• Journal of Korean Neurosurgical Society
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• v.52 no.5
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• pp.466-471
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• 2012

Objective : The aim of this study was to devise an objective clustering method for magnetoencephalography (MEG) interictal spike sources, and to identify the prognostic value of the new clustering method in adult epilepsy patients with cortical dysplasia (CD). Methods : We retrospectively analyzed 25 adult patients with histologically proven CD, who underwent MEG examination and surgical resection for intractable epilepsy. The mean postoperative follow-up period was 3.1 years. A hierarchical clustering method was adopted for MEG interictal spike source clustering. Clustered sources were then tested for their prognostic value toward surgical outcome. Results : Postoperative seizure outcome was Engel class I in 6 (24%), class II in 3 (12%), class III in 12 (48%), and class IV in 4 (16%) patients. With respect to MEG spike clustering, 12 of 25 (48%) patients showed 1 cluster, 2 (8%) showed 2 or more clusters within the same lobe, 10 (40%) showed 2 or more clusters in a different lobe, and 1 (4%) patient had only scattered spikes with no clustering. Patients who showed focal clustering achieved better surgical outcome than distributed cases (p=0.017). Conclusion : This is the first study that introduces an objective method to classify the distribution of MEG interictal spike sources. By using a hierarchical clustering method, we found that the presence of focal clustered spikes predicts a better postoperative outcome in epilepsy patients with CD.

• International Journal of Advanced Culture Technology
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.167-176
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• 2020

Recommendation Systems is the top requirements for many people and researchers for the need required by them with the proper suggestion with their personal indeed, sorting and suggesting doctor to the patient. Most of the rating prediction in recommendation systems are based on patient's feedback with their information regarding their treatment. Patient's preferences will be based on the historical behaviour of similar patients. The similarity between the patients is generally measured by the patient's feedback with the information about the doctor with the treatment methods with their success rate. This paper presents a new method of predicting Top Ranked Doctor's in recommendation systems. The proposed Recommendation system starts by identifying the similar doctor based on the patients' health requirements and cluster them using K-Means Efficient Clustering. Our proposed K-Means Clustering with Content Based Doctor Recommendation for Cancer (KMC-CBD) helps users to find an optimal solution. The core component of KMC-CBD Recommended system suggests patients with top recommended doctors similar to the other patients who already treated with that doctor and supports the choice of the doctor and the hospital for the patient requirements and their health condition. The recommendation System first computes K-Means Clustering is an unsupervised learning among Doctors according to their profile and list the Doctors according to their Medical profile. Then the Content based doctor recommendation System generates a Top rated list of doctors for the given patient profile by exploiting health data shared by the crowd internet community. Patients can find the most similar patients, so that they can analyze how they are treated for the similar diseases, and they can send and receive suggestions to solve their health issues. In order to the improve Recommendation system efficiency, the patient can express their health information by a natural-language sentence. The Recommendation system analyze and identifies the most relevant medical area for that specific case and uses this information for the recommendation task. Provided by users as well as the recommended system to suggest the right doctors for a specific health problem. Our proposed system is implemented in Python with necessary functions and dataset.

• Smart Media Journal
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.126-133
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• 2020

The treatment policy and prognosis are determined based on the final stage of lung cancer patients. The final stage of lung cancer patients is determined based on the T, N, and M stage classification table provided by the American Cancer Society (AJCC). However, the final stage of AJCC has limitations in its use for various fields such as patient treatment, prognosis and survival days prediction. In this paper, clustering algorithm which is one of non-supervised learning algorithms was assessed in order to check whether using only T, N, M stages with a data science method is effective for classifying the group of patients in the aspect of survival days. The final stage groups and T, N, M stage clustering groups of lung cancer patients were compared by using the cox proportional hazard model. It is confirmed that the accuracy of prediction of survival days with only T, N, M stages becomes higher than the accuracy with the final stages of patients. Especially, the accuracy of prediction of survival days with clustering of T, N, M stages improves when more or less clusters are analyzed than the seven clusters which is same to the number of final stage of AJCC.

• Journal of information and communication convergence engineering
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.258-263
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• 2018

Color Doppler sonography is a useful tool for examining blood flow and related indices. However, it should be done by well-trained operator, that is, operator subjectivity exists. In this paper, we propose an automatic blood flow area extraction method from brachial artery that would be an essential building block of computer aided color Doppler analyzer. Specifically, our concern is to examine hypertension suspicious (prehypertension) patients who might develop their symptoms to established hypertension in the future. The proposed method uses fuzzy C-means clustering as quantization engine with careful seeding of the number of clusters from histogram analysis. The experiment verifies that the proposed method is feasible in that the successful extraction rates are 96% (successful in 48 out of 50 test cases) and demonstrated better performance than K-means based method in specificity and sensitivity analysis but the proposed method should be further refined as the retrospective analysis pointed out.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.15 no.14
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• pp.5721-5727
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• 2014

Objectives: To evaluate the performance of clustering methods used in the prognostic assessment of categorical clinical data for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients in China, and establish a predictable prognostic nomogram for clinical decisions. Materials and Methods: A total of 332 newly diagnosed HCC patients treated with hepatic resection during 2006-2009 were enrolled. Patients were regularly followed up at outpatient clinics. Clustering methods including the Average linkage, k-modes, fuzzy k-modes, PAM, CLARA, protocluster, and ROCK were compared by Monte Carlo simulation, and the optimal method was applied to investigate the clustering pattern of the indices including platelet count, platelet/lymphocyte ratio (PLR) and serum aspartate aminotransferase activity/platelet count ratio index (APRI). Then the clustering variable, age group, tumor size, number of tumor and vascular invasion were studied in a multivariable Cox regression model. A prognostic nomogram was constructed for clinical decisions. Results: The ROCK was best in both the overlapping and non-overlapping cases performed to assess the prognostic value of platelet-based indices. Patients with categorical platelet-based indices significantly split across two clusters, and those with high values, had a high risk of HCC recurrence (hazard ratio [HR] 1.42, 95% CI 1.09-1.86; p<0.01). Tumor size, number of tumor and blood vessel invasion were also associated with high risk of HCC recurrence (all p< 0.01). The nomogram well predicted HCC patient survival at 3 and 5 years. Conclusions: A cluster of platelet-based indices combined with other clinical covariates could be used for prognosis evaluation in HCC.

• Journal of Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers
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• v.42 no.2
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• pp.129-137
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• 2016

A colonoscopy is important because it detects the presence of polyps in the colon that can lead to colon cancer. How often one needs to repeat a colonoscopy may depend on various factors. The main purpose of this study is to determine personalized surveillance interval of colonoscopy based on characteristics of patients including their clinical information. The clustering analysis using a partitioning around medoids algorithm was conducted on 625 patients who had a medical examination at Korea University Anam Hospital and found several subgroups of patients. For each cluster, we then performed survival analysis that provides the probability of having polyps according to the number of days until next visit. The results of survival analysis indicated that different survival distributions exist among different patients' groups. We believe that the procedure proposed in this study can provide the patients with personalized medical information about how often they need to repeat a colonoscopy.

• Korean Journal of Biological Psychiatry
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.38-43
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• 2018

Objectives Dopamine dysregulation has been regarded as one of the core pathologies in patients with schizophrenia. Since dopamine synthesis capacity has found to be inconsistent in patients with schizophrenia, current classification of patients based on clinical symptoms cannot reflect the neurochemical heterogeneity of the disease. Here we performed new subtyping of patients with first-episode psychosis (FEP) through biotype-based cluster analysis. We specifically suggested basal ganglia structural changes as a biotype, which deeply involves in the dopaminergic circuit. Methods Forty FEP and 40 demographically matched healthy participants underwent 3T T1 MRI. Whole brain parcellation was conducted, and volumes of total 6 regions of basal ganglia have been extracted as features for cluster analysis. We used K-means clustering, and external validation was conducted with Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS). Results K-means clustering divided 40 FEP subjects into 2 clusters. Cluster 1 (n = 25) showed substantial volume decrease in 4 regions of basal ganglia compared to Cluster 2 (n = 15). Cluster 1 showed higher positive scales of PANSS compared with Cluster 2 (F = 2.333, p = 0.025). Compared to healthy controls, Cluster 1 showed smaller volumes in 4 regions, whereas Cluster 2 showed larger volumes in 3 regions. Conclusions Two subgroups have been found by cluster analysis, which showed a distinct difference in volume patterns of basal ganglia structures and positive symptom severity. The result possibly reflects the neurobiological heterogeneity of schizophrenia. Thus, the current study supports the importance of paradigm shift toward biotype-based diagnosis, instead of phenotype, for future precision psychiatry.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.823-827
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• 2016

Determination of the colorectal cancer stage is possible only after surgery based on pathology results. However, sometimes this may prove impossible. The aim of the present study was to determine colorectal cancer stage using three clustering methods based on preoperative clinical findings. All patients referred to the Colorectal Research Center of Shiraz University of Medical Sciences for colorectal cancer surgery during 2006 to 2014 were enrolled in the study. Accordingly, 117 cases participated. Three clustering algorithms were utilized including k-means, hierarchical and fuzzy c-means clustering methods. External validity measures such as sensitivity, specificity and accuracy were used for evaluation of the methods. The results revealed maximum accuracy and sensitivity values for the hierarchical and a maximum specificity value for the fuzzy c-means clustering methods. Furthermore, according to the internal validity measures for the present data set, the optimal number of clusters was two (silhouette coefficient) and the fuzzy c-means algorithm was more appropriate than the k-means clustering approach by increasing the number of clusters.

• Journal of the Korea Management Engineers Society
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.1-18
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• 2018

Emergency response has been considered as an important task in practice, because it is directly associated with the survival of patients. However, it is very difficult to increase the number of fire stations due to the budget and efficiency problem. Under this circumstances, it is critical to consider the suitability of current arrangement for 911 fire station. This is especially true in Gyeonggi-Do where the characteristics of each sub-area are different. In response, this study aims to identify types of areas that are vulnerable for emergency situations, and try to find relevant solutions for each type. For this purpose, we collected 151,463 data for emergency declaration data which exceeds 10 minutes for its response. Total 19 clustering variables which are used as input variables are selected, considering the characteristics of each area. As a result of clustering analysis, three clusters are identified and analyzed. Finally, areas whose emergence response time is in top 10% are selected and analyzed. This paper is expected to find current issues and problems of emergency response for each area, and help to understand and solve the problem for the local government.

• Journal of Korean Neurosurgical Society
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• v.66 no.1
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• pp.44-52
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• 2023

Objective : This study aimed to investigate the efficacy of transverse process (TP) hook system at the upper instrumented vertebra (UIV) for preventing screw pullout in adult spinal deformity surgery using the pedicle Hounsfield unit (HU) stratification based on K-means clustering. Methods : We retrospectively reviewed 74 patients who underwent deformity correction surgery between 2011 and 2020 and were followed up for >12 months. Pre- and post-operative data were used to determine the incidence of screw pullout, UIV TP hook implementation, vertebral body HU, pedicle HU, and patient outcomes. Data was then statistically analyzed for assessment of efficacy and risk prediction using stratified HU at UIV level alongside the effect of the TP hook system. Results : The screw pullout rate was 36.4% (27/74). Perioperative radiographic parameters were not significantly different between the pullout and non-pullout groups. The vertebral body HU and pedicle HU were significantly lower in the pullout group. K-means clustering stratified the vertebral body HU ≥205.3, <137.2, and pedicle HU ≥243.43, <156.03. The pullout rate significantly decreases in patients receiving the hook system when the pedicle HU was from ≥156.03 to < 243.43 (p<0.05), but the difference was not statistically significant in the vertebra HU stratified groups and when pedicle HU was ≥243.43 or <156.03. The postoperative clinical outcomes improved significantly with the implementation of the hook system. Conclusion : The UIV hook provides better clinical outcomes and can be considered a preventative strategy for screw-pullout in the certain pedicle HU range.