• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• 제62권4호
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• pp.507-517
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• 2017

Due to the discontinuous nature of uncertainty quantification in conventional evidence theory(ET), the computational cost of reliability analysis based on ET model is very high. A novel ET model based on fuzzy distribution and the corresponding combination rule to synthesize the judgments of experts are put forward in this paper. The intersection and union of membership functions are defined as belief and plausible membership function respectively, and the Murfhy's average combination rule is adopted to combine the basic probability assignment for focal elements. Then the combined membership functions are transformed to the equivalent probability density function by a normalizing factor. Finally, a reliability analysis procedure for structures with the mixture of epistemic and aleatory uncertainties is presented, in which the equivalent normalization method is adopted to solve the upper and lower bound of reliability. The effectiveness of the procedure is demonstrated by a numerical example and an engineering example. The results also show that the reliability interval calculated by the suggested method is almost identical to that solved by conventional method. Moreover, the results indicate that the computational cost of the suggested procedure is much less than that of conventional method. The suggested ET model provides a new way to flexibly represent epistemic uncertainty, and provides an efficiency method to estimate the reliability of structures with the mixture of epistemic and aleatory uncertainties.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• 제14권12호
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• pp.7401-7407
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• 2013

Aim: To compare survival outcomes after whole brain radiation therapy (WBRT), stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS), and WBRT plus SRS combination therapy in Korea, by performing a quantitative systematic review. Materials and Methods: We searched 10 electronic databases for reports on Korean patients treated with WBRT or SRS for brain metastases published prior to July 2010. Independent reviewers screened all articles and extracted the data. When a Kaplan-Meier survival curve was available, median survival time and standard errors were calculated. Summary estimates for the outcomes in each study were calculated using the inverse variance random-effects method. Results: Among a total of 2,761 studies, 20 studies with Korean patients (n=1,053) were identified. A combination of 12 studies (n=566) with WBRT outcomes showed a median survival time of 6.0 months (95%CI: 5.9-6.2), an overall survival rate of 5.6% (95%CI: 1-24), and a 6-month survival rate of 46.5% (95%CI: 37.2-56.1). For nine studies (n=412) on SRS, the median survival was 7.9 months (95%CI: 5.1-10.8), and the 6-month survival rate was 63.1% (95%CI: 49.8-74.8). In six studies (n=75) using WBRT plus SRS, the median survival was 10.7 months (95%CI: 4.7-16.6), and the overall and 6-month survival rates were 16.8% (95%CI: 6.2-38.2) and 85.7% (95%CI: 28.3-96.9), respectively. Conclusions: WBRT plus SRS showed better 1-year survival outcome than of WBRT alone for Korean patients with metastatic brain tumors. However, the results of this analysis have to be interpreted cautiously, because the risk factors of patients were not adjusted in the included studies.

• 디지털산업정보학회논문지
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• 제15권4호
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• pp.111-116
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• 2019

The digital forensic analysis ensures the integrity of confiscated data by calculating hash values for seizure and search of digital evidence and receiving confirmation and signature from participants. However, evidence that is irrelevant to the alleged offense needs to be deleted even after seizure from the point of view of privacy. But the hash value is altered by deleting the irrelevant data from the image file, one will not be able to prove that the file is in the initial state when it was seized. Therefore, in this paper, a study was conducted to support the integrity of the digital evidence, even if some of the seized digital evidence was deleted or damaged during the seizure search. The hash value of each data is calculated and hash value of the combination of hash values are also calculated. Even if the unrelated evidence is deleted from the seized evidence regardless of file system such as FAT or NTFS, the suggested method presented a way to provide the integrity that proves there is no change in the evidence file.

• 약학회지
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• 제59권6호
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• pp.245-250
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• 2015

Middle East respiratory syndrome - coronavirus infection has posed substantial threat to public health with extremely high mortality rate in 2015. Although there are no approved novel medications for coronavirus, several antiviral agents such as ribavirin and interferon have been tried to MERS patients according to the in-vitro inhibitory effect, therapeutic effect on the animal model and experience from the severe acute respiratory syndrome - coronavirus infection. The aim of this study is to evaluate the clinical evidence of the antiviral treatment for MERS-CoV infection. After systematically searching the medical literature databases, I found five studies described the clinical efficacy of antiviral treatment on MERS patients. All of them were about the combination therapy of ribavirin and interferon (IFN). Two of them were retrospective cohort studies with quality of evidence (QOE) II and the others were observational study and case reports with QOE III. As a result of critical appraisal, it is concluded that none of those studies represented confirmatory clinical evidence of the efficacy of ribavirin and interferon combination therapy on MERS patients. Although Omrani et al. represented that ribavirin and IFN treatment had significantly improved survival at 14 days, it was not enough time to conclude the effect.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• 제15권6호
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• pp.1489-1502
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• 2019

This work introduces a novel unweighted combination method (UCSS) for business failure perdition (BFP). With considering features of BFP in the age of big data, UCSS integrates the quantitative and qualitative analysis by utilizing soft set theory (SS). We adopt the conventional expert system (ES) as the basic qualitative classifier, the logistic regression model (LR) and the support vector machine (SVM) as basic quantitative classifiers. Unlike other traditional combination methods, we employ soft set theory to integrate the results of each basic classifier without weighting. In this way, UCSS inherits the advantages of ES, LR, SVM, and SS. To verify the performance of UCSS, it is applied to real datasets. We adopt ES, LR, SVM, combination models utilizing the equal weight approach (CMEW), neural network algorithm (CMNN), rough set and D-S evidence theory (CMRD), and the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) and SS (CFBSS) as benchmarks. The superior performance of UCSS has been verified by the empirical experiments.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• 제16권14호
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• pp.5963-5966
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• 2015

Background: This analysis was conducted to evaluate the efficacy and safety of a combination of gemcitabine and nedaplatin in treating patients with non-small cell lung cancer. Methods: Clinical studies evaluating the efficacy and safety of a combination of gemcitabine and nedaplatin with attention to response and safety for patients with non-small cell lung cancer were identified using a predefined search strategy. Pooled response rates for gemcitabine and nedaplatin were calculated. Results: In gemcitabine and nedaplatin based regimens, 4 clinical studies including 112 patients with non-small cell lung cancer were considered eligible for inclusion. The pooled analysis suggested that the pooled reponse rate was 40.2% (45/112). Main side effects included grade 3-4 neutropenia, thrombocytopenia, and anemia. Grade 3-4 nonhematological toxicity included nausea and vomiting, diarrhea, and hepatic dysfunction. There were no treatment-related deaths. Conclusion: This evidence based analysis suggests that the combination of gemcitabine and nedaplatin is associated with good response rate and accepted toxicity for treating patients with non-small cell lung cancer.

• 사상체질의학회지
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• 제34권2호
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• pp.48-64
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• 2022

Objectives The purpose of this study was to review and evaluate the clinical evidence of the efficacy and safety of treatment based on Sasang constitutional medicine (SCM) for post-stroke patients by systematic review and meta-analysis. Methods Randomized controlled trials (RCTs), published in 10 electronic databases up to December 2020, were searched. For the included studies, Cochrane's risk of bias assessment was performed to analyze the methodological quality. The strength of evidence was evaluated using the grading of recommendations assessment, development, and evaluation system based on the results of analyses. All review processes were performed by two independent researchers. Results Five RCTs were finally included. All included RCTs were conducted for one month on post-stroke patients in 60-80s, four studies on Tae-Eum patients and one study on So-Yang patients. Four types of constitution-specific herbal medicine (Chungpyesagan-tang, Cheongsimsanyak-tang, Yeoldahanso-tang, and Yangkyuksanhwa-tang) and constitution-specific acupuncture therapy were identified as interventions. More than half of the included studies were evaluated as low quality due to the high-risk of bias in selection, performance, and detection. The combination of constitution-specific herbal medicine, acupuncture, and conventional treatment was more effective in improving the patients' motor impairment, dysphagia, aphasia, and depression than conventional treatment alone. No serious adverse events by SCM treatment were reported. Conclusions SCM treatment may improve the sequelae of post-stroke patients safely in combination with conventional treatment. Since the quality of clinical evidence included in this study was low, higher quality clinical evidence obtained in well-designed clinical studies will be needed.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• 제8권5호
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• pp.221-229
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• 2021

This study aims to forecast the exchange rate of the Chinese Yuan against the US Dollar by a combination of different models as proposed by Poon and Granger (2003) during the Covid-19 pandemic. For this purpose, we include three uni-variate time series models, i.e., ARIMA, Naïve, Exponential smoothing, and one multivariate model, i.e., NARDL. This is the first of its kind endeavor to combine univariate models along with NARDL to the best of our knowledge. Utilizing monthly data from January 2011 to December 2020, we predict the Chinese Yuan against the US dollar by two combination criteria i.e. var-cor and equal weightage. After finding out the individual accuracy, the models are then assessed through equal weightage and var-cor methods. Our results suggest that Naïve outperforms all individual & combination of time series models. Similarly, the combination of NARDL and Naïve model again outperformed all of the individual as well as combined models except the Naïve model, with the lowest MAPE value of 0764. The results suggesting that the Chinese Yuan exchange rate against the US Dollar is dependent upon the recent observations of the time series. Further evidence shows that the combination of models plays a vital role in forecasting which commensurate with the literature.

• Journal of Evidence-Based Herbal Medicine
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• 제3권1호
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• pp.9-18
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• 2010

The use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is currently widespread and appears to be growing. As an increasing proportion of the population turns to CAM therapies, whether singly or in combination with allopathic medicine, the need for quality research in this area is reinforced. Much of this research consists of clinical studies aim ed primarily at clinicians, yet challenges arising from poor methodological quality will occur w hen interpreting study findings and their implications. For clinicians to be effective consumers of the scientific literature, familiarization with the principles of evidence based medicine (EBM) is essential. The goal of this review is to introduce clinicians to the concept of critical appraisal of clinical studies and foster critical thinking when reading research articles in order to best evaluate and incorporate study findings into their daily practice.

• ALGAE
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• 제20권4호
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• pp.271-278
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• 2005

Evidence is presented to demonstrate that the type of Delesseria kurilensis Ruprecht belongs to Congregatocarpus rather than Tokidadendron (both genera of the red algal family Delesseriaceae), and the new combination of Congregatocarpus kurilensis (Ruprecht) M.J. Wynne is proposed.