• Title/Summary/Keyword: Remaining and emerging issues

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Remaining and emerging issues pertaining to the human reliability analysis of domestic nuclear power plants

  • Park, Jinkyun;Jeon, Hojun;Kim, Jaewhan;Kim, Namcheol;Park, Seong Kyu;Lee, Seungwoo;Lee, Yong Suk
    • Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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    • v.51 no.5
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    • pp.1297-1306
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    • 2019
  • Probabilistic safety assessments (PSA) have been used for several decades to visualize the risk level of commercial nuclear power plants (NPPs). Since the role of a human reliability analysis (HRA) is to provide human error probabilities for safety critical tasks to support PSA, PSA quality is strongly affected by HRA quality. Therefore, it is important to understand the underlying limitations or problems of HRA techniques. For this reason, this study conducted a survey among 14 subject matter experts who represent the HRA community of domestic Korean NPPs. As a result, five significant HRA issues were identified: (1) providing a technical basis for the K-HRA (Korean HRA) method, and developing dedicated HRA methods applicable to (2) diverse external events to support Level 1 PSA, (3) digital environments, (4) mobile equipment, and (5) severe accident management guideline tasks to support Level 2 PSA. In addition, an HRA method to support multi-unit PSA was emphasized because it plays an important role in the evaluation of site risk, which is one of the hottest current issues. It is believed that creating such a catalog of prioritized issues will be a good indication of research direction to improve HRA and therefore PSA quality.

Emerging Role of Hepatobiliary Magnetic Resonance Contrast Media and Contrast-Enhanced Ultrasound for Noninvasive Diagnosis of Hepatocellular Carcinoma: Emphasis on Recent Updates in Major Guidelines

  • Tae-Hyung Kim;Jeong Hee Yoon;Jeong Min Lee
    • Korean Journal of Radiology
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    • v.20 no.6
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    • pp.863-879
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    • 2019
  • Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) can be noninvasively diagnosed on the basis of its characteristic imaging findings of arterial phase enhancement and portal/delayed "washout" on computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in cirrhotic patients. However, different specific diagnostic criteria have been proposed by several countries and major academic societies. In 2018, major guideline updates were proposed by the Association for the Study of Liver Diseases, European Association for the Study of the Liver (EASL), Korean Liver Cancer Association and National Cancer Center (KLCA-NCC) of Korea. In addition to dynamic CT and MRI using extracellular contrast media, these new guidelines now include magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) using hepatobiliary contrast media as the first-line diagnostic test, while the KLCA-NCC and EASL guidelines also include contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) as the second-line diagnostic test. Therefore, hepatobiliary MR contrast media and CEUS will be increasingly used for the noninvasive diagnosis and staging of HCC. In this review, we discuss the emerging role of hepatobiliary phase MRI and CEUS for the diagnosis of HCC and also review the changes in the HCC diagnostic criteria in major guidelines, including the KLCA-NCC practice guidelines version 2018. In addition, we aimed to pay particular attention to some remaining issues in the noninvasive diagnosis of HCC.