• Investigative Magnetic Resonance Imaging
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.179-201
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• 2019

Portable low-cost magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) systems have the potential to enable "point-of-care" and timely MRI diagnosis, and to make this imaging modality available to routine scans and to people in underdeveloped countries and areas. With simplicity, no maintenance, no power consumption, and low cost, permanent magnets/magnet arrays/magnet assemblies are attractive to be used as a source of static magnetic field to realize the portability and to lower the cost for an MRI scanner. However, when taking the canonical Fourier imaging approach and using linear gradient fields, homogeneous fields are required in a scanner, resulting in the facts that either a bulky magnet/magnet array is needed, or the imaging volume is too small to image an organ if the magnet/magnet array is scaled down to a portable size. Recently, with the progress on image reconstruction based on non-linear gradient field, static field patterns without spatial linearity can be used as spatial encoding magnetic fields (SEMs) to encode MRI signals for imaging. As a result, the requirements for the homogeneity of the static field can be relaxed, which allows permanent magnets/magnet arrays with reduced sizes, reduced weight to image a bigger volume covering organs such as a head. It offers opportunities of constructing a truly portable low-cost MRI scanner. For this exciting potential application, permanent magnets/magnet arrays have attracted increased attention recently. A magnet/magnet array is strongly associated with the imaging volume of an MRI scanner, image reconstruction methods, and RF excitation and RF coils, etc. through field patterns and field homogeneity. This paper offers a review of permanent magnets and magnet arrays of different kinds, especially those that can be used for spatial encoding towards the development of a portable and low-cost MRI system. It is aimed to familiarize the readers with relevant knowledge, literature, and the latest updates of the development on permanent magnets and magnet arrays for MRI. Perspectives on and challenges of using a permanent magnet/magnet array to supply a patterned static magnetic field, which does not have spatial linearity nor high field homogeneity, for image reconstruction in a portable setup are discussed.

• Journal of Ginseng Culture
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• v.1
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• pp.28-42
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• 2019

What is unknown about Leibniz (Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 1646~1716), a great philosopher and mathematician, is that he inquired about ginseng. Why Leibniz, one of the leading figures of the Enlightenment, became interested in ginseng? This paper excavates Leibniz's references on ginseng in his vast amount of correspondences and traces the path of his personal life and cultural context where the question about ginseng arose. From the sixteenth century, Europe saw a notable growth of medical botany, due to the rediscovery of such Greek-texts as Materia Medica and the introduction of a variety of new plants from the New World. In the same context, ginseng, the renowned panacea of the Old World began to appear in a number of European travelogues. As an important part of mercantilistic projects, major scientific academies in Europe embarked on the researches of valuable foreign plants including ginseng. Leibniz visited such scientific academies as the Royal Society in London and $Acad{\acute{e}}mie$ royale des sciences in Paris, and envisioned to establish such scientific society in Germany. When Leibniz visited Rome, he began to form a close relationship with Jesuit missionaries. That opportunity amplified his intellectual curiosity about China and China's famous medicine, ginseng. He inquired about the properties of ginseng to Grimaldi and Bouvet who were the main figures in Jesuit China mission. This article demonstrates ginseng, the unnoticed subject in the Enlightenment, could be an important clue that interweaves the academic landscape, the interactions among the intellectuals, and the mercantilistic expansion of Europe in the late 17th century.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.26 no.11
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• pp.21-31
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• 2021

As the COVID-19 pandemic rapidly changes healthcare around the globe, the need for smart healthcare that allows for remote diagnosis is increasing. The current classification of respiratory diseases cost high and requires a face-to-face visit with a skilled medical professional, thus the pandemic significantly hinders monitoring and early diagnosis. Therefore, the ability to accurately classify and diagnose respiratory sound using deep learning-based AI models is essential to modern medicine as a remote alternative to the current stethoscope. In this study, we propose a deep learning-based respiratory sound classification model using data collected from medical experts. The sound data were preprocessed with BandPassFilter, and the relevant respiratory audio features were extracted with Log-Mel Spectrogram and Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC). Subsequently, a Parallel CNN network model was trained on these two inputs using stacking ensemble techniques combined with various machine learning classifiers to efficiently classify and detect abnormal respiratory sounds with high accuracy. The model proposed in this paper classified abnormal respiratory sounds with an accuracy of 96.9%, which is approximately 6.1% higher than the classification accuracy of baseline model.

• Composites Research
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• v.34 no.6
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• pp.357-372
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• 2021

The energy harvesting device is known to be promising as an alternative to solve the resource shortage caused by the depletion of petroleum resources. In order to overcome the limitations (environmental pollution and low mechanical properties) of piezoelectric elements capable of converting mechanical motion into electrical energy, many studies have been conducted on a polymer matrix-based composite piezoelectric energy harvesting device. In this paper, the output performance and related applications of the reported piezoelectric composites are reviewed based on the applied materials and processes. As for the piezoelectric fillers, zinc oxide, which is advantageous in terms of eco-friendliness, biocompatibility, and flexibility, as well as ceramic fillers based on lead zirconate titanate and barium titanate, were reviewed. The polymer matrix was classified into piezoelectric polymers composed of polyvinylidene fluoride and copolymers, and flexible polymers based on epoxy and polydimethylsiloxane, to discuss piezoelectric synergy of composite materials and improvement of piezoelectric output by high external force application, respectively. In addition, the effect of improving the conductivity or the mechanical properties of composite material by the application of a metal or carbon-based secondary filler on the output performance of the piezoelectric harvesting device was explained in terms of the structure of the composite material. Composite material-based piezoelectric harvesting devices, which can be applied to small electronic devices, smart sensors, and medicine with improved performance, can provide potential insights as a power source for wireless electronic devices expected to be encountered in future daily life.

• Parasites, Hosts and Diseases
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• v.59 no.6
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• pp.625-634
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• 2021

Based on the field investigations in 91 investigation sites (counties) in southwest China between 2001 and 2019, the present paper reported the chigger mites on A. agrarius mice in southwest China for the first time by using a series of statistical methods. From 715 striped field mice captured in 28 of 91 investigated sites, only 255 chiggers were collected, and they were identified as 14 species, 6 genera in 3 subfamilies under 2 families. Of 715 A. agrarius mice, only 24 of them were infested with chigger mites with low overall prevalence (P_M=3.4%), overall mean abundance (M_A=0.36 mites/host) and overall mean intensity (M_I=10.63 mites/host). The species diversity and infestation of chiggers on A. agrarius were much lower than those previously reported on some other rodents in southwest China. On a certain species of rodent, A. agrarius mouse in southwest China seems to have a very low susceptibility to chigger infestations than in other geographical regions. Of 14 chigger species, there were 3 dominant species, Leptotrombidium sialkotense, L. rupestre and Schoengastiella novoconfuciana, which were of aggregated distribution among different individuals of A. agrarius hosts. L. sialkotense, one of 6 main vectors of scrub typhus in China, was the first dominant on A. agrarius. The species similarity of chigger mites on male and female hosts was low with C_SS=0.25, and this reflects the sex-bias of different genders of A. agrarius mice in harboring different chigger species.

• Journal of fish pathology
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• v.35 no.1
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• pp.57-63
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• 2022

Vibrio parahaemolyticus and V. vulnificus are known to be infected to human via fisheries products. Therefore, food safety of fisheries products is important for public health and fish industry. This paper was conducted to know how well these human isolates can survive in olive flounder (Paralichthys olivaceus). The growth of V. parahaemolyticus and V. vulnificus showed about 50~60% reduced rates at 25℃ than at 37℃ and did not show any differences according to NaCl concentration of media except the increasing in the growth of V. vulnificus in medium containing 3% NaCl. Artificial infection of 1×10⁶ CFU/fish was carried out to confirm the sensitivity of olive flounder against V. parahaemolyticus and V. vulnificus. After 1 week from injection, no fish was dead. To evaluate nonspecific defense of olive flounder against V. parahaemolyticus and V. vulnificus, the antibacterial potency of serum and epidermal mucus were tested. The number of the vibrios exposed to serum obtained from olive flounder significantly decreased after 3 hours, and epidermal mucus showed decrease of the bacteria over than 90% until 12 hours from exposure. Phagocytosis of head kidney leucocytes of healthy olive flounder against V. parahaemolyticus and V. vulnificus showed in over 70% of leucocytes at the 2 hours. Therefore, cultured olive flounder only as vehicle for human pathogen in environmental water is well developed its antibacterial potency against human pathogens, so the viability of V. parahaemolyticus and V. vulnificus in cultured olive flounder was considered very low.

• Korean Journal of Optics and Photonics
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• v.34 no.4
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• pp.157-169
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• 2023

Augmented reality (AR) using a head mounted display (HMD) is used in various fields such as military, medicine, manufacturing, gaming, and education. In this paper, we discuss the design and fabrication of the AR optical system, which is most essential for HMD. The AR optical system for HMD requires a wide transparent area in which the augmented image of the display and the real world can be viewed at the same time. To this end, an AR optical system was designed and manufactured by dividing it into three parts according to each characteristic. Also, the refractive index of the ultra-violet (UV) adhesive layer required to make the three optical systems into one complete AR optical system was considered from the design stage to minimize the optical path shift phenomenon when the input light source passes through the UV adhesive layer. In addition, when designing the AR optical system, two aspheric surfaces were used to compensate for off-axis aberration and to be suitable for mass production. Finally, for HMD mass production, an aspheric AR optical system with a thickness of 11 mm, a diagonal field of view of 40°, and a weight of 11.3 g was designed and manufactured.

• Research in Plant Disease
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.108-117
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• 2023

With the development of advanced virus diagnostic technologies, numerous viruses, including novel viruses, have been identified explosively from various biological samples around the world over the last decade. For plant viruses, approximately 376 novel viruses have been reported in the last three years. Information on the occurrence and host ranges of plant viral diseases in a particular country or region is very important for diagnosis, quarantine, and control of the viral diseases. Recently, based on active research on the diagnosis and identification of plant viruses, a significant number of newly occurring viruses and new viral host plants have been reported in South Korea. This review paper provides integrated information on plant viruses and viral host plants newly reported in South Korea between 2020 and 2022 to help diagnose, control, and quarantine plant virus diseases in crop fields.

• The Transactions of the Korea Information Processing Society
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• v.13 no.6
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• pp.284-290
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• 2024

Speech emotion recognition (SER) is a technique that is used to analyze the speaker's voice patterns, including vibration, intensity, and tone, to determine their emotional state. There has been an increase in interest in artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, which are now widely used in medicine, education, industry, and the military. Nevertheless, existing researchers have attained impressive results by utilizing acted-out speech from skilled actors in a controlled environment for various scenarios. In particular, there is a mismatch between acted and spontaneous speech since acted speech includes more explicit emotional expressions than spontaneous speech. For this reason, spontaneous speech-emotion recognition remains a challenging task. This paper aims to conduct emotion recognition and improve performance using spontaneous speech data. To this end, we implement deep learning-based speech emotion recognition using the VGG (Visual Geometry Group) after converting 1-dimensional audio signals into a 2-dimensional spectrogram image. The experimental evaluations are performed on the Korean spontaneous emotional speech database from AI-Hub, consisting of 7 emotions, i.e., joy, love, anger, fear, sadness, surprise, and neutral. As a result, we achieved an average accuracy of 83.5% and 73.0% for adults and young people using a time-frequency 2-dimension spectrogram, respectively. In conclusion, our findings demonstrated that the suggested framework outperformed current state-of-the-art techniques for spontaneous speech and showed a promising performance despite the difficulty in quantifying spontaneous speech emotional expression.

• Food Science and Preservation
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• v.31 no.2
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• pp.307-314
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• 2024

Broussonetia kazinoki twig extract (BKT) is recognized for its antioxidant and anti-cancer effects and natural whitening properties. So, it is used as a raw material for cosmetics. B. kazinoki twig is also an edible raw material. B. kazinoki has been used in Asia for paper production and oriental medicine, has anti-diabetic effects, and contains various flavonoids and alkaloids. In this study, to evaluate the efficacy of BKT on allergic skin inflammatory responses, we investigated its effects on factors related to skin inflammation in HaCaT keratinocytes and allergic responses in RBL-2H3 cells. There was no cytotoxicity of the 70% ethanol extract against HaCaT and RBL-2H3 cells. In HaCaT cells, stimulation with tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-𝛼) and interferon-gamma (IFN-𝛾) increased the production of several chemokines, including thymus and activation-regulated chemokine (TARC), macrophage-derived chemokine (MDC), and regulated on activation, normal T cell expressed and secreted (RANTES). However, it was observed that this elevation was notably mitigated in a concentration-dependent manner upon treatment with BKT. Furthermore, BKT treatment demonstrated a significant reduction of 𝛽-hexosaminidase and inflammatory cytokines TNF-𝛼 and IL-4 in IgE-sensitized RBL-2H3 cells. Thus, it is expected that BKT can be used as a natural cosmetic and food ingredient that effectively suppresses allergic inflammatory reactions.