• Biomedical Science Letters
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.123-131
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• 2003

Inflammation appears to have a major role in the development of atherosclerosis. Cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) is involved in the inflammatory response via the generation of prostanoids that, in turn, are involved in the production of matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs). This study hypothesized that a vascular infection with cytomegalovirus (CMV) may induce a chronic inflammatory reaction and activated inflammatory cells may express inflammatory mediators such as cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) and matrix metalloproteinases-9 (MMP-9). To confirm the hypothesis, the immunohistochemical stains for CMV late antigen, COX-2, MMP-9, macrophage, and T-lymphocyte were performed on CMV-infected atherosclerotic lesions. The immunoreactivity for COX-2 and MMP-9 was evident in all cases of atherosclerosis along with plaques, mainly in macrophages/foamy cells, intimal and medial smooth muscle cells, and endothelial cells of the intima. Within the intima, the increased immunoreactivity for COX-2 and MMP-9 was colocalized to the area stained with CMV late antigen. Sections from control specimens showed no immunoreactivity for CMV late antigen, COX-2 and MMP-9. These data seem to support the hypothesis that CMV may participate in a pathogenetic mechanism for atherogenesis or progression of atherosclerosis.

• Biomedical Science Letters
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.369-374
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• 2007

A fingerprint is an impression of the friction ridges of all or any part of the finger. A friction ridge is a raised portion of the epidermis on the palmar (palm and fingers) or plantar (sole and toes) skin, consisting of one or more connected ridge units of friction ridge skin. There are two fundamental principles underlying the use of fingerprints as a means of identifying individuals - immutability and uniqueness. Friction ridges develop on the fetus in their definitive form before birth. Ridges are persistent throughout life except for permanent scarring. Ridge patterns and the details in small areas of friction ridges are unique and never repeated. Friction ridge patterns vary within limits, which allow for classification. We developed the high temperature-moisturizing method to obtained quality postmortem impressions from decomposing friction ridge skin. This technique is a simple procedure that uses boiling water to recondition the skin. This reconditioning process enhances detail present on the fingers and exposes ridge detail not visible to the naked eye. Therefore, we can recover the quality fingerprints, even from the worst decomposed bodies.

• Imaging Science in Dentistry
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• v.43 no.4
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• pp.267-272
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• 2013

Purpose: Demirjian's dental maturity scores and curves have been widely used for human age determination. Several authors have reported considerable differences between the true and estimated age based on the Demirjian curves, which have been accounted for by ethnicity. The purpose of the current study was to assess the role of ethnicity-specific dental maturation curves in age estimation of Saudi children. Materials and Methods: A sample of 452 healthy Saudi children aged 4 to 14 years were aged based on the original French-Canadian Demirjian curves and several modified Demirjian curves specified for certain ethnic groups: Saudi, Kuwaiti, Polish, Dutch, Pakistani, and Belgian. One-way ANOVA and a post hoc Scheff$\acute{e}$'s test were used to assess the differences between chronological age and dental age estimated by the different curves (P<0.05). Results: The curves designed for Dutch, Polish, Saudi, and Belgian (5th percentile) populations had a significantly lower error in estimating age than the original French-Canadian and Belgian (50th percentile) curves. The optimal curve for males was the Saudi one, with a mean absolute difference between estimated age and chronological age of 8.6 months. For females, the optimal curve was the Polish one, with a mean absolute difference of 7.4 months. It was revealed that accurate age determination was not related to certain ethnicity-specific curves. Conclusion: We conclude that ethnicity might play a role in age determination, but not a principal one.

• Journal of the Society of Disaster Information
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.229-239
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• 2011

The private investigator service in Korea is to protect our legal market from personal right, creation of job, legal opening via OECD and FTA as well as the prevention of negative private investigation such as service center and private investigator operated without any control. Therefore, this study compares the civil research systems of advanced countries, reviews the legal process to introduce private investigator service as well as considers the previous studies to suggest the work sectors of private investigator service appropriate to Korea. As a result, it distinguished the private investigation work into corporate, finance, insurance, medical service, Cyber, traffic accidents, intellectual property right, lost and forensic science.

• Imaging Science in Dentistry
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• v.42 no.4
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• pp.213-217
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• 2012

Purpose: This study was performed to evaluate the uniqueness and reliability of the frontal sinuses by comparing various patterns of frontal sinus as observed on Waters' radiographs for individual identification. Materials and Methods: Three Waters' radiographs of 100 individuals, taken on day one, after 6-8 months, and one radiograph with a slight variation in angulation, to mimic conditions out in the field or during autopsy. Three observers were randomly given radiographs from all there packets for comparisons and identification, by the method of superimposition and individual uniqueness. Results: The comparative identification by superimposition of the frontal sinus was 100% positive. The size, shape, unilateral or bilateral presence, absence, and septa were observed to be unique in each case; neither had the measurements changed over a period of time. Conclusion: The need to establish a reliable, low-cost, and easily reproducible method for human identification prompted the elaboration of technical, precise, and accessible parameters, such as the evaluation of the area, asymmetry, and shape of the frontal sinus. Comparison among each of the frontal sinuses of the 100 people in the sample revealed that no two sinuses are the same, that is, the sinus is unique to each individual.

• Korean Journal of Occupational Health Nursing
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.153-161
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• 2015

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to identify the effects of violence experience, emotional labor and job stress on clinical nurses' depression and to provide suggestions for improving the quality of patient care. Methods: This research involved 257 clinical nurses who were working at an acute care hospital with at least 200 beds in S city and K province. Data were collected from May 23 to June 7 in 2014 and were analyzed using IBM SPSS version 21.0. Results: The results show that 98.1% of subjects had violence experience in the past year and the violence experience included 44.4% physical threat, 37.5% verbal violence and 18.1% physical violence. The average scores were emotional labor 3.57, job stress 3.54 and depression 21.16. There were positive correlations among violence experience, emotional labor, job stress and depression (p<.01). There were also significant co-relationships between depression and violence experience (r=.21, p=.001), between depression and emotional labor (r=.48, p<.001) and between depression and job stress (r=.31, p<.001). Conclusion: The results suggest that it is necessary to set up guidelines for clinical nurses to manage violence, emotional labor and job stress in order to create better working environment and to improve quality of patient care.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.893-913
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• 2017

The handwriting based person identification systems use their designer's perceived structural properties of handwriting as features. In this paper, we present a system that uses those structural properties as features that graphologists and expert handwriting analyzers use for determining the writer's personality traits and for making other assessments. The advantage of these features is that their definition is based on sound historical knowledge (i.e., the knowledge discovered by graphologists, psychiatrists, forensic experts, and experts of other domains in analyzing the relationships between handwritten stroke characteristics and the phenomena that imbeds individuality in stroke). Hence, each stroke characteristic reflects a personality trait. We have measured the effectiveness of these features on a subset of handwritten Devnagari and Latin script datasets from the Center for Pattern Analysis and Recognition (CPAR-2012), which were written by 100 people where each person wrote three samples of the Devnagari and Latin text that we have designed for our experiments. The experiment yielded 100% correct identification on the training set. However, we observed an 88% and 89% correct identification rate when we experimented with 200 training samples and 100 test samples on handwritten Devnagari and Latin text. By introducing the majority voting based rejection criteria, the identification accuracy increased to 97% on both script sets.

• Parasites, Hosts and Diseases
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• v.57 no.6
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• pp.601-605
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• 2019

As we learn more about parasites in ancient civilizations, data becomes available that can be used to see how infection may change over time. The aim of this study is to assess how common certain intestinal parasites were in China and Korea in the past 2000 years, and make comparisons with prevalence data from the 20th century. This allows us to go on to investigate how and why changes in parasite prevalence may have occurred at different times. Here we show that Chinese liver fluke (Clonorchis sinensis) dropped markedly in prevalence in both Korea and China earlier than did roundworm (Ascaris lumbricoides) and whipworm (Trichuris trichiura). We use historical evidence to determine why this was the case, exploring the role of developing sanitation infrastructure, changing use of human feces as crop fertilizer, development of chemical fertilizers, snail control programs, changing dietary preferences, and governmental public health campaigns during the 20th century.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.21 no.12
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• pp.331-336
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• 2021

Vacuum metal deposition(VMD) using gold and zinc is known as a very sensitive technique of developing latent fingerprints on nonporous surfaces by excellent malleability and ductility of gold. However, VMD produces empty print which cannot be identified. There is only presumption about the cause of occurrence of empty print, the exact cause is not known. In this study, we experiment on the freshness of fingerprints and sensitivity of techniques that are estimated as the factors causing empty print, based on this, we suggest cyanoacrylate fuming is effective to redevelop empty print.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.24 no.12
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• pp.1624-1631
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• 2021

With the continued development of image processing technology, we live in a time when it is difficult to visually discriminate processed (or tampered) images from real images. However, as the risk of fake images being misused for crime increases, the importance of image forensic science for identifying fake images is emerging. Currently, various deep learning-based identifiers have been studied, but there are still many problems to be used in real situations. Due to the inherent characteristics of deep learning that strongly relies on given training data, it is very vulnerable to evaluating data that has never been viewed. Therefore, we try to find a way to improve generalization ability of deep learning-based fake image identifiers. First, images with various contents were added to the training dataset to resolve the over-fitting problem that the identifier can only classify real and fake images with specific contents but fails for those with other contents. Next, color spaces other than RGB were exploited. That is, fake image identification was attempted on color spaces not considered when creating fake images, such as HSV and YCbCr. Finally, dropout, which is commonly used for generalization of neural networks, was used. Through experimental results, it has been confirmed that the color space conversion to HSV is the best solution and its combination with the approach of increasing the training dataset significantly can greatly improve the accuracy and generalization ability of deep learning-based identifiers in identifying fake images that have never been seen before.