• The Korean Society of Law and Medicine
• /
• v.18 no.2
• /
• pp.105-138
• /
• 2017

This is case comments of several representative legal cases regarding self- determination right of patient. In a case in which an intoxicated patient attempted suicide refusing treatment, the Supreme Court ruled that the medical team's respect for the patient's decision was an act of malpractice, and that in particular medical situations (medical emergencies) the physician's duty to preserve life supersedes the patient's rights to autonomy. Afterwards, at the request of the patient's family, and considering the patient's condition (irrecoverable death stage, etc.) consistent with a persistent vegetative state, the Supreme Court deduced the patient's intention and decide to withdraw life-sustaining treatment. More recently, regarding patients who refuse blood transfusions or other necessary treatment due to religious beliefs, the Supreme Court established a standard of judgment that can be seen as conferring equal value to the physician's duty to respect patient autonomy and to preserve life. An empirical study of legal precedent with regard to cases in which the physician's duty to preserve life conflicts with the patient's autonomy, grounded in respect for human dignity, can reveal how the Court's perspective has reflected the role of the patient as a decision-making subject and ways of respecting autonomy in Korean society, and how the Court's stance has changed alongside changing societal beliefs. The Court has shifted from judging the right to life as the foremost value and prioritizing this over the patient's autonomy, to beginning to at least consider the patient's formally stated or deducible wishes when withholding or withdrawing treatment, and to considering exercises of self determination right based on religious belief or certain other justifications with informed refusal. This will have a substantial impact on medical community going forward, and provide implicit and explicit guidance for physicians who are practicing medicine within this environment.

• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.36 no.1
• /
• pp.41-49
• /
• 2022

With the advancement of intelligent vehicles and unmanned systems, there is a growing interest in underwater surveys using autonomous marine vehicles (AMVs). This study presents an automated planning strategy for a long-term survey mission using a fleet of AMVs consisting of autonomous surface vehicles and autonomous underwater vehicles. Due to the complex nature of the mission, the actions of the vehicle must be of high-level abstraction, which means that the actions indicate not only motion of the vehicle but also symbols and semantics, such as those corresponding to deploy, charge, and survey. For automated planning, the planning domain definition language (PDDL) was employed to construct a mission planner for realizing a powerful and flexible planning system. Despite being able to handle abstract actions, such high-level planners have difficulty in efficiently optimizing numerical objectives such as obtaining the shortest route given multiple destinations. To alleviate this issue, a widely known technique in operations research was additionally employed, which limited the solution space so that the high-level planner could devise efficient plans. For a comprehensive evaluation of the proposed method, various PDDL-based planners with different parameter settings were implemented, and their performances were compared through simulation. The simulation result shows that the proposed method outperformed the baseline solutions by yielding plans that completed the missions more quickly, thereby demonstrating the efficacy of the proposed methodology.