• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
• /
• v.14 no.1
• /
• pp.435-440
• /
• 2013

Background: Breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related death among women in Malaysia. A diagnosis is very stressful for women, affecting all aspects of their being and quality of life. As such, there is little information on quality of life of women with breast cancer across the different ethnic groups in Malaysia. The purpose of this study was to examine the quality of life in Malay and Chinese women newly diagnosed with breast cancer in Kelantan. Materials and Methods: A descriptive study involved 58 Malays and 15 Chinese women newly diagnosed with breast cancer prior to treatment. Quality of life was measured using the Malay version of the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer Quality of Life Questionnaire (EORTC QLQ-C30) and its breast-specific module (QLQ-BR23). Socio-demographic and clinical data were also collected. All the data were analyzed using SPSS version 20.0. Results: Most of the women were married with at least a secondary education and were in late stages of breast cancer. The Malay women had lower incomes (p=0.046) and more children (p=0.001) when compared to the Chinese women. Generally, both the Malay and Chinese women had good functioning quality-of-life scores [mean score range: 60.3-84.8 (Malays); 65.0-91.1 (Chinese)] and global quality of life [mean score 60.3, SD 22.2 (Malays); mean score 65.0, SD 26.6 (Chinese)]. The Malay women experienced more symptoms such as nausea and vomiting (p=0.002), dyspnoea (p=0.004), constipation (p<0.001) and breast-specific symptoms (p=0.041) when compared to the Chinese. Conclusions: Quality of life was satisfactory in both Malays and Chinese women newly diagnosed with breast cancer in Kelantan. However, Malay women had a lower quality of life due to high general as well as breast-specific symptoms. This study finding underlined the importance of measuring quality of life in the newly diagnosed breast cancer patient, as it will provide a broader picture on how a cancer diagnosis impacts multi-ethnic patients. Once health care professionals understand this, they might then be able to determine how to best support and improve the quality of life of these women during the difficult times of their disease and on-going cancer treatments.

• Journal of Hospice and Palliative Care
• /
• v.12 no.4
• /
• pp.177-193
• /
• 2009

The assessment of patient status in palliative medicine is essential for determining treatments and for clinical outcomes. The objective of assessment tools is to raise the quality of care for individual patients and their families. There are a number of tools available to assess pain, non-pain symptoms and quality of life. The tools are either uni-dimensional or multi-dimensional measures. Unfortunately, however, no single tool is recommended to be a superior to others in symptoms or quality of life assessment. Therefore, to select an appropriate assessment tool, one should consider the time frame and unique characteristics of tools depending on purpose and setting. The combination of prognostic index is highly recommended in prognostication, and web-based prognostic tools are available. Recently, a new objective prognostic score has been constructed through multicenter study in Korea. It does not include clinicalestimates of survival, but includes new objective prognostic factors, therefore, anyone can easily use it. For beginners in palliative medicine, relatively easy-to-use tools would be convenient. We recommend Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group performance status to assess functional status, numeric rating scale for pain assessment and the Korean version of brief pain inventory for initial pain assessment. Asking directly with numeric rating scale or the Korean version of MD Anderson Symptom Inventory would be desirable to assess various symptoms together. We think that European Organization Research and Treatment Quality of Life Questionnaire Core 15 for Palliative Care is good to assess the quality of life, while Objective Prognostic Score is convenient as prognostic index for beginners.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
• /
• v.41 no.2
• /
• pp.9-22
• /
• 2004

This paper presents a parallel genetic algorithm for the Multi-disk data allocation problem an NP-complete problem. This problem is to find a method to distribute a Binary Cartesian Product File on disk-arrays to maximize parallel disk I/O accesses. A Sequential Genetic Algorithm(SGA), DAGA, has been proposed and showed the superiority to the other proposed methods, but it has been observed that DAGA consumes considerably lengthy simulation time. In this paper, a parallel version of DAGA(ParaDAGA) is proposed. The ParaDAGA is a 2-dimension torus-based Parallel Genetic Algorithm(PGA) and it is based on a distributed population structure. The ParaDAGA has been implemented on the parallel computer simulated on a single processor platform. Through the simulation, we study the impact of varying ParaDAGA parameters and compare the quality of solution derived by ParaDAGA and DAGA. Comparing the quality of solutions, ParaDAGA is superior to DAGA in all cases of configurations in less simulation time.

• Journal of the Korean Data and Information Science Society
• /
• v.26 no.4
• /
• pp.923-930
• /
• 2015

There exist many competition systems to determine a winner. Many sports games use the 1-in-2 tournament or its modified version to determine a winner. In this paper, we propose a competition system that can be used when there are many candidates and many random referees to evaluate the candidates. These competitions can be found in the cyber space where many users score many competing apps. We study fairness of our proposed competing system called a multi-stage random tournament in terms of equal probabilities. We also formulate the influence factor of a specific referee under some specific conditions.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
• /
• v.38 no.5
• /
• pp.576-582
• /
• 2001

The Multi-Band Excitation(MBE) speech coder uses a different approach for the representation of the excitation signal. It replaces the frame-based single voiced/unvoiced classification of a classical speech coder with a set of such decision over harmonic intervals in the frequency domain. This enables each speech segment to be a mixture of voiced and unvoiced, and improves the synthetic speech quality by reducing decision errors that might occur on the frame-based single voiced and unvoiced decision process when input speech is degraded with noise. The IMBE-LP, improved version of MBE with linear prediction, represents the spectral information of MBE model with linear prediction coefficients to obtain low bit rate of 2.4 kbps. In this Paper, we proposed a variable rate IMBE-LP vocoder that has lower bit rate than IMBE-LP without degrading the synthetic speech quality. To determine the LP order, it uses the spectral band information of the MBE model that has something to do with he input speech's characteristics. Experimental results are riven with our findings and discussions.

• Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases
• /
• v.58 no.3
• /
• pp.213-229
• /
• 2005

The first and the longest criminal indictment case of Korean medico-legal battle, so called BORAMAE Hospital Incident, was finally on its end by Korean Supreme Court's decision on June 24, 2004, after 7 years long legal dispute via Seoul District Court and Seoul Superior Appeal Court's decision. Boramae Hospital case was the first Korean legal case of Withdrawing Life-sustaining treatment of mechanical respirator on 58 years old Extradural Hematoma victim who was on Respirator under Coma after multi-organ failure postoperatively(APACHE II score: 34-39). Two physicians who have involved patient's care and had helped to make discharge the Near-death patient to home after repeated demand of patient's wife, due to economic reason, were sentenced as homicidal crime. This review article will discuss the following items with the review of US cases, Quinlan(1976), Nancy Cruzan(1990), Barber (1983), Helen Wanglie(1990), Baby K (1994) and Baby L cases, along with Official Statement of ATS and other Academic dignitaries of US and World.: [1] Details of Boramae Hospital incident, medical facts description and legal language of homicidal crime sentence. [2] The medical dispute about the legal misinterpretation of patient's clinical status, regarding the severity of the victim with multi-organs failure on Respirator under coma with least chance of recovery, less than 10% probability. [3] Case study of US, of similar situation. [4] Introduction of ATS official Statement on Withdrawing/ Withholding Life sustaining treatment. [5] Patient Autonomy as basic principle. [6] The procedural formality in Medical practise for keeping the legitimacy. [7] The definition of Medical Futility and its dispute. [8] Dying in Dignity and PAS(Physician Assisted Suicide)/and/or Euthanasia [9] The Korean version of "Dying in Dignity", based on the Supreme Court's decision of Boramae Hospital incident (2004.6.24.) [10] Summary and Author's Note for future prospects.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
• /
• v.23 no.5
• /
• pp.475-482
• /
• 2010

In this paper, an efficient two-level parallel domain decomposition algorithm is suggested to solve large-DOF structural problems. Each subdomain is composed of the coarse problem and local problem. In the coarse problem, displacements at coarse nodes are computed by the iterative method that does not need to assemble a stiffness matrix for the whole coarse problem. Then displacements at local nodes are computed by Multi-Frontal Sparse Solver. A parallel version of PCG(Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient Method) is developed to solve the coarse problem iteratively, which minimizes the data communication amount between processors to increase the possible problem DOF size while maintaining the computational efficiency. The test results show that the suggested algorithm provides scalability on computing performance and an efficient approach to solve large-DOF structural problems.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
• /
• v.10 no.12
• /
• pp.3638-3644
• /
• 2009

A CMOS multi-channel low-voltage current mode filter circuit is designed. The designed current-mode filter is based on linear cascode current-mode integrator that is newly proposed in this paper. When it is compared with that of the typical current-mirror type current-mode integrator, the proposed linear cascode current-mode integrator achieves high current gain and unity gain frequency. The designed filter is composed with 5th Chebyshev function and converted to active version by signal flow graph method. We verified that the designed filter can be applied to three-channel basedband, bluetooth, DECT and WCDMA with 0.51MHz~7.03MHz frequency tuning range by Hspice simulation using 1.8V-$0.18{\mu}m$ CMOS technology.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
• /
• v.19 no.2
• /
• pp.302-310
• /
• 2018

This study was conducted to develop a unified structural model that defines relationships among factors that affect Multi Cultural Acceptance (MCA) for adolescents. This study was performed using the dataset from the 2016 Korean Children and Youth Panel Survey (KCPS). We analyzed the survey result from the dataset at the 0.05 significance level using the SPSS and AMOS version 22 programs. Specifically, we investigated several demographic characteristics of the survey participants by a descriptive analysis method that adopted the maximum likelihood estimate method to verify the fitness of the hypothetical model and the hypotheses therein. In addition, we applied the ${\chi}^2$-test, GFI, AGFI, CFI, IFI, and RMSEA to show the fitness level of our structural model. The results showed that our proposed structural model demonstrated a fine fitness level. We found that key factors that affect MCA for adolescents were ego-resilience, peer relationships, and sense of community. Overall, the results of our study indicate that combinational intervention is needed to help adolescents lift their ego-resilience, as well as to develop peer relationships and a sense of community.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
• /
• v.13 no.4
• /
• pp.303-317
• /
• 2013

Two novel clocking strategies for a high-speed multi-channel serializer-deserializer (SERDES) are proposed in this paper. Both of the clocking strategies are based on groups, which facilitate flexibility and expansibility of the SERDES. One clocking strategy is applicable to moderate parallel I/O cases, such as high density, short distance, consistent media, high temperature variation, which is used for the serializer array. Each group within the strategy consists of a full-rate phase-locked loop (PLL), a full-rate delay-locked loop (DLL), and two fixed phase alignment (FPA) techniques. The other is applicable to more awful I/O cases such as higher speed, longer distance, inconsistent media, serious crosstalk, which is used for the deserializer array. Each group within the strategy is composed of a PLL and two DLLs. Moreover, a half-rate version is chosen to realize the desired function of 1:2 deserializer. Based on the proposed clocking strategies, two representative ICs for each group of SERDES are designed and fabricated in a standard $0.18{\mu}m$ CMOS technology. Measurement results indicate that the two SERDES ICs can work properly accompanied with their corresponding clocking strategies.