• Title/Summary/Keyword: Reusable

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Bacterial Contamination of Digital Panoramic Dental X-Ray Equipment

  • Lee-Rang Im;Ji-Hyun Min;Ki-Rim Kim
    • Journal of dental hygiene science
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    • v.23 no.4
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    • pp.343-350
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    • 2023
  • Background: Digital panoramic dental X-ray equipment (PDX) is frequently used by patients and dental workers for diagnosis and examination in dental institutions; however, infection control has not been properly implemented. Therefore, in this study, we aimed to systematically review the potential risk of cross-infection in the dental environment by investigating the contamination level of general aerobic bacteria and Staphylococcus aureus, which are important in hospital infections, in PDX areas that people mainly contact. Methods: This survey was conducted from March to May 2023 and covered one general hospital, three dental hospitals, and nine dental clinics equipped with PDX. Bacteria samples were collected from the left-handle, right-handle, forehead support, and head side support as the patient's contact areas, as well as the X-ray exposure switch and left-click mouse button as the dental hygienist's contact areas of the PDX. The collected bacteria were spread on Petrifilm, and colonies formed after 48 hours of culture were counted. Results: General aerobic bacteria and S. aureus were detected in all areas investigated. Significant differences in bacterial counts between different regions of the PDX were observed in both groups (p<0.001). The detection rates of general aerobic bacteria (p<0.001) and S. aureus (p<0.001) were significantly higher in the contact areas of patients than those of dental hygienists. A positive correlation was observed between the forehead and the temple region in terms of general aerobic bacteria and S. aureus detection (r=1) (p<0.01). Conclusion: Taken together, the presence of many bacteria, including S. aureus, detected in PDX indicates that PDX has a potential cross-infection risk. Our results therefore highlight the need for the development of appropriate disinfection protocols for reusable medical devices such as PDX and periodic infection prevention training for hospital-related workers, including dental hygienists.

Outcomes of endoscopic retrograde cholangiography and percutaneous transhepatic biliary drainage in liver transplant recipients with a Roux-en-Y biliary-enteric anastomosis

  • Divyanshoo Rai Kohli;Bashar A. Aqel;Nicole L. Segaran;M. Edwyn Harrison;Norio Fukami;Douglas O. Faigel;Adyr Moss;Amit Mathur;Winston Hewitt;Nitin Katariya;Rahul Pannala
    • Annals of Hepato-Biliary-Pancreatic Surgery
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    • v.27 no.1
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    • pp.49-55
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    • 2023
  • Backgrounds/Aims: Data regarding outcomes of endoscopic retrograde cholangiography (ERC) in liver transplant (LT) recipients with biliary-enteric (BE) anastomosis are limited. We report outcomes of ERC and percutaneous transhepatic biliary drainage (PTBD) as first-line therapies in LT recipients with BE anastomosis. Methods: All LT recipients with Roux-BE anastomosis from 2001 to 2020 were divided into ERC and PTBD subgroups. Technical success was defined as the ability to cannulate the bile duct. Clinical success was defined as the ability to perform cholangiography and therapeutic interventions. Results: A total of 36 LT recipients (25 males, age 53.5 ± 13 years) with Roux-BE anastomosis who underwent biliary intervention were identified. The most common indications for a BE anastomosis were primary sclerosing cholangitis (n = 14) and duct size mismatch (n = 10). Among the 29 patients who initially underwent ERC, technical success and clinical success were achieved in 24 (82.8%) and 22 (75.9%) patients, respectively. The initial endoscope used for the ERC was a single balloon enteroscope in 16 patients, a double balloon enteroscope in 7 patients, a pediatric colonoscope in 5 patients, and a conventional reusable duodenoscope in 1 patient. Among the 7 patients who underwent PTBD as the initial therapy, six (85.7%) achieved technical and clinical success (p = 0.57). Conclusions: In LT patients with Roux-BE anastomosis requiring biliary intervention, ERC with a balloon-assisted enteroscope is safe with a success rate comparable to PTBD. Both ERC and PTBD can be considered as first-line therapies for LT recipients with a BE anastomosis.

Alternative Concept to Enhance the Disposal Efficiency for CANDU Spent Fuel Disposal System (CANDU 사용후핵연료 처분시스템 효율향상 개념 도출)

  • Lee, Jong-Youl;Cho, Dong-Geun;Kook, Dong-Hak;Lee, Min-Soo;Choi, Heui-Joo
    • Journal of Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Waste Technology(JNFCWT)
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    • v.9 no.3
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    • pp.169-179
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    • 2011
  • There are two types of nuclear reactors in Korea and they are PWR type and CANDU type. The safe management of the spent fuels from these reactors is very important factor to maintain the sustainable energy supply with nuclear power plant. In Korea, a reference disposal system for the spent fuels has been developed through a study on the direct disposal of the PWR and CANDU spent fuel. Recently, the research on the demonstration and the efficiency analyses of the disposal system has been performed to make the disposal system safer and more economic. PWR spent fuels which include a lot of reusable material can be considered being recycled and a study on the disposal of HLW from this recycling process is being performed. CANDU spent fuels are considered being disposed of directly in deep geological formation, since they have little reusable material. In this study, based on the Korean Reference spent fuel disposal System (KRS) which was to dispose of both PWR type and CANDU type, the more effective CANDU spent fuel disposal systems were developed. To do this, the disposal canister for CANDU spent fuels was modified to hold the storage basket for 60 bundles which is used in nuclear power plant. With these modified disposal canister concepts, the disposal concepts to meet the thermal requirement that the temperature of the buffer materials should not be over $100^{\circ}C$ were developed. These disposal concepts were reviewed and analyzed in terms of disposal effective factors which were thermal effectiveness, U-density, disposal area, excavation volume, material volume etc. and the most effective concept was proposed. The results of this study will be used in the development of various wastes disposal system together with the HLW wastes from the PWR spent fuel recycling process.

A Study on the Legal Issues in Space Tourism (우주여행의 법적문제에 대한 고찰)

  • Kim, Jong-Bok
    • The Korean Journal of Air & Space Law and Policy
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    • v.26 no.1
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    • pp.215-239
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    • 2011
  • We are now entering the era of Commercial Space Transportation with the rapid commercialization of space. Commercial Space Tourism will be realized first of all in the commercial space transportation and the spacecraft is developing for it led by private enterprise such as Virgin Galatic and XCOR Aerospace. The spacecraft for space tourism is developed as Reusable Launch Vehicle(RLV). RLV Spaceship I & II manufactured by the Scaled Composites for Virgin Galatic had completed experimental flight successfully and is going to put to the operation for space travel around the year 2012. In our country, Yecheon Astro-Space Center located in Yecheon, Kyungbuk Province, signed a binding-MOU with XCOR Aerospace and going to start space travel in the year 2013 with the spacecraft LYNX MARK-II. Thus, now space travel has become a reality to us. But it is also reality that there's no study by legal basis preparing for the space tourism domestically and internationally. In this regards, this thesis dealt with legal issues related to space tourism. These are as follows : (1) the applicabe law issue that is which law between air law and space law will apply, (2) the status of space tourist issue that is space tourist can be considered as personnel of a spacecraft and/or space flight participant and has the duty to obey the order of the captain of spacecraft, (3) the responsibility of the government for the non-governmental entities such as private enterprise which involved in space tourism in case space accident occurs during the space travel, (4) license permit and supervision issue by the government (In this point, for activating the market of the space tourism, I think it is essential to guarantee the safety of the spacecraft by the government authority, though U. S. government declared that it has not certified the launch vehicle as safe for carrying crew or space flight participants), (5) registration issue, (6) space insurance issue. For all the issues mentioned above, I have studied the existing international treaties and several country's domestic law to the space by referring U.S's Commercial Space Launch Amendment Act of 2004 and New IGA of 1998 and concluded that uniform legal regime to govern these issues should be established domestically and internationally in the near future.

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A MVC Framework for Visualizing Text Data (텍스트 데이터 시각화를 위한 MVC 프레임워크)

  • Choi, Kwang Sun;Jeong, Kyo Sung;Kim, Soo Dong
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.20 no.2
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    • pp.39-58
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    • 2014
  • As the importance of big data and related technologies continues to grow in the industry, it has become highlighted to visualize results of processing and analyzing big data. Visualization of data delivers people effectiveness and clarity for understanding the result of analyzing. By the way, visualization has a role as the GUI (Graphical User Interface) that supports communications between people and analysis systems. Usually to make development and maintenance easier, these GUI parts should be loosely coupled from the parts of processing and analyzing data. And also to implement a loosely coupled architecture, it is necessary to adopt design patterns such as MVC (Model-View-Controller) which is designed for minimizing coupling between UI part and data processing part. On the other hand, big data can be classified as structured data and unstructured data. The visualization of structured data is relatively easy to unstructured data. For all that, as it has been spread out that the people utilize and analyze unstructured data, they usually develop the visualization system only for each project to overcome the limitation traditional visualization system for structured data. Furthermore, for text data which covers a huge part of unstructured data, visualization of data is more difficult. It results from the complexity of technology for analyzing text data as like linguistic analysis, text mining, social network analysis, and so on. And also those technologies are not standardized. This situation makes it more difficult to reuse the visualization system of a project to other projects. We assume that the reason is lack of commonality design of visualization system considering to expanse it to other system. In our research, we suggest a common information model for visualizing text data and propose a comprehensive and reusable framework, TexVizu, for visualizing text data. At first, we survey representative researches in text visualization era. And also we identify common elements for text visualization and common patterns among various cases of its. And then we review and analyze elements and patterns with three different viewpoints as structural viewpoint, interactive viewpoint, and semantic viewpoint. And then we design an integrated model of text data which represent elements for visualization. The structural viewpoint is for identifying structural element from various text documents as like title, author, body, and so on. The interactive viewpoint is for identifying the types of relations and interactions between text documents as like post, comment, reply and so on. The semantic viewpoint is for identifying semantic elements which extracted from analyzing text data linguistically and are represented as tags for classifying types of entity as like people, place or location, time, event and so on. After then we extract and choose common requirements for visualizing text data. The requirements are categorized as four types which are structure information, content information, relation information, trend information. Each type of requirements comprised with required visualization techniques, data and goal (what to know). These requirements are common and key requirement for design a framework which keep that a visualization system are loosely coupled from data processing or analyzing system. Finally we designed a common text visualization framework, TexVizu which is reusable and expansible for various visualization projects by collaborating with various Text Data Loader and Analytical Text Data Visualizer via common interfaces as like ITextDataLoader and IATDProvider. And also TexVisu is comprised with Analytical Text Data Model, Analytical Text Data Storage and Analytical Text Data Controller. In this framework, external components are the specifications of required interfaces for collaborating with this framework. As an experiment, we also adopt this framework into two text visualization systems as like a social opinion mining system and an online news analysis system.

Evaluation of Industrial Byproduct for the Adsorption of Arsenic (V) (재이용한 산업부산물에 의한 비소(V) 이온 흡착능 평가)

  • Park, Youn-Jong;Yang, Jae-Kyu;Choi, Sang-Il
    • Journal of Soil and Groundwater Environment
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    • v.12 no.4
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    • pp.78-85
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    • 2007
  • This study provides an attempt to evaluate sanding wastes, generated from a chemical company as a reused adsorbent. Organic impurities in the raw sanding wastes were removed by calcination at $550^{\circ}C$. Aluminum was a major inorganic composition in the raw sanding wastes and increased from 29.09% to 52.73% after calcination. Dissolved concentrations of heavy metals from the calcined sample were below 0.3 mg/L in a stability test at pH 2. From the pH-edge adsorption experiments with the calcined sanding wastes, As (V) was found to follow an anionic-type adsorption. Adsorption isotherm obtained with variation of the dosage of the calcined sanding wastes was better described by Freundlich equation than Langmuir one. Freundlich constants of K and 1/n were 4.244 and 0.316, respectively. The As (V) adsorption capacity of calcined sanding wastes estimated from Langmuir isotherm was 13.25 mg/g. From this study, the calcined sample was identified as a good reusable adsorbent in the view point of stability and adsorption capacity on As (V).

Methods to Enhance Service Scalability Using Service Replication and Migration (서비스 복제 및 이주를 이용한 서비스 확장성 향상 기법)

  • Kim, Ji-Won;Lee, Jae-Yoo;Kim, Soo-Dong
    • Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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    • v.37 no.7
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    • pp.503-517
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    • 2010
  • Service-oriented computing, the effective paradigm for developing service applications by using reusable services, becomes popular. In service-oriented computing, service consumer has no responsibility for managing services, just invokes services what service providers are producing. On the other hand, service providers should manage any resources and data for service consumers can use the service anytime and anywhere. However, it is hard service providers manage the quality of the services because an unspecified number of service consumers. Therefore, service scalability for providing services with higher quality of services specified in a service level agreement becomes a potential problem in service-oriented computing. There have been many researches for scalability in network, database, and distributed computing area. But a research about a definition of service scalability and metrics of measuring service scalability is still not mature in service engineering area. In this paper, we construct a service network which connects multiple service nodes, and integrate all the resources to manage it. And we also present a service scalability framework for managing service scalability by using a mechanism of service migration or replication. In section 3, we, firstly, present the structure of the scalability management framework and basic functionalities. In section 4, we propose scalability enhancement mechanism which is needed to release functionality of the framework. In section 5, we design and implement the framework by using proposed mechanism. In section 6, we demonstrate the result of our case study which dynamically manages services in multi-nodes environment by applying our framework. Through the case study, we show the applicability of our scalability management framework and mechanism.

Representing City Image as Regional Geographic Knowledge: Ontology Modeling Approach (온톨로지 방법론을 이용한 지역지리 지식으로서 도시이미지의 표현)

  • Hong, Il-Young
    • Journal of the Korean Association of Geographic Information Studies
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    • v.13 no.2
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    • pp.74-93
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    • 2010
  • Nowadays, the navigation system is very popular to general public and the study of landmarks has an important role to develop the cognitive systems for regional navigation. The city image is composed of landmarks that are well-known to regional community and they are the reference frame for place recognition in urban navigation. In general, the case of navigation can be categorized as two kinds. The first is to explore the new region and the second is to navigate the familiar region. In case of latter, the city image has a critical role in place recognition for regional community. Place recognition of a community might be a knowledge-based inference on the basis of city image which is composed of the systematically connected places. In this study, the mental structure of urban image is regarded as a hierarchical knowledge and represents it as domain ontology for the regional navigation of a community. The city image of a community is assumed as the collection of landmarks, which are categorized as anchor, distant and local according to spatial familiarity of community. Representing city image as a regional knowledge using ontology modeling method is an essential step to make the geographical assumption of a regional community explicit and reusable for the regional agents who will provide the regional guide in LBS age.

Effect of the Methylation of Amine Groups on Polysulfone-Escherichia Coli Biomass Composite Fiber for Removal of Basic Dye (Polysulfone-Escherichia Coli Biomass Composite Fiber에서 아민기의 메틸화가 염기성 염료의 제거에 미치는 영향)

  • Park, Ha Neul;Choi, Han A;Kim, Sok;Yun, Yeoung-Sang;Won, Sung Wook
    • Clean Technology
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    • v.21 no.3
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    • pp.164-170
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    • 2015
  • In this study, polysulfone-Escherichia coli biomass composite fiber (PSBF) was prepared by spinning the suspension of PS and E. coli biomass and amine-methylated PSBF (AM-PSBF) was fabricated through the methylation of amine groups in PSBF. As comparing the adsorption characteristics of basic dye, Basic Blue 3 (BB3) by the PSBF and AM-PSBF, the effect of the methylation of amine groups on BB3 adsorption was confirmed. pH edge experiments showed that the BB3 uptake of PSBF and AM-PSBF increased as pH was increased and the BB3 uptake of AM-PSBF was higher than that of PSBF at the same pH. Both of PSBF and AM-PSBF was reached at equilibrium within 5 h and kinetic experimental data were well fitted by the pseudo-first-order kinetic model. By the Langmuir model, the maximum adsorption capacities of PSBF and AM-PSBF at pH 8 were evaluated to be 28.9 and 20.7 mg/g, respectively. The maximum adsorption capacity of AM-PSBF was enhanced 1.4 times comparing that of PSBF. These results indicate that the methylation of amine groups in PSBF leads to the improvement of BB3 adsorption capacity. In addition, the results of desorption experiments revealed that AM-PSBF was repeatedly reusable.

Development Trend of Low Cost Space Launch Vehicle and Consideration of Next Generation Fuel (저비용 우주 발사체 개발 동향 및 이를 위한 차세대 연료에 대한 고찰)

  • Bae, Jinhyun;Koo, Jaye;Yoon, Youngbin
    • Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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    • v.45 no.10
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    • pp.855-862
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    • 2017
  • Due to the weight reduction and miniaturization of satellites, there is a growing interest in low-cost launch vehicles, which are cheaper to launch than larger launch vehicles. One of the most cost-effective ways to reduce the cost of launch vehicles is the reuse of vehicles. Most companies that are developing low cost launch vehicles are also adopting a vehicles reuse approach. Along with this reuse purpose, the demand for environmentally friendly space launch vehicles has increased, so the choice of fuel used for low cost launch vehicles has also become very important. Methane and hydrogen-enriched compressed natural gas (HCNG), which makes more energy-efficient by adding hydrogen to methane, are considered to be the most suitable when considering other factors such as energy density among the fuels that are eco-friendly and capable of reusing the launch vehicles. This study investigated the trends of low-cost launch vehicle and rocket fuel in the world as a reference for setting up domestic space development after the development of Korea Space Launch Vehicle-II.