying HBC. The average cumulative risks in BRCA1 mutation carriers at 70 years of age are 65% (95% confidence interval 44-78%) for BC and 39% (18-54%) for ovarian cancer (OC). The corresponding estimates for BRCA2 are 45% (31-56%) and 11% (2.4-19%), respectively. The penetrance of BRCA mutations is not the same between patients and can depend on factors such as race and birth-cohort. The Korean Hereditary Breast Cancer (KOHBRA) study is a large prospective nationwide study that includes 39 participating centers. Between May 2007 and May 2010, the first phase of the KOHBRA study was planned and fulfilled successfully. The primary aim of phase I was to estimate the prevalence of BRCA1/2 mutations and OC among a high-risk group of patients with HBC and their families. According to data collected during phase I of the study, the prevalence and penetrance of BRCA mutations were comparable to corresponding data from Western countries. For the second phase of the KOHBRA study, we are currently investigating a Korean BRCA mutation prediction model, prognostic factors in BRCA-related BC, environmental/genetic modifiers, and implementing a genetic counseling network. The final goal of the KOHBRA study is to create clinical practice guidelines for HBC in Korea. In this article, I review the genetics of HBC, summarize the characteristics of Korean HBC, and discuss current and future HBC research in Korea.

• The Journal of Health Technology Assessment
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.142-147
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• 2018

Objectives: The purpose of this study is to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of Robot-Assisted Brain Stereotactic Surgery with a systematic review. Methods: Electronic literature was searched using KoreaMed, Ovid-MEDLINE, Ovid-EMBASE, and Cochrane Library on 6th April 2017. Two authors screened 1218 citations. Duplicated articles of 456 excluded, the remaining 762 articles were reviewed with title and abstract. Results: A total of 8 studies were selected in this review. The device used in all studies was $ROSA^{TM}$. In one cohort study comparing the intervention ($ROSA^{TM}$) with the control (conventional stereotactic surgery), hematoma was reported no significant difference between groups. In six descriptive studies, one study reported hematoma 10% (10/100) and temporary nerve impairment 6% (6/100) using the ROSA; while five descriptive study did not report any complications. In one cohort, the localization precision were 1.2 mm in the intervention group and 1.1 mm in the control group; the localization success rate as 78.2% in the intervention group and 76.2% in the control group in one cohort; and the average time for surgery as 130 min for the intervention group and 352 min for the control group in one cohort. Four studies reported the localization success rate as 100%; two out of three articles reported the overall time for surgery as 56 min and 90 min, while one article reported the time as less than one hour in 50% of patients (50/100); two articles reported in epilepsy patients, the condition after the surgery was Engel level I in 66.2%, 75% patients, Engel level II-III in 25%, 26.5% patients, and Engel level 4 in 7.3% patients. Conclusion: Robot-Assisted Brain Stereotactic Surgery is a safe and accurate technique that can significantly reduce the time for the brain stereotactic surgery. However, further studies are needed to generalize the results.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.70-78
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• 2021

Estimating 3D information from a single image is one of the essential problems in numerous applications. Since a 2D image inherently might originate from an infinite number of different 3D scenes, thus 3D reconstruction from a single image is notoriously challenging. This challenge has been overcame by the advent of recent deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), by modeling the mapping function between 2D image and 3D information. However, to train such deep CNNs, a massive training data is demanded, but such data is difficult to achieve or even impossible to build. Recent trends thus aim to present deep learning techniques that can be trained in a weakly-supervised manner, with a meta-data without relying on the ground-truth depth data. In this article, we introduce recent developments of weakly-supervised deep learning technique, especially categorized as scene 3D reconstruction and object 3D reconstruction, and discuss limitations and further directions.

• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.111-118
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• 2022

This research article presents the work that is related to the application of different machine learning based similarity techniques on religious text for identifying similarities and differences among its various translations. The dataset includes 10 different English translations of verses (Arabic: Ayah) of two Surahs (chapters) namely, Al-Humazah and An-Nasr. The quantitative similarity values for different translations for the same verse were calculated by using the cosine similarity and semantic similarity. The corpus went through two series of experiments: before pre-processing and after pre-processing. In order to determine the performance of machine learning based similarities, human annotated similarities between translations of two Surahs (chapters) namely Al-Humazah and An-Nasr were recorded to construct the ground truth. The average difference between the human annotated similarity and the cosine similarity for Surah (chapter) Al-Humazah was found to be 1.38 per verse (ayah) per pair of translation. After pre-processing, the average difference increased to 2.24. Moreover, the average difference between human annotated similarity and semantic similarity for Surah (chapter) Al-Humazah was found to be 0.09 per verse (Ayah) per pair of translation. After pre-processing, it increased to 0.78. For the Surah (chapter) An-Nasr, before preprocessing, the average difference between human annotated similarity and cosine similarity was found to be 1.93 per verse (Ayah), per pair of translation. And. After pre-processing, the average difference further increased to 2.47. The average difference between the human annotated similarity and the semantic similarity for Surah An-Nasr before preprocessing was found to be 0.93 and after pre-processing, it was reduced to 0.87 per verse (ayah) per pair of translation. The results showed that as expected, the semantic similarity was proven to be better measurement indicator for calculation of the word meaning.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aviation and Aeronautics
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• v.30 no.1
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• pp.20-27
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• 2022

It is anticipated that there will be radical disputes over land ownership in the event of the advent of the era of UAM. As such, policy alternative is presented by analyzing and researching relevant laws at home and abroad on the means of legislating 'Regulations on compensation for use of air space above land' in preparation of such occurrence. As the results of the study, it is deemed to limit the range of the land ownership in accordance with UAM operation as follows. First, it is proposed to newly enact regulation to limit the ownership of air space of land owner to the public space above the elevation of 200m as stipulated under the Article 78 of the Aviation Safety Act. Second, as the result of analysis made for the option of making compensation from the perspective of the property right of land ownership and option of not making compensation from the perspectives of public interest and concerns in the event of operation of UAM within the air space below the elevation of 200m, it is deemed that legislative decision is necessary through more extensive studies in the future.

• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.21 no.12spc
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• pp.696-702
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• 2021

Informatization of early childhood education in the EU occurs in the context of the use of ICT as a means of sharing experiences, practices in the education and training of preschool children, communication, both at the national level and locally - within educational institutions, as a means of document management, search, data processing and information for the management of early childhood educational institutions, and planning activities for these institutions. This article aims to identify the features of the informatization of early childhood education in EU countries. Results. The countries of the EU have different levels of workload on the staff of early childhood education institutions, which is caused by different numbers of preschoolers and workforce. The greatest load on the staff in France due to a large number of preschoolers, which, despite the reduction, remained the highest among all the countries. By comparison, Poland's significant workload is mitigated by the size of its workforce. With almost equal numbers of staff in Poland and Germany, the countries differ significantly in the number of preschoolers. The countries also have different funding mechanisms for early childhood education, which determines the potential for digitalization. In France, total spending on early childhood education has grown the least (by 11 % between 2012 and 2018), in Poland by 51 %, in the Czech Republic by 44 %, and in Germany by 49%. In France, 100 % is funded by the government, in Poland 78 % is funded by the government, in the Czech Republic and Germany 87 % and 85 % respectively is funded by the government. The results of the survey of teachers' training in the use of ICTs and the level of specialists' readiness to use them in their studies indicate a mismatch between education and the practice of using technology. At the same time, given the high level of professional training of teachers in the use of technology in education, a low level of practice of ICT use in teaching preschool children was revealed. Teachers require professional development of ICT skills.

• Journal of The Korean Society of Integrative Medicine
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.1-15
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• 2023

Purpose : This study investigates the effectiveness of digital therapy for stroke patients in Korea. Methods : A comprehensive database search was performed using KCI, Science on, e-article, RISS, KISS and Korea OpenMed databases for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that studied the effects of digital therapy on patients who had a stroke. This study includes RCTs published from January 2000 to July 15, 2022, which fulfilled the inclusion and exclusion criteria. A total 697 studies were screened and 30 studies were included in the final analysis. Methodological quality was assessed with the Cochrane's RoB (risk of bias) tool. Meta-analysis was performed using CMA 4.0 software. Results : A total of 56 effect sizes were calculated from the 30 selected studies. As a result of the analysis, the overall effect size of digital therapy was .59 (95 % CI=.43-.74). When classified according to type of intervention, VR (virtual reality) (g=.58, 95 % CI=.40-.75), and CACR (computer assisted cognitive rehabilitation) (g=.62, 95 % CI=.30-.95) were statistically significant. VR showed medium to large effect sizes in cognitive function (g=.78, 95 % CI=.20-1.37), psychosocial function (g=.63, 95 % CI=.20-1.07), and physical function (g=.61, 95 % CI=.38-.83). In the CACR, there was a large effect size in cognitive function (g=.84, 95 % CI=.52-1.15), but there was no significant difference in psychosocial function. Also, there was no significant difference between the two interventions in activities of daily living and no significant difference in the effect size of both interventions according to the intervention session. Furthermore, medium to large effect sizes were found for subacute and chronic stroke patients according to the duration of disease. Conclusion : This study presents evidence that digital therapy has a positive effect on various functions of stroke patients in Korea. The researchers expect to actively accept the new paradigm of digital therapy and continue to apply digital therapy in clinical practice.

• BMB Reports
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• v.57 no.2
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• pp.71-78
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• 2024

Melanoma is one of the most aggressive skin tumors, and conventional treatment modalities are not effective in treating advanced melanoma. Although immunotherapy is an effective treatment for melanoma, it has disadvantages, such as a poor response rate and serious systemic immune-related toxic side effects. The main solution to this problem is the use of biological materials such as hydrogels to reduce these side effects and amplify the immune killing effect against tumor cells. Hydrogels have great advantages as local slow-release drug carriers, including the ability to deliver antitumor drugs directly to the tumor site, enhance the local drug concentration in tumor tissue, reduce systemic drug distribution and exhibit good degradability. Despite these advantages, there has been limited research on the application of hydrogels in melanoma treatment. Therefore, this article provides a comprehensive review of the potential application of hydrogels in melanoma immunotherapy. Hydrogels can serve as carriers for sustained drug delivery, enabling the targeted and localized delivery of drugs with minimal systemic side effects. This approach has the potential to improve the efficacy of immunotherapy for melanoma. Thus, the use of hydrogels as drug delivery vehicles for melanoma immunotherapy has great potential and warrants further exploration.