• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.221-228
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• 2021

Recently, there has been an increased awareness on the use of High-Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU) as a non-surgical treatment option for leiomyomas. This study aimed to assess gynecologists' perception of HIFU therapy for uterine leiomyomas in Korea. We analyzed questionnaires from 162 Korean gynecologists who provided data on 1) demographics, 2) pattern of practice with respect to leiomyomas, and 3) opinion regarding HIFU therapy for leiomyomas. Of the 162 gynecologists, 2.8 % regarded HIFU as a first-line treatment for leiomyomas. HIFU was only available at the workplace of 19 % of respondents; of these, 58 % had requested the use of HIFU. When asked about their perception of HIFU for treating leiomyomas, only 19 % of the respondents thought that it was effective. The commonest perceived complication was a delay in the adequate treatment of sarcoma (59 %), followed by bowel injury (52 %). The respondents considered HIFU to be suitable in the following circumstances: age between 40 and 49 years, those patients who no longer desired pregnancy, medium-sized (5-6 cm) leiomyomas, and up to 2 leiomyomas. The Korean gynecologists' perception of HIFU as a treatment for leiomyomas is still not favorable. Gynecologists working at hospitals where HIFU is available tended to have a higher positive perception of this treatment. In addition to research involving a large number of gynecologists from multiple countries, a study on the long-term outcomes of HIFU is needed.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Marine Environment & Safety
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• v.27 no.7
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• pp.1004-1010
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• 2021

Ship-floating object accidents can lead not only to a delay in ship's operations, but also to large scale casualties. Hence, preventive measures are required to avoid them. This study analyzed the spatiotemporal aspects of such collisions based on the data on ship-floating object accidents in sea areas in the last five years, including the collisions in South Korea's territorial seas and exclusive economic zones. We also provide basic data for related research fields. To understand the distribution of the relative density of accidents involving floating objects, the sea area under analysis was visualized as a grid and a two-dimensional histogram was generated. A multinomial logistic regression model was used to analyze the effect of variables such as time of day and season on the collisions. The spatial analysis revealed that the collision density was highest for the areas extending from Geoje Island to Tongyeong, including Jinhae Bay, and that it was high near Jeongok Port in the West Sea and the northern part of Jeju Island. The temporal analysis revealed that the collisions occurred most frequently during the day (71.4%) and in autumn. Furthermore, the likelihood of collision with floating objects was much higher for professional fishing vessels, leisure vessels, and recreational fishing vessels than for cargo vessels during the day and in autumn. The results of this analysis can be used as primary data for the arrangement of Coast Guard vessels, rigid enforcement of regulations, removal of floating objects, and preparation of countermeasures involving preliminary removal of floating objects to prevent accidents by time and season.

• Tunnel and Underground Space
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• v.33 no.1
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• pp.42-56
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• 2023

In deep geological disposal of high-level radioactive waste (HLW), the natural barrier must physically support the disposal facility and delay the movement of radionuclides for at least hundreds of thousands of years. To evaluate the long-term geological evolution of the natural barriers, it is essential to analyze the long-term behavior of rock joints, including the frictional healing behavior. This study aimed to experimentally analyze the frictional healing behavior of rock joints under hydro-mechanical (H-M) conditions through the slide-hold-slide (SHS) test. The SHS tests were performed under mechanical and H-M conditions for joint specimens of different roughness. In the H-M conditions, the frictional healing rate tended to increase, which was more evident in the specimens with large roughness. In addition, it was confirmed that the effect of the hydro-mechanical conditions was more significant when the effective normal stress acting on the joint surface was small. These results are expected to be used as fundamental data to understand the frictional healing behavior of rock joints in the natural barriers.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.343-348
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• 2022

Recently, With the recent rapid development of technology, the amount of data generated by various systems is increasing, and enterprise servers and data centers that have to handle large amounts of big data need to apply high-stability and high-performance storage devices even if costs increase. In such systems, SSD(solid state disk) that provide high performance of read/write are often used as storage devices. However, due to the characteristics of reading and writing on a page-by-page basis, erasing operations on a block basis, and erassing-before-writing, there is a problem that performance is degraded when duplicate writes occur. Therefore, in order to delay this performance degradation problem, over-provision technology of SSD has been applied internally. However, since over-provided technologies have the disadvantage of consuming a lot of storage space instead of performance, the application of inefficient technologies above the right performance has a problem of over-costing. In this paper, we proposed a method of measuring the performance and cost incurred when various over-provisions are applied in an SSD and predicting the system-optimized over-provided ratio based on this. Through this research, we expect to find a trade-off with costs to meet the performance requirements in systems that process big data.

• International Journal of High-Rise Buildings
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.225-234
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• 2023

Even at this point in the era of digital transformation, we are still facing many problems in the safety sector that cannot prevent the occurrence or spread of human casualties. When you are in an unexpected emergency, it is often difficult to respond only with human physical ability. Human casualties continue to occur at construction sites, manufacturing plants, and multi-use facilities used by many people in everyday life. If you encounter a situation where normal judgment is impossible in the event of an emergency at a life site where there are still many safety blind spots, it is difficult to cope with the existing manual guidance method. New variable guidance technology, which combines artificial intelligence and digital twin, can make it possible to prevent casualties by processing large amounts of data needed to derive appropriate countermeasures in real time beyond identifying what safety accidents occurred in unexpected crisis situations. When a simple control method that divides and monitors several CCTVs is digitally converted and combined with artificial intelligence and 3D digital twin control technology, intelligence augmentation (IA) effect can be achieved that strengthens the safety decision-making ability required in real time. With the enforcement of the Serious Disaster Enterprise Punishment Act, the importance of distributing a smart location guidance system that urgently solves the decision-making delay that occurs in safety accidents at various industrial sites and strengthens the real-time decision-making ability of field workers and managers is highlighted. The smart location guidance system that combines artificial intelligence and digital twin consists of AIoT HW equipment, wireless communication NW equipment, and intelligent SW platform. The intelligent SW platform consists of Builder that supports digital twin modeling, Watch that meets real-time control based on synchronization between real objects and digital twin models, and Simulator that supports the development and verification of various safety management scenarios using intelligent agents. The smart location guidance system provides on-site monitoring using IoT equipment, CCTV-linked intelligent image analysis, intelligent operating procedures that support workflow modeling to immediately reflect the needs of the site, situational location guidance, and digital twin virtual fencing access control technology. This paper examines the limitations of traditional fixed passive guidance methods, analyzes global technology development trends to overcome them, identifies the digital transformation properties required to switch to intelligent variable smart location guidance methods, explains the characteristics and components of AI-based public facility smart fire safety integrated system (ISFS).

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.213-221
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• 2006

Phone segmentation of speech waveform is especially important for concatenative text to speech synthesis which uses segmented corpora for the construction of synthetic units. because the quality of synthesized speech depends critically on the accuracy of the segmentation. In the beginning. the phone segmentation was manually performed. but it brings the huge effort and the large time delay. HMM-based approaches adopted from automatic speech recognition are most widely used for automatic segmentation in speech synthesis, providing a consistent and accurate phone labeling scheme. Even the HMM-based approach has been successful, it may locate a phone boundary at a different position than expected. In this paper. we categorized adjacent phoneme pairs and analyzed the mismatches between hand-labeled transcriptions and HMM-based labels. Then we described the dominant error patterns that must be improved for the speech synthesis. For the experiment. hand labeled standard Korean speech DB from ETRI was used as a reference DB. Time difference larger than 20ms between hand-labeled phoneme boundary and auto-aligned boundary is treated as an automatic segmentation error. Our experimental results from female speaker revealed that plosive-vowel, affricate-vowel and vowel-liquid pairs showed high accuracies, 99%, 99.5% and 99% respectively. But stop-nasal, stop-liquid and nasal-liquid pairs showed very low accuracies, 45%, 50% and 55%. And these from male speaker revealed similar tendency.

• Journal of the Korea Society for Simulation
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• v.33 no.2
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• pp.1-11
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• 2024

A cyber-physical system is a technology that connects the physical systems of a manufacturing environment with a cyber space to enable simulation. One of the major challenges in this technology is the seamless communication between these two environments. In complex manufacturing processes, it is crucial to adapt to various protocols of manufacturing equipment and ensure the transmission and reception of a large volume of data without delays or errors. In this study, we propose a method for constructing agent models for real-time simulation-capable cyberphysical systems. To achieve this, we design data collection units as independent agent models and effectively integrate them with existing simulation tools to develop the overall system architecture. To validate the proposed structure and ensure reliability, we conducted empirical testing by integrating various equipment from a real-world smart microfactory system to assess the data collection capabilities. The experiments involved testing data delay and data gaps related to data collection cycles. As a result, the proposed approach demonstrates flexibility by enabling the application of various internal data collection methods and accommodating different data formats and communication protocols for various equipment with relatively low communication delays. Consequently, it is expected that this approach will promote innovation in the manufacturing industry, enhance production line efficiency, and contribute to cost savings in maintenance.

• Korean Journal of Radiology
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.413-425
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• 2022

Objective: We compared appendiceal visualization on 2-mSv CT vs. conventional-dose CT (median 7 mSv) in adolescents and young adults and analyzed the undesirable clinical and diagnostic outcomes that followed appendiceal nonvisualization. Materials and Methods: A total of 3074 patients aged 15-44 years (mean ± standard deviation, 28 ± 9 years; 1672 female) from 20 hospitals were randomized to the 2-mSv CT or conventional-dose CT group (1535 vs. 1539) from December 2013 through August 2016. A total of 161 radiologists from 20 institutions prospectively rated appendiceal visualization (grade 0, not identified; grade 1, unsure or partly visualized; and grade 2, clearly and entirely visualized) and the presence of appendicitis in these patients. The final diagnosis was based on CT imaging and surgical, pathologic, and clinical findings. We analyzed undesirable clinical or diagnostic outcomes, such as negative appendectomy, perforated appendicitis, more extensive than simple appendectomy, delay in patient management, or incorrect CT diagnosis, which followed appendiceal nonvisualization (defined as grade 0 or 1) and compared the outcomes between the two groups. Results: In the 2-mSv CT and conventional-dose CT groups, appendiceal visualization was rated as grade 0 in 41 (2.7%) and 18 (1.2%) patients, respectively; grade 1 in 181 (11.8%) and 81 (5.3%) patients, respectively; and grade 2 in 1304 (85.0%) and 1421 (92.3%) patients, respectively (p < 0.001). Overall, undesirable outcomes were rare in both groups. Compared to the conventional-dose CT group, the 2-mSv CT group had slightly higher rates of perforated appendicitis (1.1% [17] vs. 0.5% [7], p = 0.06) and false-negative diagnoses (0.4% [6] vs. 0.0% [0], p = 0.01) following appendiceal nonvisualization. Otherwise, these two groups were comparable. Conclusion: The use of 2-mSv CT instead of conventional-dose CT impairs appendiceal visualization in more patients. However, appendiceal nonvisualization on 2-mSv CT rarely leads to undesirable clinical or diagnostic outcomes.

• Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases
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• v.64 no.6
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• pp.439-444
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• 2008

Background: A patient with a pleural effusion that is difficult to safely drain by a "blind" thoracentesis procedure is generally referred to a radiologist for ultrasound-guided thoracentesis. But such a referral increases the cost and the patient's inconvenience, and it causes delay in the diagnostic procedures. If ultrasound-guided thoracentesis is performed as a bedside procedure by a medical resident, then this will reduce the previously mentioned problems. So these patients with pleural effusions were treated by medical residents at our medical center, and the procedures included bedside ultrasound-guided thoracenteses. Methods: We studied 89 cases of pleural effusions from March 2003 to June 2005. A "blind" thoracentesis was performed if the amount of pleural effusion was moderate or large. Bedside ultrasound-guided thoracentesis was performed for small or loculated effusions or for the cases that failed with performing a "blind" thoracentesis. Results: "Blind" thoracenteses were performed in 79 cases that had a moderate or large amount of uncomplicated pleural effusions and the success rate was 93.7% (74/79 cases). Ultrasound-guided thoracentesis by the medical residents was performed in 15 cases and the success rate was 66.7% (10/15 cases). The 5 failedcases included all 3 cases with loculated effusions and 2 cases with a small amount of pleural effusion. All the failed cases were referred to one radiologist and they were then successfully treated. If we exclude the 3 cases with loculated pleural effusions, the success rate of ultrasound-guided thoracentesis by the medical residents increased up to 83% (10/12cases). Two cases of complications (1 pneumothorax, 1 hydrohemothorax) occurred during ultrasound-guided thoracentesis. Conclusion: Ultrasound-guided thoracentesis performed as a bedside procedure by a medical resident may be relatively effective and safe. If a patient has a loculated effusion, then it would be better to first refer the patient to a radiologist.

• Explosives and Blasting
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.29-42
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• 2012

Variables influencing the free face movement due to rock blasting include the physical and mechanical properties, in particular the discontinuity characteristics, explosive type, charge weight, burden, blast-hole spacing, delay time between blast-holes or rows, stemming conditions. These variables also affects the blast vibration, air blast and size of fragmentation. For the design of surface blasting, the priority is given to the safety of nearby buildings. Therefore, blast vibration has to be controlled by analyzing the free face movement at the surface blasting sites and also blasting operation needs to be optimized to improve the fragmentation size. High-speed digital image analysis enables the analyses of the initial movement of free face of rock, stemming optimality, fragment trajectory, face movement direction and velocity as well as the optimal detonator initiation system. Even though The high-speed image analysis technique has been widely used in foreign countries, its applications can hardly be found in Korea. This thesis aims at carrying out a fundamental study for optimizing the blast design and evaluation using the high-speed digital image analysis. A series of experimentation were performed at two large surface blasting sites with the rock type of shale and granite, respectively. Emulsion and ANFO were the explosives used for the study. Based on the digital images analysis, displacement and velocity of the free face were scrutinized along with the analysis fragment size distribution. In addition, AUTODYN, 2-D FEM model, was applied to simulate detonation pressure, detonation velocity, response time for the initiation of the free face movement and face movement shape. The result show that regardless of the rock type, due to the displacement and the movement velocity have the maximum near the center of charged section the free face becomes curved like a bow. Compared with ANFO, the cases with Emulsion result in larger detonation pressure and velocity and faster reaction for the displacement initiation.