• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.36 no.6
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• pp.391-398
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• 2023

In this paper, a penalized maximum likelihood estimation (PMLE) method that applies a penalty to increase the accuracy of a basis-screening-based Kriging model (BSKM) is introduced. The maximum order and set of basis functions used in the BSKM are determined according to their importance. In this regard, the cross-validation error (CVE) for the basis functions is employed as an indicator of importance. When constructing the Kriging model (KM), the maximum order of basis functions is determined, the importance of each basis function is evaluated according to the corresponding maximum order, and finally the optimal set of basis functions is determined. This optimal set is created by adding basis functions one by one in order of importance until the CVE of the KM is minimized. In this process, the KM must be generated repeatedly. Simultaneously, hyper-parameters representing correlations between datasets must be calculated through the maximum likelihood evaluation method. Given that the optimal set of basis functions depends on such hyper-parameters, it has a significant impact on the accuracy of the KM. The PMLE method is applied to accurately calculate hyper-parameters. It was confirmed that the accuracy of a BSKM can be improved by applying it to Branin-Hoo problem.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.17 no.6
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• pp.919-927
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• 2023

Elastography utilizes the fact that the tissue of a malignant tumor is harder than that of a benign tumor and increases the specificity of diagnosis according to the elastic modulus of the tumor, helping to reduce unnecessary biopsies. However, the reliability of elastography can be influenced by the equipment used and the examiner's skills. In this study, the researchers analyzed the reproducibility of elastography by evaluating phantom images when measuring the elasticity values repeatedly. Phantoms were created using silicone and gelatin with different levels of stiffness, and they were inserted at varying depths from the surface. The elasticity values were measured using shear wave elastography. The study aimed to determine whether the reproducibility of elasticity values remains consistent depending on the stiffness and depth of the lesions. The experimental results showed that there was no statistically significant correlation between the elasticity values obtained through shear wave elastography and the depth or stiffness of the lesions. However, in the lesions with the lowest stiffness, the elasticity values were statistically significant (p<0.001) and showed a high correlation with the depth of the lesions. Although there were variations in the measured elasticity values based on the differences in lesion stiffness and depth, these differences did not significantly impact the diagnosis. Therefore, shear wave elastography remains a reliable diagnostic method, and it is suggested that it can be helpful in the diagnosis of breast lesions.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.17 no.6
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• pp.911-917
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• 2023

The method of observing nodular changes on the liver surface using clinical ultrasonography is useful for diagnosing cirrhosis. However, the speckle noise that inevitably occurs in ultrasound images makes it difficult to identify changes in the liver surface and echo patterns, which has a negative impact on the diagnosis of cirrhosis. The purpose of this study is to model the median modified Wiener filter (MMWF), which can efficiently reduce noise in cirrhotic ultrasound images, and confirm its applicability. Ultrasound images were acquired using an ACR phantom and an actual cirrhotic patient, and the proposed MMWF algorithm and conventional noise reduction algorithm were applied to each image. Coefficient of variation (COV) and edge rise distance (ERD) were used as quantitative image quality evaluation factors for the acquired ultrasound images. We confirmed that the MMWF algorithm improved both COV and ERD values compared to the conventional noise reduction algorithm in both ACR phantom and real ultrasound images of cirrhotic patients. In conclusion, the proposed MMWF algorithm is expected to contribute to improving the diagnosis rate of cirrhosis patients by reducing the noise level and improving spatial resolution at the same time.

• The Journal of Engineering Geology
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• v.33 no.4
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• pp.725-736
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• 2023

The compliance of deep geological disposal facilities for high-level radioactive waste with safety objectives requires consideration of uncertainties owing to temporal changes in the disposal system. A comprehensive review and analysis of the characteristics of this evolution should be undertaken to identify the effects on multiple barriers and the biosphere. We analyzed the evolution of the buffer, backfill, plug, and closure regions during the early phase of the post-closure period as part of a long-term performance assessment for an operating license application for a deep geological repository in Finland. Degradation mechanisms generally expected in engineered barriers were considered, and long-term evolution features were examined for use in performance assessments. The importance of evolution features was classified into six categories based on the design of the Finnish case. Results are expected to be useful as a technical basis for performance and safety assessment in developing the Korean deep geological disposal system for high-level radioactive waste. However, for a more detailed review and evaluation of each feature, it is necessary to obtain data for the final disposal site and facility-specific design, and to assess its impact in advance.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.27 no.6
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• pp.182-192
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• 2023

In this study, the efficacy of Engineered Cementitious Composite(ECC) jacket for masonry fences subjected to lateral dynamic load was experimentally verified through a shaking table test, comparing it with the performance of an unreinforced masonry(URM) fence. Firstly, dominant frequencies, modal damping ratios and deformed shapes were identified through an impact hammer test. URM and ECC-strengthened fences with heights of 940mm and 970mm had natural frequencies of 6.4 and 35.3Hz, and first modal damping ratios of 7.0 and 5.3%, respectively. Secondly, a shaking table test was conducted in the out-of-plane direction, applying a historical earthquake, El Centro(1940) scaled from 25 to 300%. For the URM fence, flexural cracking occurred at the interface of brick and mortar joint(i.e., bed joint) at the ground motion scaled to 50%, and out-of-plane overturning failure followed during the subsequent test conducted at the ground motion scaled to 30%. On the other hand, the ECC-jacketed fence showed a robust performance without any crack or damage until the ground motion scaled to 300%. Finally, the base shear forces exerted upon the URM and ECC-jacketed fences by the ground motions scaled to 25~300% were evaluated and compared with the ones calculated according to the design code. In contrast to the collapse risk of the URM fence at the ground motion of 1,000-year return period, the ECC-jacketed fence was estimated to remain safe up to the 4,800-year return period ground motion.

• Journal of Korean Society of Forest Science
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• v.112 no.4
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• pp.544-553
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• 2023

The purpose of this study was to reveal the thermal comfort and physiological and psychological effects of spending time in broad-leaved forests in suumer. Thirty-one university students (with an average age of 21.4 ± 2.1 years) participated in the study, and a within-subjects experimental design methodology was used. The participants moved to an experimental site (with a crown closure of 76.6%) or a control site (25.9%), sat on a chair to eliminate the impact of movement, and rested for 5 minutes with closed eyes. At this time, thermal comfort, heart rate variability, heart rate, and forehead temperature were continuously measured. After that, blood pressure and pulse rate were measured, and a subjective evaluation was conducted. As a result, spending time at an experimental site showed a statistically significant decrease in the predicted mean vote and the percentage of dissatisfied values, enhancement of parasympathetic nerve activity, decrease of forehead temperature, diastolic blood pressure, heart rate, pulse rate, and improvement of personal thermal sensation (thermal sensation vote and comfort sensation vote). In conclusion, it was found that a forest with high crown closure reduces thermal stress and induces physiological and psychological relaxation.

• The Journal of The Korea Institute of Intelligent Transport Systems
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.1-18
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• 2023

With the recent developments in big data and deep learning, a variety of traffic information is collected widely and used for traffic operations. In particular, long short-term memory (LSTM) is used in the field of traffic information prediction with time series characteristics. Since trends, seasons, and cycles differ due to the nature of time series data input for an LSTM, a trial-and-error method based on characteristics of the data is essential for prediction models based on time series data in order to find hyperparameters. If a methodology is established to find suitable hyperparameters, it is possible to reduce the time spent in constructing high-accuracy models. Therefore, in this study, a traffic information prediction model is developed based on highway vehicle detection system (VDS) data and LSTM, and an impact assessment is conducted through changes in the LSTM evaluation indicators for each hyperparameter. In addition, a methodology for finding hyperparameters suitable for predicting highway traffic information in the transportation field is presented.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.751-759
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• 2023

Breast ultrasonography is difficult to image in fatty breasts and to find micro-calcification, but the discovery of micro-calcification is very important for breast cancer screening. Among the color Doppler artifact of ultrasound, twinkle artifact mainly occur on strong reflectors such as stones or calcification in images, and evaluation methods using them are clinically being used. In this study, we are conducting experiments on the color Doppler settings of ultrasound equipment, such as repetition frequency, ensemble, persist, wall filtering, smoothing, linear density, and dissociation value, by producing a breast simulation phantom using the largest amount of calcium phosphate among breast implants. The purpose of this study was to improve the contrast of twinkle artifact in breast ultrasound examinations and to maximize their use in clinical practice. As a result, the pulse repetition frequency occurred in the range of 3.6 kHz to 7.2 kHz, and did not occur above 10.5 kHz. For ensembles, twinkle artifact occurred in all sizes of calcification under low conditions, and in threshold settings, the twinkle artifact increased slightly only under 80 to 100 conditions, and did not occur in 1 mm size calcification. Persist, wall filter, smoothing, and line density settings did not have much meaning in the setting variable because conditions did not increase by condition, and pulse repetition frequency, ensemble, and thresholds had the greatest impact on the twinkling artifact image. This study is expected to help examiners select optimal conditions to effectively increase twinkle artifact by adjusting color Doppler settings.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.9 no.6
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• pp.1057-1063
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• 2023

The urban railway sleeper floating track, the subject of this study, is an anti-vibration track to reduce vibration transmitted to the structure. currently, the replacement cycle of resilience pad for sleeper floating tracks is set and operated based on load. however, most previous studies were conducted on load-based structural safety aspects, such as fatigue life evaluation of sleeper anti-vibration pads and increase in track impact coefficient and track support stiffness due to increase in spring stiffness. therefore, in this study, we measure the vibration acceleration of the ballast for each analysis section and use the results of 7 million fatigue tests to calculate the spring stiffness of the resilience pad for each section. the spring stiffness of the resilience pad calculated for each section was set as the analysis data and the concrete vibration acceleration was derived analytically. the adequacy of analysis modeling was verified as the analyzed concrete bed vibration acceleration for each section was within the field-measured concrete bed vibration acceleration range. using the vibration acceleration curve according to the derived spring stiffness change, the spring stiffness of the resilience pad is estimated from the measured vibration acceleration. therefore, we would like to present a technique that can estimate the spring stiffness of resilience pad of a running track using the vibration acceleration of the measured concrete bed.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.91-100
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• 2023

Reverberation time (T60) is a typical acoustic parameter that provides information about reverberation. Since the impacts of reverberation vary depending on the frequency bands even in the same space, frequency-dependent (FD) T60, which offers detailed insights into the acoustic environments, can be useful. However, most conventional blind T60 estimation methods, which estimate the T60 from speech signals, focus on fullband T60 estimation, and a few blind FDT60 estimation methods commonly show poor performance in the low-frequency bands. This paper introduces a modified approach based on Attentive pooling based Weighted Sum of Spectral Decay Rates (AWSSDR), previously proposed for blind T60 estimation, by extending its target from fullband T60 to FDT60. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms conventional blind FDT60 estimation methods on the acoustic characterization of environments (ACE) challenge evaluation dataset. Notably, it consistently exhibits excellent estimation performance in all frequency bands. This demonstrates that the mechanism of the AWSSDR method is valuable for blind FDT60 estimation because it reflects the FD variations in the impact of reverberation, aggregating information about FDT60 from the speech signal by processing the spectral decay rates associated with the physical properties of reverberation in each frequency band.