• Sleep Medicine and Psychophysiology
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.102-108
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• 2000

Objectives: Parkinson's disease (PD) patients may experience fluent mobility upon awakening from a night's sleep, which is called sleep benefit (SB). Although SB is a phenomenon closely associated with sleep, sleep features of PD are not well characterized. The objectives of this study were, first, to investigate if there are any clinical characteristic features between patients with SB and without SB (NSB), and second, to examine if SB patients are associated with any specific sleep variables compared with NSB patients. Methods: Thirty-three PD patients (14 men and 19 women) participated in this study. All subjects were interviewed to examine whether or not they had SB and overnight polysomnography was performed at the sleep center. Various clinical variables were collected through medical record review. Results: The 331 PD patients were divided into 16 SB group (48.5%) and 17 NSB group (51.5%). SB patients were younger (p<0.02), had higher sleep efficiency (p<0.05), and showed shortened sleep latency (p<0.02) as compared with NSB patients. However, no difference was found between SB and NSB with respect to gender, duration or stage of PD, antiparkinsonian medications prescribed, and predominant motor symptoms. SB did not clearly relate to a specific sleep stage and other sleep variables except sleep efficiency and sleep latency. Although primary snoring was more prevalent in SB patients (p<0.05), other sleep disorders were seen with equal frequency in SB and NSB groups. Conclusion: Our results suggest that good sleep efficiency, shortened sleep latency, and age may have an effect on morning motor function (i.e., SB) in Parkinson's disease.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.1745-1749
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• 2014

Background: Platycodin D (PD), a triterpenoid saponin isolated from the Chinese medicinal herb Platycodonis radix, possesses anti-cancer effects in several cancer cell lines. The aim of this study was to evaluate its anticancer activities in hepatocellular carcinoma cells. Materials and Methods: MTT and colony formation assays were performed to evaluate cell proliferation, along with flow cytometry and Western blotting for apoptosis. Cell adhesion was tested by observing cellular morphology under a microscope, while the transwell assay was employed to investigate the cell migration and invasion. Results: PD concentration-dependently inhibited cell proliferation in both HepG2 and Hep3B cells, and significantly suppressed colony formation and induced apoptosis in HepG2 cells. The protein levels of cleaved poly ADP-ribose polymerase (PARP) and Bax were up-regulated while that of survivin was down-regulated after treatment with PD. Moreover, PD not only obviously suppressed the adhesion of HepG2 cells to Matrigel, but also remarkably depressed their migration and invasion induced by 12-O-tetradecanoylphorbol 13-acetate (TPA). Conclusions: PD presents anti-cancer potential in hepatocellular carcinoma cells via inducing apoptosis, and inhibiting cell adhesion, migration and invasion, indicating promising features as a lead compound for anti-cancer agent development.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.36 no.4
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• pp.103-108
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• 2015

Discrimination of Parkinson's disease (PD) from Essential tremor (ET) is often misdiagnosed in clinical practice. Since tremor is time-varying signal, and dominant and harmonic frequencies are shown in tremor only with moderate or severe symptom, there are some limitations to use frequency related features. Moreover, patients with PD or ET can suffer from both resting tremor and postural tremor. In this study, 28 patients with PD and 17 patients with ET were enrolled. Tremor was measured with accelerations on the more affected hand during resting and postural conditions. The ratio of root mean square (RMS) of resting tremor to RMS of postural tremor, the mean coefficients of autocorrelation function (ACF), and the mean of differences of two adjacent coefficients of ACF at resting and postural were calculated and compared between PD and ET. The performance showed 98% accuracy with support vector machine and leave-one-out cross validation. In addition, the method accurately differentiated the patients with tremor-dominant PD from patients with ET, with 100% accuracy. Therefore, the developed algorithm can assist clinicians in diagnosing and categorizing patients with tremor, especially, patients with mild symptom or the early stage of a disease, for proper treatment.

• Journal of the Korean Crystal Growth and Crystal Technology
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• v.16 no.6
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• pp.235-239
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• 2006

ZnO-doped near-stoichiometric $LiNbO_3$ single crystals of $0.8{\sim}1.0mm$ diameter and $30{\sim}35mm$ length were grown by the micro-pulling down (U-PD) method. The structure of the grown crystals was confirmed by powder x-ray diffraction (XRD) patterns. Electron probe micro analysis (EPMA) showed that Zn ions were homogeneously incorporated In grown crystals. The threshold in ZnO doping level was confirmed that an abrupt change in the features of $OH^-$ absorption band as doping level reaching about 2 mol%.

• Clinical and Experimental Pediatrics
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• v.62 no.6
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• pp.224-234
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• 2019

Purpose: Pompe disease (PD) is an autosomal recessive disorder caused by a deficiency of acid alpha-glucosidase resulting from pathogenic GAA variants. This study describes the clinical features, genotypes, changes before and after enzyme replacement therapy (ERT), and long-term outcomes in patients with infantile-onset PD (IOPD) and late-onset PD (LOPD) at a tertiary medical center. Methods: The medical records of 5 Korean patients (2 male, 3 female patients) diagnosed with PD between 2002 and 2013 at Samsung Medical Center in Seoul, Republic of Korea were retrospectively reviewed for data, including clinical and genetic characteristics at diagnosis and clinical course after ERT. Results: Common initial symptoms included hypotonia, cyanosis, and tachycardia in patients with IOPD and limb girdle weakness in patients with LOPD. Electrocardiography at diagnosis revealed hypertrophic cardiomyopathy in all patients with IOPD who showed a stable disease course during a median follow-up period of 10 years. Patients with LOPD showed improved hepatomegaly and liver transaminase level after ERT. Conclusion: As ERT is effective for treatment of PD, early identification of this disease is very important. Thus, patients with IOPD should be considered candidates for clinical trials of new drugs in the future.

• Annals of Clinical Neurophysiology
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.9-15
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• 2009

Background: To investigate the differences of locomotor dynamics between Parkinson's disease (PD) patients with tremor dominant symptom and patients with postural instability dominant symptom. Methods: 66 subjects with PD were classified into two subgroups, tremor-dominant group and postural instability and gait disorder group by Unified Parkinson's disease rating scale (UPDRS). The spatial, temporal and electrodynamic gait parameters were recorded automatically using computerized 3-D motion analysis system with electrogoniometer. Results: There was no significant difference in cadence, pelvic tilt range, hip flexion range, knee flexion range and ankle dorsiflexion range. Postural instability and gait disorder group showed decreased gait velocity, short stride length, decreased range of motion in pelvic obliquity, pelvic rotation and ankle plantar flexion. Conclusions: There was meaningful difference in locomotor dynamics between Parkinson's disease(PD) patients with tremor dominant symptom and patients with postural instability dominant symptom.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2013.02a
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• pp.133-133
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• 2013

For both oxygen reduction (ORR) and hydrogen oxidation reactions (HOR) of proton electrolyte membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs), alloying Pt with another transition metal usually results in a higher activity relative to pure Pt, mainly due to electronic modification of Pt and bifunctional behaviour of alloy surface for ORR and HOR, respectively. However, activity and stability are closely related to the preparation of alloy nanoparticles. Preparation conditions of alloy nanoparticles have strong influence on surface composition, oxidation state, nanoparticle size, shape, and contamination, which result from a large difference in redox priority of metal precursors, intrinsic properties of metals, increasedreactivity of nanocrystallites, and interactions with constituents for the synthesis such as solvent, stabilizer, and reducing agent, etc. Carbon-supported Pt-Ni alloy nanoparticles were prepared by the borohydride reduction method in anhydrous solvent. Pt-Ru alloy nanoparticles supported on carbon black were also prepared by the similar synthetic method to that of Pt-Ni. Since electrocatalytic reactions are strongly dependent on the surface structure of metal catalysts, the atom-leveled design of the surface structure plays a significant role in a high catalytic activity and the utilization of electrocatalysts. Therefore, surface-modified electrocatalysts have attracted much attention due to their unique structure and new electronic and electrocatalytic properties. The carbon-supported Au and Pd nanoparticles were adapted as the substrate and the successive reduction process was used for depositing Pt and PtM (M=Ru, Pd, and Rh) bimetallic elements on the surface of Au and Pd nanoparticles. Distinct features of the overlayers for electrocatalytic activities including methanol oxidation, formic acid oxidation, and oxygen reduction were investigated.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.55-62
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• 2015

It is widely accepted that Parkinson's disease(PD) is the most common cause of hypokinetic dysarthria, and its characteristics of 'short rushes of speech' have become more evident along with the severity of motor disorders. Speech alternate motion rates (AMRs) are particularly useful for observing not only rate abnormalities but also deviant speech. However, relatively little is known about the characteristics of 'short rushes of speech' in terms of AMRs of PD except for the perceptual characteristics. The purpose of this study was to examine which acoustic features of 'short rushes of speech' in terms of AMRs are a robust indicator of Parkinsonian speech. Numbers of syllabic repetitions (/pə/, /tə/, /kə/) in AMR tasks were analyzed through acoustic methods observing a spectrogram of the Computerized Speech Lab in 9 patients with PD. Acoustically, we found three characteristics of 'short rushes of speech': 1) Vocalized consonants without closure duration(VC) 76.3%; 2) No consonant segmentation(NC) 18.6%; 3) No vowel formant frequency(NV) 5.1%. Based on these results, 'short rushes of speech' may affect the failure to reach and maintain the phonatory targets. In order to best achieve the therapeutic goals, and to make the treatment most efficacious, it is important to incorporate training methods which are based on both phonation and articulation.

• Journal of Korea Society of Industrial Information Systems
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• v.14 no.5
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• pp.43-51
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• 2009

In this paper, we propose an efficient method of face retrieval by using PCA(principal component analysis) based features. The coarse-to-fine strategy is adopted to sort the retrieval results in the lower dimensional eigenface space and to rearrange candidates at high ranks in higher dimensional eigenface space. To evaluate similarity between a query face image and class reference image, we utilize the PD (projection distance), MQDF(modified quadratic distance function) and MED(minimum Euclidean distance). The experimental results show that the proposed method which rearrange the retrieval results incrementally by using projection distance is efficient for face image retrieval.

• Journal of Engineering Education Research
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.3-10
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• 2010

Human resources specialized in product development (PD) being essential in industry to enhance their competitiveness in the market with differentiated products, the PD curricula of domestic universities are in need of restructuring to better provide a comprehensive and diverse spectrum of knowledge as well as practical experiences for PD. We compared the PD curricula of selected domestic and foreign universities and identified advanced features of PD curricula. The major portion of the information used in our benchmarking of the seven, three domestic and four foreign, universities is obtained through their official websites. At domestic universities, the PD curricula comes in different sizes and is administered at the departmental level. On the other hand, each foreign university has her own unique form of PD curricula which is formulated on the firm basis of multidisciplinary collaboration among schools of Engineering, Management, and Arts with diversified program options ranging from giving course credits to offering various certificates and degrees. The industrial sponsorship in the form of financial support and mentorship at foreign universities is much more noticeable than at domestic universities. The survey results of the present study can be effectively utilized to develop an effective PD curriculum.