• Journal of the Korean Magnetics Society
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.39-44
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• 2016

Determination of the structural, electronic, and magnetic properties of the magnetically doped bismuth-telluride alloys are drawing lots of interest in the fields of the thermoelectric application as well as the research on magnetic interaction and topological insulator. In this study, we performed the first-principles electronic structure calculations within the density functional theory for the Gd doped bismuth-tellurides in order to study its magnetic properties and magnetic phase stability. All-electron FLAPW (full-potential linearized augmented plane-wave) method is employed and the exchange correlation potentials of electrons are treated within the generalized gradient approximation. In order to describe the localized f-electrons of Gd properly, the Hubbard +U term and the spin-orbit coupling of the valence electrons are included in the second variational way. The results show that while the Gd bulk prefers a ferromagnetic phase, the total energy differences between the ferromagnetic and the antiferromagnetic phases of the Gd doped bismuth-telluride alloys are about ~1meV/Gd, indicating that the stable magnetic phase may be changed sensitively depending on the structural change such as defects or strains.

• The Korean Society of Law and Medicine
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.275-307
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• 2010

In the presidential new-year address in January 2, 2009, the President declared that 17 kinds of new driving force of growth that could create high-added value be selected to step up job creation and an increase in national wealth. The Ministry of Strategy & Finance announced plans for the 17 kinds of new driving force of growth after the presidential address. Specifically, that ministry announced an ambitious plan to select health care service named 'Global Health Care' as one of the five service industries that could create high-added value in a move to provide jobs to approximately 7,000 people and produce pervasive economic effects coming up to a trillion and 10 billion won. To attain the goal, several action plans were mapped out to globalize domestic medical institutions, to rearrange the relevant law and system for the purposes of raising awareness of domestic medical institutions among foreign patients and improving their accessibility and post-satisfaction level, and to lure lots of foreign patients through financial assistance. At the same time, the government announced plans to lure severe patients such as those in want of surgery or organ transplant, cancer patients or patients with heart diseases to create high-added value on a long-term basis. Thus, the government announced that it planned to formulate such strategies and to enter an agreement with foreign governments to attract plenty of foreign patients. In fact, however, there are little full-scale evaluation of medical tourism though it's been a year since it was introduced, and there are few actual efforts to implement what the government announced, either. According to the results of the evaluation of medical tourism, domestic hospitals are said to undergo little significant changes after the introduction of medical tourism, which shows that they take a dim view of medical tourism instead of having expectations for that. The medical tourism industries in major Asian countries have been dynamized, and there are several factors of their success. First of all, they are successful in creating new market opportunities by incorporating related industries such as medicine, tourism and IT and in developing medical tourism products and differentiated marketing by taking advantage of their competitive edge. They have offered full-fledged assistance to this sector, and another reason is the improved international credibility of their medical service. If our country fails to pinpoint our problems in consideration of the cases of the Asian countries or to provide appropriate financial aid, our country is bound to lag behind them. Given this reality, how to assess medical tourism and what challenges this sector is confronted with are discussed.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.791-797
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• 2016

Background: Punjab state is particularly reporting a rising burden of cancer. A 'door to door cancer awareness and early detection campaign' was therefore launched in the Punjab covering about 2.67 million population, wherein after initial training accredited social health activists (ASHAs) and other health staff conducted a survey for early detection of cancer cases based on a twelve point clinical algorithm. Objective: To ascertain unit cost for undertaking a population-based cancer awareness and early detection campaign. Materials and Methods: Data were collected using bottom-up costing methods. Full economic costs of implementing the campaign from the health system perspective were calculated. Options to meet the likely demand for project activities were further evaluated to examine their worth from the point of view of long-term sustainability. Results: The campaign covered 97% of the state population. A total of 24,659 cases were suspected to have cancer and were referred to health facilities. At the state level, incidence and prevalence of cancer were found to be 90 and 216 per 100,000, respectively. Full economic cost of implementing the campaign in pilot district was USD 117,524. However, the financial cost was approximately USD 6,301. Start-up phase of campaign was more resource intensive (63% of total) than the implementation phase. The economic cost per person contacted and suspected by clinical algorithm was found to be USD 0.20 and USD 40 respectively. Cost per confirmed case under the campaign was 7,043 USD. Conclusions: The campaign was able to screen a reasonably large population. High to high economic cost points towards the fact that the opportunity cost of campaign put a significant burden on health system and other programs. However, generating awareness and early detection strategy adopted in this campaign seems promising in light of fact that organized screening is not in place in India and in many developing countries.

• International Journal of High-Rise Buildings
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.37-51
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• 2012

New generation of tall and complex buildings systems are now introduced that are reflective of the latest development in materials, design, sustainability, construction, and IT technologies. While the complexity in design is being overcome by the availability and advances in structural analysis tools and readily advanced software, the design of these buildings are still reliant on minimum code requirements that yet to be validated in full scale. The involvement of the author in the design and construction planning of Burj Khalifa since its inception until its completion prompted the author to conceptually develop an extensive survey and real-time structural health monitoring program to validate all the fundamental assumptions mad for the design and construction planning of the tower. The Burj Khalifa Project is the tallest structure ever built by man; the tower is 828 meters tall and comprises of 162 floors above grade and 3 basement levels. Early integration of aerodynamic shaping and wind engineering played a major role in the architectural massing and design of this multi-use tower, where mitigating and taming the dynamic wind effects was one of the most important design criteria established at the onset of the project design. Understanding the structural and foundation system behaviors of the tower are the key fundamental drivers for the development and execution of a state-of-the-art survey and structural health monitoring (SHM) programs. Therefore, the focus of this paper is to discuss the execution of the survey and real-time structural health monitoring programs to confirm the structural behavioral response of the tower during construction stage and during its service life; the monitoring programs included 1) monitoring the tower's foundation system, 2) monitoring the foundation settlement, 3) measuring the strains of the tower vertical elements, 4) measuring the wall and column vertical shortening due to elastic, shrinkage and creep effects, 5) measuring the lateral displacement of the tower under its own gravity loads (including asymmetrical effects) resulting from immediate elastic and long term creep effects, 6) measuring the building lateral movements and dynamic characteristic in real time during construction, 7) measuring the building displacements, accelerations, dynamic characteristics, and structural behavior in real time under building permanent conditions, 8) and monitoring the Pinnacle dynamic behavior and fatigue characteristics. This extensive SHM program has resulted in extensive insight into the structural response of the tower, allowed control the construction process, allowed for the evaluation of the structural response in effective and immediate manner and it allowed for immediate correlation between the measured and the predicted behavior. The survey and SHM programs developed for Burj Khalifa will with no doubt pioneer the use of new survey techniques and the execution of new SHM program concepts as part of the fundamental design of building structures. Moreover, this survey and SHM programs will be benchmarked as a model for the development of future generation of SHM programs for all critical and essential facilities, however, but with much improved devices and technologies, which are now being considered by the author for another tall and complex building development, that is presently under construction.

• Journal of the Korean GEO-environmental Society
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• v.15 no.11
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• pp.53-59
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• 2014

It has been generally recognized that the conventional rockfall protection nets have several problems to actual field application in the aspect of shock absorption, lack of pullout bearing capacities, and net damages. Because of the recognition, authors have tried to develop a new rockfall protection system consisted of shock absorption parts and hexagonal net configuration. In the previous research by the authors, the performance of the newly developed rockfall protection system has been investigated through the laboratory tests and the full-scale testing. In this study, subsequently, numerical analysis program is organized to make a confirmation of the structural stability and performance. For the correct design procedure of the hexagonal net system, it is essential to understand the various mechanical behavior of the entire system. It is also important to be reproduced the systematic characteristics of the system acquired by laboratory and full-scale testing by numerical analysis in order to carry out the numerical experiment to understand various mechanical behavior of the system. As a conclusion, the hexagonal net has better performance in mechanical and physical behavior compared with that of the rectangular net. Furthermore, due to the hexagonal net shows a good performance in aspect of the load distribution, it gives a good alternative in long-term management of the rockfall protection net.

• Fire Science and Engineering
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.119-127
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• 2011

Because of most notably the increase in vehicular traffic in Korea, as measured by highway transport usage, relief is being sought by expanding the construction of highways after 1970s'. These highways have opened up over 70 % of the mountainous areas in Korea's country side which includes the construction of tunnels. Currently there are 607 tunnels installed that are being maintained and by 2015, under the next medium-term plan, Korea will build an additional 440 tunnels. In addition, the use of 1,000m double-pole tunnels is expected to increase significantly in 256 locations. There is no doubt that these tunnels will relieve traffic congestion and aid improved communications, but halfclosed underground highway tunnels in particular are required to reduce tunnel fires caused by poor vehicle maintenance, and other factors such as speeding motorists that increase the number of vehicular accidents. Double-pole tunnels in 1,000m length over require vehicle drivers to be more cautious in terms of the continuous speed limit, judged by how devastating most of car-crash fires within these tunnels can be. In order to prevent these disasters, a full-length tunnel speed enforcement system should be considered mandatorily in legal clauses.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.44 no.1
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• pp.49-55
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• 2007

To improved the multi-resolution fast hierarchical motion estimation by using de-interlacing algorithm that is effective in term of both performance and VLSI implementation, is proposed so as to cover large search area field-based as well as frame based image processing in SoC design. In this paper, we have simulated a various picture mode M=2 or M=3. As a results, the proposed algorithm achieved the motion estimation performance PSNR compare with the full search block matching algorithm, the average performance degradation reached to -0.7dB, which did not affect on the subjective quality of reconstructed images at all. And acquiring the more desirable to adopt design SoC for the fast hierarchical motion estimation, we exploit foreground and background search algorithm (FBSA) base on the dual arithmetic processor element(DAPE). It is possible to estimate the large search area motion displacement using a half of number PE in general operation methods. And the proposed architecture of MHME improve the VLSI design hardware through the proposed FBSA structure with DAPE to remove the local memory. The proposed FBSA which use bit array processing in search area can improve structure as like multiple processor array unit(MPAU).

• Journal of Periodontal and Implant Science
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.577-588
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• 2002

Osseointegrated implants have been established as the standard treatment modality for full/partial edentulous patients since the 1960's, and the long term results for full edentulous patients have proven to be successful. Based on these results osseointegrated implants are now widely used for partial edentulous patients. There has been an increased interest towards the efficacy of wide implants, despite many reports mentioning the lower success rate of wide implants compared to regular implants. Recently, mandibular molar area defects are commonly restored using 2 wide implants, but it is not determined whether which treatment modality-3 regular implants or 2 wide implants-shows superior success rate. In this study, 2 wide implants and 3 regular implants used for the restoration of mandibular molar area are used to compare the survival rate of 1-4 years, and to analyze and compare the failure factors. The following conclusions could be drawn from this study. 1. Wide implants and regular implants showed 94.5% and 97,6% of survival rate respectively. After prosthodontic work, the survival rate was 100% and 98.1% for wide implants and regular implants respectively. 2. 5 failed implants have been removed. 2 wide implants and 1 regular implant have been removed due to failure of osseointegration. 1 wide implant was removed due to abscess formation caused by over-heating, and 1 regular implant was removed due to mechanical failure caused by over-loading within the first year of function. 3. No statistically significant difference was observed with respect to the amount of marginal bone loss of wide and regular implants.(P>0.05) In conclusion, restoration of the mandibular molar area using 3 regular implants was found to be a good treatment modality, and 2 wide implants could he considered a good treatment modality when success factors are taken into account.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Railway
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.252-260
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• 2015

Ballasted track on an asphalt roadbed can be beneficial for its various effects such as (i) decreasing of roadbed thickness by dispersing train load; (ii) prevention of both strength reduction and weakening in roadbed system by preventing rainwater penetration; and (iii) reducing maintenance cost by preventing roadbed mud-pumping and frostbite. With these beneficial effects, ballasted track on asphalt roadbed has been widely used in Europe and Japan, and relevant research for applying such ballasted track on asphalt roadbed systems in Korea is ongoing. In this study, full-scale static and dynamic train load tests were performed to compare the performance of ballasted track on asphalt roadbed and ballasted track. The optimum thickness levels of asphalt and reinforced roadbeds, corresponding to the design criteria for reinforced roadbed of high-speed railway, was estimated using the FEM program ABAQUS. Test results show that the earth pressure on reinforced roadbed of ballasted track on the asphalt roadbed was relatively low compared with that of simple ballasted track. The elastic and plastic displacements of simple ballasted track on the asphalt roadbed were also lower than those of ballasted track. These test results may indicate that the use of ballasted track on asphalt roadbed is an advantageous system in view of long-term maintenance.

• Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases
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• v.78 no.4
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• pp.321-325
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• 2015

Background: The adverse effects of the phosphodiesterase-4 inhibitor roflumilast, appear to be more frequent in clinical practice than what was observed in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) clinical trials. Thus, we designed this study to determine whether adverse effects could be reduced by starting roflumilast at half the dose, and then increasing a few weeks later to $500{\mu}g$ daily. Methods: We retrospectively investigated 85 patients with COPD who had taken either $500{\mu}g$ roflumilast, or a starting dose of $250{\mu}g$ and then increased to $500{\mu}g$. We analyzed all adverse events and assessed differences between patients who continued taking the drug after dose escalation and those who had stopped. Results: Adverse events were reported by 22 of the 85 patients (25.9%). The most common adverse event was diarrhea (10.6%). Of the 52 patients who had increased from a starting dose of $250{\mu}g$ roflumilast to $500{\mu}g$, 43 (82.7%) successfully maintained the $500{\mu}g$ roflumilast dose. No difference in factors likely to affect the risk of adverse effects, was detected between the dose-escalated and the discontinued groups. Of the 26 patients who started with the $500{\mu}g$ roflumilast regimen, seven (26.9%) discontinued because of adverse effects. There was no statistically significant difference in discontinuation rate between the dose-escalated and the control groups (p=0.22). Conclusion: Escalating the roflumilast dose may reduce treatment-related adverse effects and improve tolerance to the full dose. This study suggests that the dose-escalated regimen reduced the rate of discontinuation. However, longer-term and larger-scale studies are needed to support the full benefit of a dose escalation strategy.