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Development of Work-related Musculoskeletal Disorder Questionnaire Using Receiver Operating Characteristic Analysis (Receiver Operating Characteristic 분석법을 이용한 업무관련성 근골격계질환 설문지 개발)

  • Kwon, Ho-Jang;Ju, Yeong-Su;Cho, Soo-Hun;Kang, Dae-Hee;Sung, Joo-Hon;Choi, Seong-Woo;Choi, Jae-Wook;Kim, Jae-Young;Kim, Don-Gyu;Kim, Jai-Yong
    • Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health
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    • v.32 no.3
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    • pp.361-373
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    • 1999
  • Objectives: Receive Operating Characteristic(ROC) curve with the area under the ROC curve(AUC) is one of the most popular indicator to evaluate the criterion validity of the measurement tool. This study was conducted to develop a standardized questionnaire to discriminate workers at high-risk of work-related musculoskeletal disorders using ROC analysis. Methods: The diagnostic results determined by rehabilitation medicine specialists in 370 persons(89 shipyard CAD workers, 113 telephone directory assistant operators, 79 women with occupation, and 89 housewives) were compared with participant's own replies to 'the questionnair on the worker's subjective physical symptoms'(Kwon, 1996). The AUC's from four models with different methods in item selection and weighting were compared with each other. These 4 models were applied to 225 persons, working in an assembly line of motor vehicle, for the purpose of AUC reliability test. Results: In a weighted model with 11 items, the AUC was 0.8155 in the primary study population, and 0.8026 in the secondary study population(p=0.3780). It was superior in the aspects of discriminability, reliability and convenience. A new questionnaire of musculoskeletal disorder could be constructed by this model. Conclusion: A more valid questionnaire with a small number of items and the quantitative weight scores useful for the relative comparisons are the main results of this study. While the absolute reference value applicable to the wide range of populations was not estimated, the basic intent of this study, developing a surveillance fool through quantitative validation of the measures, would serve for the systematic disease prevention activities.

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Biodegradation Characteristics of Monochlorophenols by Wood Rot Fungi (Monochlorophenol의 목질분해균에 의한 분해 특성)

  • Choi, In-Gyu;Lee, Jae-Won;Choi, Don-Ha
    • Korean Journal of Environmental Agriculture
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    • v.21 no.4
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    • pp.261-268
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    • 2002
  • Biodegradation of monochlorophenols by wood rot fungi such as Daldina concentrica, Trametes versicolor and Pleurotus ostreatus was evaluated by determining their resistance or toxic test and biodegradability. The metabolites of monochlorophenols were also analyzed. Among the three fungi, T. versicolor was the most resistant to 200 ppm of 2-, 3- and 4-chlorophenols, and did not show any inhibitory mycellium growth. But D. concentrica had a little inhibition effect at more than 100 ppm of 3- or 4-chlorophenol. Control cultures of P. ostreatus took even 14 days far the completion of mycellium growth, but the hyphal growth was improved when 2- or 3-chlorophenol were added to the culture. In biodegradation analysis, P. ostreatus showed the highest degradation of 2- or 3-chlorophenol, while T. versicolor was the most effective in 4-chlorophenol. D. concentrica and P. ostreatus slowly degraded 4-chlorophenol. However, T. versicolor had similar degradation capability in the three monochlorophenols, suggesting that the biode- gradation nude is dependent on the fungi as well as the type of monochlorophenol. Several metabolites such as 1,3,5-trihydroxyl benzene, 1-ethyl-1-hydroxyl pentane, 2-propenoicacid, methylmalonic acid and 2-methyl-4-keto-pentan-2-ol were found as products of primary oxidation of 2-, 3- and 4-chlorophenols by intact fungal cultures. fatty acids including tetradecanoic, heptadecanoic and octadecanoic acids were also detected The order of increase of mycellium weight during incubation were P. ostreatus > T. versicolor > D. concentrica. The pH in the culture was not constantly changed depending on incubation days, but the mycellium weight was slightly increased, indicating that the biodegradation of monochlorophenol might have low relationship with the mycellium growth Laccase activities of T. versicolor and P. ostreatus were continuously increased depending on the incubation days, suggesting that the ligninolytic enzyme activity play an important role in the biodegradation of monochlorophenol.

Application of LCA Methodology on Lettuce Cropping Systems in Protected Cultivation (시설재배 상추에 대한 전과정평가 (LCA) 방법론 적용)

  • Ryu, Jong-Hee;Kim, Kye-Hoon
    • Korean Journal of Soil Science and Fertilizer
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    • v.43 no.5
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    • pp.705-715
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    • 2010
  • The adoption of carbon foot print system is being activated mostly in the developed countries as one of the long-term response towards tightened up regulations and standards on carbon emission in the agricultural sector. The Korean Ministry of Environment excluded the primary agricultural products from the carbon foot print system due to lack of LCI (life cycle inventory) database in agriculture. Therefore, the research on and establishment of LCI database in the agriculture for adoption of carbon foot print system is urgent. Development of LCA (life cycle assessment) methodology for application of LCA to agricultural environment in Korea is also very important. Application of LCA methodology to agricultural environment in Korea is an early stage. Therefore, this study was carried out to find out the effect of lettuce cultivation on agricultural environment by establishing LCA methodology. Data collection of agricultural input and output for establishing LCI was carried out by collecting statistical data and documents on income from agro and livestock products prepared by RDA. LCA methodology for agriculture was reviewed by investigating LCA methodology and LCA applications of foreign countries. Results based on 1 kg of lettuce production showed that inputs including N, P, organic fertilizers, compound fertilizers and crop protectants were the main sources of major emission factor during lettuce cropping process. The amount of inputs considering the amount of active ingredients was required to estimate the actual quantity of the inputs used. Major emissions due to agricultural activities were $N_2O$ (emission to air) and ${NO_3}^-$/${PO_4}^-$ (emission to water) from fertilizers, organic compounds from pesticides and air pollutants from fossil fuel combustion in using agricultural machines. The softwares for LCIA (life cycle impact assessment) and LCA used in Korea are 'PASS' and 'TOTAL' which have been developed by the Ministry of Knowledge Economy and the Ministry of Environment. However, the models used for the softwares are the ones developed in foreign countries. In the future, development of models and optimization of factors for characterization, normalization and weighting suitable to Korean agricultural environment need to be done for more precise LCA analysis in the agricultural area.

An Effect of the Self-Regulation Program for Hypertensives -Synthesis & testing of Orem and Bandura's theory- (본태성 고혈압 환자의 자가간호증진을 위한 자기조절 프로그램 효과 -Orem이론과 Bandura이론의 합성과 검증-)

  • Park, Young-Im;Hong, Yeo-Shin
    • Research in Community and Public Health Nursing
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    • v.5 no.2
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    • pp.109-129
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    • 1994
  • Chronic health problems has become a major concern and challenge to the health care professionals today. Especially hypertension, one of the leading primary cause of death in Korea, is a typical chronic disease requiring adequate and continuous management. Though these hypertensives need to maintain desirable health practice by themselves for their life time, many previous studies indicated that most of the essential hypertensives have no specific symptoms and thus, reluctant to follow appropriate medical regimens causing the condition further aggravated and complicated. Self-care is an essential factor that keeps chronic patients in control of their health and wellness. Thus this study was conducted to identify the effect of the comprehensive self-regulation program as a nursing intervention on the promotion self-care performance and improvement in physical parameters of hypertensives. For this purpose, a one group quasi-experimental research with pre and post test design was used. The subjects of the study was consisted of thirty persons with mild or moderate essential hypertension from two companies in Cheong-ju city. The whole program was carried out from October, 1993 to February, 1994. The self-regulation program was consisted with group education on hypertension and self-care, self-regulation including the blood pressure self-monitoring and recording, recording of daily self-care activities, and encouraging and reinforcing self-efficacy through verbal persuation and enactive attainment. The subjects were asked to measure their own blood pressure by themselves twice per day and to record blood pressure and the daily self-care performance according to the instructions provided during the whole period of 9 weeks. The instruments used for data collection in this study were as follows : 1) Instruments used for measuring the knowledge about hypertension, multiple health locus of control, and perceived benifits and barriers were adapted from previous studies and modified by author to be fit for the subjects. 2) Self-efficacy scale and self-care performance record were developed by the author. 3) Physiological parameters included systolic / diastolic blood pressure, body weight, level of blood cholesterol, and 24hour ambulatory blood pressure. The post-experimental Cronbach's Alpha as the reliability test of scales were 0.703-0.897, an appropriate level of confidence. The effect of the program was analyzed by experimental stages ; the first week, the fifth week, and the ninth week since the experimental imput began. Data were analyzed by the SPSS PC+ program with paired t-test and t-test, repeated measure ANOVA, and pearson's correlation to de termine the effect of program. The results were as follows : 1) After the self-regulation program, scores on knowledge(t=-2.41, p=.011), perceived self-efficacy (F=5.60, p=.001), self-care performance(F=22.31, p=.0001) were significantly higher than those before the program. 2) After the program, both systolic and diastolic blood pressure were significantly lower than those before the program(F=10.89 -13.11, p=.0001). However in 24hour ambulatory blood pressure, systolic mean pressure was nearly significantly lower, but not in diastolic mean pressure. 3) After the program, the body weight was significant decresed(t=5.53, p=.0001), but the blood cholesterol level was not decreased significantly except in those cases with higher cholesterol level. 4) There were significant relationships between changes in self-care performance and diastolic pressure at 1st week (r=.3389, p=.033) and changes in self-care performance and systolic pressure at 9th week(r=.3651, p=.024). 5) There were significant relationship between perceived self-efficacy and self-care performance at 5th week(r=.5313, p=.001) and 9th week (r=.3026, p=.052). 6) After the program, internal health locus of control and perceived benefits did not show significant change, but perceived barriers was significantly lower than those before the program (t=3.57, p=.0001). From the above results, it can be concluded that 1) The self-regulation program is an effective nursing strategy to promote self-care performance of hypertensives and to lower the blood pressure. Thus this program can be recommended in the management of the hypertensives in workplaces and community settings. 2) The synthesis of Orem's self-care theory and Bandura's self-regulation & self-efficacy theory in this study was proved to enhance explanation and prediction of the change of self-care behavior. Thus the result of the study would contribute in development of the self-care theory and an expansion of practice-theory.

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The Effect of the IGF-I treated Gingival and Periodontal Ligament Fibroblast on Osteoblasts (IGF-I으로 처리한 치은 및 치주인대 섬유모세포가 골모세포에 미치는 영향)

  • Kim, Mi-Jeong;Yang, Won-Sik
    • The korean journal of orthodontics
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    • v.31 no.6 s.89
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    • pp.589-600
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    • 2001
  • Insulin-like growth factor I (IGF-I) has the local tissue regulating actions. In bone, IGF-I increases the replication of osteoblastic lineage, probably preosteoblasts, and enhances osteoblastic collagen synthesis and matrix composition rates. The purpose of this study was to investigate the local regulatory effect of IGF-I on periodontium totally, both in an autocrine and paracrine manner. To examine the effect of IGF-I directly on osteoblast (OB) of test rats, and indirectlv on OB via periodontal ligament fibroblast (PDLF), and the effect of gingival fibroblast (GF) on OB via cellular paracrine manner for the understanding of humoral action of adjacent tissue, GF and PDLF were obtained from male Sprague-Dawley rats of six to eight weeks of age. OB was obtained iron frontal and parietal calvarial bone of Sprague-Dawley 21day-old-fetus. After each tell was Incubated 24 hours, for collecting conditioned medium, different concentrations of IGF-I (1,10,100 ng/ml,1ml/well) was adding in the GF, PDLF cells, and the supernatant from these cultures was put into the primary OB culture with $1{\times}10^4$cell/ml/well. The experimental group was divided into six groups control OB, IGF-I treated OB, OB culture with conditioned medium from PDLF, OB culture with conditioned medium from IGF-I treated PDLF, OB culture with conditioned medium from GF, OB culture with conditioned medium from IGF-I treated GF. After final IGF-I treatment, OB was Incubated for 24 hours, and alkaline phosphatase activity assay, BMP expression, cell proliferation measurement using MTT assay, total protein measurement, Collagen synthesis assay using western blot, and examination of bone nodule synthesis were done. Alkaline phosphatase expressions were increased in the group of PDLF-IGF-I supernatant treatment. Direct IGF-I treatment with concentrations of 100ng/m1 showed increased viable tell number measured by MTT assay. And IGF-I treatment did not increase total protein amount. The entire experimental group showed BMP2, 4 expression in western blot, and there was no significant difference between control and experimental groups. These results suggested that supernatant from PDLF effects on increasing cellular activities of OB regardless of IGF-I, and at high concentration, IGF-I increases OB tell proliferation.

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Control of Human Clonorchiasis at Gokseong-gun and Sunchang-gun near the Sumjin River in Korea (섬진강 유역 곡성군, 순창군 지역 주민의 간흡충증 관리)

  • Kim, Suk-Il;Yun, Woo-Sang
    • Journal of agricultural medicine and community health
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    • v.29 no.1
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    • pp.163-175
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    • 2004
  • Objectives: This study was carried out to decrease the prevalence of human clonorchiasis and to evaluate the control effect in two Clonorchis sinensis-endemic area of Gokseong-gun and Sunchang-gun adjacent to the Sumjin River in Korea. Methods: The formalin-ether concentration method for stool egg examination or ELISA was applied for the diagnosis of clonorchiasis. As a primary survey, according to the non-probability sampling, a total of 1,2.13 inhabitants at Gokseong-gun were screened through the stool examination, and 1,004 inhabitants at Sunchang-gun were screened through the ELISA. The humans infected with C. sinensis were medicated with praziquantel and educated for the prevention of reinfection with the fluke. After 9 months, as a secondary survey, each prevalence of 616 inhabitants at Gokseong-gun and 2.637 inhabitants at Sunchang-gun was followed-up for the decrease of human clonorchiasis. Results: The prevalence before the mass control was 39.0% at Gokseong-gun and 30.1% at Sunchang-gun in average from 61.5% to 8.9% according to the villages (Myeon) of the survey. In the riverside villages to the Sumjin River the prevalences were higher than other villages located far from the river. The prevalence after the control was decreased to the level of 22.4% at Gokseong-gun(P<0.0001) and 16,3% at Sunchang-gun (P<0.0001). Conclusions: These results suggested that human clonorchiasis was still highly endemic in riverside area of the Sumjin River and could be decreased through the control activities such as diagnosis, medication and education. It was highly recommended that a integrated control such as those of the present study must be adopted in other localities along the Sumjin River for the eradication of human clonorchiasis.

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Estimation of POC Export Fluxes Using 234Th/238U Disequilibria in the Amundsen Sea, Antarctica; Preliminary Result (남극 아문젠해에서 234Th/238U 비평형법을 사용한 유광대에서 심층으로의 입자상 유기탄소 침강플럭스 추정; 예비결과)

  • Kim, Mi Seon;Choi, Man Sik;Lee, Sang Heon;Lee, Sang Hoon;Rhee, Tae Siek;Hahm, Doshik
    • The Sea:JOURNAL OF THE KOREAN SOCIETY OF OCEANOGRAPHY
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    • v.19 no.2
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    • pp.109-124
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    • 2014
  • In order to understand the carbon cycle in the Amundsen Sea of the Southern Ocean, the export fluxes of particulate organic carbon from the euphotic zone to deep water estimated using ${\psi}$/${\psi}$ disequilibrium method. Seawaters in 14 water columns were collected during February and March 2012, and analyzed for total and dissolved ${\psi}$, and particulate organic carbon. Total ${\psi}$ activities in the water column showed deficiency and excess relative to those of ${\psi}$ depending on the water depth. Deficiency of total ${\psi}$ in the euphotic zone showed mirror images both with chlorophyll-a and fluorescence, and was consistent with the loss of nitrate, which indicated the effect of biological activity. In addition, deficiency of total ${\psi}$ from deep water was associated with the increase of total dissolvable Fe/Mn concentration. Excess total ${\psi}$ activity presented below the euphotic zone might be related to particulate ${\psi}$ concentrated in this water depth. Mean export flux of ${\psi}$ estimated using the steady state model was $867{\pm}246dpmm^{-2}day^{-1}$. Mean export flux of particulate organic carbon, which were estimated by the product of total ${\psi}$ flux and ratio of POC/${\psi}$ ($7.08{\pm}4.27{\mu}molCdpm^{-1}$) in the sinking particles, was $5.9{\pm}3.9mmolCm^{-2}day^{-1}$. These fluxes were similar levels to those in the Weddell Sea during February and March 2008. Export ratios (ThE) relative to the primary production in the euphotic zone were in the range of 3-54% (av. 28%).

Understanding the Mismatch between ERP and Organizational Information Needs and Its Responses: A Study based on Organizational Memory Theory (조직의 정보 니즈와 ERP 기능과의 불일치 및 그 대응책에 대한 이해: 조직 메모리 이론을 바탕으로)

  • Jeong, Seung-Ryul;Bae, Uk-Ho
    • Asia pacific journal of information systems
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    • v.22 no.2
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    • pp.21-38
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    • 2012
  • Until recently, successful implementation of ERP systems has been a popular topic among ERP researchers, who have attempted to identify its various contributing factors. None of these efforts, however, explicitly recognize the need to identify disparities that can exist between organizational information requirements and ERP systems. Since ERP systems are in fact "packages" -that is, software programs developed by independent software vendors for sale to organizations that use them-they are designed to meet the general needs of numerous organizations, rather than the unique needs of a particular organization, as is the case with custom-developed software. By adopting standard packages, organizations can substantially reduce many of the potential implementation risks commonly associated with custom-developed software. However, it is also true that the nature of the package itself could be a risk factor as the features and functions of the ERP systems may not completely comply with a particular organization's informational requirements. In this study, based on the organizational memory mismatch perspective that was derived from organizational memory theory and cognitive dissonance theory, we define the nature of disparities, which we call "mismatches," and propose that the mismatch between organizational information requirements and ERP systems is one of the primary determinants in the successful implementation of ERP systems. Furthermore, we suggest that customization efforts as a coping strategy for mismatches can play a significant role in increasing the possibilities of success. In order to examine the contention we propose in this study, we employed a survey-based field study of ERP project team members, resulting in a total of 77 responses. The results of this study show that, as anticipated from the organizational memory mismatch perspective, the mismatch between organizational information requirements and ERP systems makes a significantly negative impact on the implementation success of ERP systems. This finding confirms our hypothesis that the more mismatch there is, the more difficult successful ERP implementation is, and thus requires more attention to be drawn to mismatch as a major failure source in ERP implementation. This study also found that as a coping strategy on mismatch, the effects of customization are significant. In other words, utilizing the appropriate customization method could lead to the implementation success of ERP systems. This is somewhat interesting because it runs counter to the argument of some literature and ERP vendors that minimized customization (or even the lack thereof) is required for successful ERP implementation. In many ERP projects, there is a tendency among ERP developers to adopt default ERP functions without any customization, adhering to the slogan of "the introduction of best practices." However, this study asserts that we cannot expect successful implementation if we don't attempt to customize ERP systems when mismatches exist. For a more detailed analysis, we identified three types of mismatches-Non-ERP, Non-Procedure, and Hybrid. Among these, only Non-ERP mismatches (a situation in which ERP systems cannot support the existing information needs that are currently fulfilled) were found to have a direct influence on the implementation of ERP systems. Neither Non-Procedure nor Hybrid mismatches were found to have significant impact in the ERP context. These findings provide meaningful insights since they could serve as the basis for discussing how the ERP implementation process should be defined and what activities should be included in the implementation process. They show that ERP developers may not want to include organizational (or business processes) changes in the implementation process, suggesting that doing so could lead to failed implementation. And in fact, this suggestion eventually turned out to be true when we found that the application of process customization led to higher possibilities of failure. From these discussions, we are convinced that Non-ERP is the only type of mismatch we need to focus on during the implementation process, implying that organizational changes must be made before, rather than during, the implementation process. Finally, this study found that among the various customization approaches, bolt-on development methods in particular seemed to have significantly positive effects. Interestingly again, this finding is not in the same line of thought as that of the vendors in the ERP industry. The vendors' recommendations are to apply as many best practices as possible, thereby resulting in the minimization of customization and utilization of bolt-on development methods. They particularly advise against changing the source code and rather recommend employing, when necessary, the method of programming additional software code using the computer language of the vendor. As previously stated, however, our study found active customization, especially bolt-on development methods, to have positive effects on ERP, and found source code changes in particular to have the most significant effects. Moreover, our study found programming additional software to be ineffective, suggesting there is much difference between ERP developers and vendors in viewpoints and strategies toward ERP customization. In summary, mismatches are inherent in the ERP implementation context and play an important role in determining its success. Considering the significance of mismatches, this study proposes a new model for successful ERP implementation, developed from the organizational memory mismatch perspective, and provides many insights by empirically confirming the model's usefulness.

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A Hybrid Forecasting Framework based on Case-based Reasoning and Artificial Neural Network (사례기반 추론기법과 인공신경망을 이용한 서비스 수요예측 프레임워크)

  • Hwang, Yousub
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.18 no.4
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    • pp.43-57
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    • 2012
  • To enhance the competitive advantage in a constantly changing business environment, an enterprise management must make the right decision in many business activities based on both internal and external information. Thus, providing accurate information plays a prominent role in management's decision making. Intuitively, historical data can provide a feasible estimate through the forecasting models. Therefore, if the service department can estimate the service quantity for the next period, the service department can then effectively control the inventory of service related resources such as human, parts, and other facilities. In addition, the production department can make load map for improving its product quality. Therefore, obtaining an accurate service forecast most likely appears to be critical to manufacturing companies. Numerous investigations addressing this problem have generally employed statistical methods, such as regression or autoregressive and moving average simulation. However, these methods are only efficient for data with are seasonal or cyclical. If the data are influenced by the special characteristics of product, they are not feasible. In our research, we propose a forecasting framework that predicts service demand of manufacturing organization by combining Case-based reasoning (CBR) and leveraging an unsupervised artificial neural network based clustering analysis (i.e., Self-Organizing Maps; SOM). We believe that this is one of the first attempts at applying unsupervised artificial neural network-based machine-learning techniques in the service forecasting domain. Our proposed approach has several appealing features : (1) We applied CBR and SOM in a new forecasting domain such as service demand forecasting. (2) We proposed our combined approach between CBR and SOM in order to overcome limitations of traditional statistical forecasting methods and We have developed a service forecasting tool based on the proposed approach using an unsupervised artificial neural network and Case-based reasoning. In this research, we conducted an empirical study on a real digital TV manufacturer (i.e., Company A). In addition, we have empirically evaluated the proposed approach and tool using real sales and service related data from digital TV manufacturer. In our empirical experiments, we intend to explore the performance of our proposed service forecasting framework when compared to the performances predicted by other two service forecasting methods; one is traditional CBR based forecasting model and the other is the existing service forecasting model used by Company A. We ran each service forecasting 144 times; each time, input data were randomly sampled for each service forecasting framework. To evaluate accuracy of forecasting results, we used Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) as primary performance measure in our experiments. We conducted one-way ANOVA test with the 144 measurements of MAPE for three different service forecasting approaches. For example, the F-ratio of MAPE for three different service forecasting approaches is 67.25 and the p-value is 0.000. This means that the difference between the MAPE of the three different service forecasting approaches is significant at the level of 0.000. Since there is a significant difference among the different service forecasting approaches, we conducted Tukey's HSD post hoc test to determine exactly which means of MAPE are significantly different from which other ones. In terms of MAPE, Tukey's HSD post hoc test grouped the three different service forecasting approaches into three different subsets in the following order: our proposed approach > traditional CBR-based service forecasting approach > the existing forecasting approach used by Company A. Consequently, our empirical experiments show that our proposed approach outperformed the traditional CBR based forecasting model and the existing service forecasting model used by Company A. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides some research background information such as summary of CBR and SOM. Section 3 presents a hybrid service forecasting framework based on Case-based Reasoning and Self-Organizing Maps, while the empirical evaluation results are summarized in Section 4. Conclusion and future research directions are finally discussed in Section 5.

Standardization of the Method of Measuring Average Glandular Dose (AGD) and Evaluation of the Breast Composition and Thickness for AGD (평균 유선선량 측정방법의 표준화 및 유방 두께, 실질양상과의 상관관계 분석)

  • Park, Hye-Suk;Kim, Hee-Joung;Lee, Chang-Lae;Cho, Hyo-Min;Yu, A-Ram
    • Progress in Medical Physics
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    • v.20 no.1
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    • pp.21-29
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    • 2009
  • Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer among korean woman. Therefore, the early detection activities of breast cancer such as breast self-examinations, clinical breast examinations, mammography are important. A yearly mammography examination has been recommended for women aged 40 and older for the early detection of breast cancer in asymptomatic periods. However, the glandular tissue of breast is the most radiation-sensitive tissue, and the determination of average glandular dose (AGD) forms an important part of the quality control of the mammographic systems. Because of the difficulty of estimating AGD directly, it is often estimated from the measurements of the incident air kerma and by applying the appropriate conversion factors. The primary objective of this study was to standardize the method of measuring AGD. The secondary objective was to evaluate the relationships between AGD per various composition and thickness of the breast using Monte Carlo simulations. As a result, we standardized the method of measuring AGD according to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) guidelines (CoP: an international code of practice). Overall, AGD for mammographic practice in Korea was less than 3.0 mGy recommended by the Korea Food and Drug Adminstration (KFDA) protocol, and Korean Institute for Accreditation of Medical Image (KIAMI). The measured and simulated AGD for a given condition were calculated as 1.7 and 1.6 mGy, respectively. For the AGDs obtained, there was no significant difference between them. The simulated AGD was dependent on the fraction of glandular tissue of the breast. The AGD increases with increasing of the breast glandularity due to increasing absorption of low energy photons. The AGD also increases as a function of breast thickness. In conclusion, the results of this study could be used as a baseline to establish a reference level of radiation dose in mammography.

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