• Information Systems Review
• /
• v.20 no.3
• /
• pp.51-71
• /
• 2018

Many studies in the field of information security reveal the need to increase awareness. However, although awareness of information security has been raised to a considerable extent, actual security behavior has been shown to fall short of that. Therefore, we wanted to identify the role of psychological factors in making information security decisions by conducting a experimental study. The results show that there are differences in perception of information security risks according to the probabilistic distance and the degree of relative optimism due to social distance. In relation to their relative optimism and intention of information security, they reduced the level of perceived risk compared to those close to them and found that their influence varied according to their probabilistic distance. This study has made valuable attempt in terms of methodology and it is meaningful that the psychological factor is taken into consideration for the information protection behavior, so that the range of relative optimism that actually affects the perception of risk is narrowed. It is expected to contribute to the improvement of information security level of information technology users and protection of information assets by empirically identifying necessity of various approaches to decision making process for information security.

• Nutrition Research and Practice
• /
• v.18 no.4
• /
• pp.511-522
• /
• 2024

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES: The study examined the association between homocysteine and diabetes mellitus in patients with H-type hypertension and assessed the possible effect modifiers. SUBJECTS/METHODS: This cross-sectional study included 1,255 eligible participants in the 'H-type Hypertension Management and Stroke Prevention Strategic International Science and Technology Innovation Cooperation Project' among rural Chinese people with H-type hypertension. A multivariate logistic regression model was used to evaluate the relationship between homocysteine and diabetes mellitus. RESULTS: The mean level of total homocysteine (tHcy) in the diabetes mellitus population was 19.37 μmol/L, which was significantly higher than the non-diabetic patients (18.18 μmol/L). When tHcy was analyzed as a continuous variable, the odds ratio (OR) of diabetes was 1.17 (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.01-1.35; per interquartile range). When tHcy was stratified according to the quintile, the ORs for diabetes were 2.86 (95% CI, 1.22-6.69) in the highest quintile (tHcy ≥ 20.60 μmol/L) compared to the reference group (tHcy < 12.04 μmol/L). When tHcy was grouped by 15 μmol/L and 20 μmol/L, patients with tHcy ≥ 20 μmol/L had a significantly (P = 0.037) higher risk of diabetes (OR, 2.03; 95% CI, 1.04-3.96) than in those with tHcy < 15 μmol/L. Subgroup analysis showed that the tHcy-diabetes association was unaffected by other variables. CONCLUSION: In this study of rural Chinese people with H-type hypertension, the tHcy levels showed a positive association with diabetes mellitus. This independent association is unaffected by other potential risk factors.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
• /
• v.17 no.8
• /
• pp.3769-3776
• /
• 2016

Background: Breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths among women worldwide. High breast cancer mortality has been attributed to lack of public awareness of the disease. Little is known about the level of knowledge of breast cancer in Central African Republic. This study aimed to investigate the knowledge of health professionals on breast cancer. Materials and Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted among 158 health professionals (27 medical; 131 paramedical) in 17 hospitals in Bangui using a self-administered questionnaire. Descriptive statistical analysis, Person's ${\chi}^2$ test and ANOVA were applied to examine associations between variables with p < 0.05 being considered significant. Results: Data analyzed using SPSS version 20 indicates that average knowledge about breast cancer perception of the entire population was 47.6%, diagnosis method 45.5%, treatment 34.3% and risk factors 23.8%. Most respondents (65.8%) agreed that breast cancer is important in Central African Republic and that family history is a risk factor (44.3%). Clinical assessments and mammography were considered most suitable diagnostic methods, and surgery as the best treatment. The knowledge level was significantly higher among medical than paramedical staff with regard to risk factors, diagnosis and treatment. However the trainee group had very high significant differences of knowledge compared with all other groups. Conclusions: There is a very urgent need to update the various training programs for these professionals, with recommendations of retraining. Health authorities must create suitable structures for the overall management of cancer observed as a serious public health problem.

• Radiation Oncology Journal
• /
• v.26 no.1
• /
• pp.1-9
• /
• 2008

Purpose: To evaluate the impact of postoperative radiotherapy on loco-regional failure in patients with vulvar carcinoma and to determine the treatment strategy for inguinal lymph nodes. Materials and Methods: Sixty-six patients who received treatment for primary vulvar carcinoma at Seoul National University Hospital, from October 1979 through June 2004, were retrospectively analyzed. Sixteen patients were excluded from the analysis due to the following reasons: distant metastases in two patients; palliative intent for six patients; previous radiotherapy given to the pelvis in three patients; follow-up loss after surgery for four patient; insufficient medical records for one patient. Of 50 eligible patients, 35 were treated with surgery alone(S), ten were treated with surgery followed by radiotherapy(S+RT), and five were treated with radiotherapy alone. Results: The 5-year overall survival(OS) and disease-free survival(DFS) rates of all patients were 91% and 78%, respectively. Twelve patients(26%) experienced treatment failures and the sites of initial failure were as follows: a primary site in eight patients; regional lymph nodes in three patients; the lung in one patient. Although risk factors for failure were more common in the S+RT group than the S group of patients(p<0.05), the DFS rates were similar for the two groups(5-year DFS rates, 78% vs. 83%, p=0.66). The incidences of occult lymph node metastases was 10%. Ten of 31 patients with clinically negative lymph nodes did not received inguinal lymph node dissection, but no patient experienced regional failure. Conclusion: Postoperative radiotherapy may have a potential benefit for patients with risk factors for failure. The omission of inguinal dissection or elective radiotherapy to the inguinal lymph nodes may be considered in low-risk patients with clinically negative lymph nodes.

• Journal of Chest Surgery
• /
• v.38 no.8 s.253
• /
• pp.538-544
• /
• 2005

Background: Pulmonary artery banding (PAB) is an initial palliative procedure for a diverse group of patients with congenital cardiac anomalies and unrestricted pulmonary blood flow. We proved the usefulness of PAB through retrospective investigation of the surgical indication and risk analysis retrospectively. Material and Method: One hundred and fifty four consecutive patients (99 males and 55 females) who underwent PAB between January 1986 and December 2003 were included. We analysed the risk factors for early mortality and actuarial survival rate. Mean age was $2.5\pm12.8\;(0.2\sim92.7)$ months and mean weight was $4.5\pm2.7\;(0.9\sim18.0)\;kg$. Preoperative diagnosis included functional single ventricle $(88,\;57.1\%)$, double outlet right ventricle $(22,\;14.2\%)$, transposition of the great arteries $(26,\;16.8\%)$, and atrioventricular septal defect $(11,\;7.1\%)$. Coarctation of the aorta or interrupted aortic arch $(32,\;20.7\%)$, subaortic stenosis $(13,\;8.4\%)$ and total anomalous pulmonary venous connection $(13,\;8.4\%)$ were associated. Result: The overall early mortality was $22.1\%\;(34\;of\;154)$, The recent series from 1996 include patients with lower age $(3.8\pm15.9\;vs.\;1.5\pm12.7,\;p=0.04)$ and lower body weight $(4.8\pm3.1\;vs.\;4.0\pm2.7,\;p=0.02)$. The early mortality was lower in the recent group $(17.5\%;\;16/75)$ than the earlier group $(28.5\%;\;18/45)$. Aortic arch anomaly (p=0.004), subaortic stenosis (p=0.004), operation for subaortic stenosis (p=0.007), and cardiopulmonary bypass (p=0.007) were proven to be risk factors for early death in univariate analysis, while time of surgery (<1996) (p=0.026) was the only significant risk factor in multivariate analysis. The mean time interval from PAB to the second-stage operation was $12.8\pm10.9$ months. Among 96 patients who survived PAB, 40 patients completed Fontan operation, 21 patients underwent bidirectional cavopulmonary shunt, and 35 patients underwent biventricular repair including 25 arterial switch operations. Median follow-up was $40.1\pm48.9$ months. Overall survival rates at 1 year, 5 years and 10 years were $81.2\%\;65.0\%,\;and\;63.5\%$ respectively. Conclusion: Although it improved in recent series, early mortality was still high despite the advances in perioperative management. As for conventional indications, early primary repair may be more beneficial. However, PA banding still has a role in the initial palliative step in selective groups.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.17 no.4
• /
• pp.241-254
• /
• 2011

Financial time-series forecasting is one of the most important issues because it is essential for the risk management of financial institutions. Therefore, researchers have tried to forecast financial time-series using various data mining techniques such as regression, artificial neural networks, decision trees, k-nearest neighbor etc. Recently, support vector machines (SVMs) are popularly applied to this research area because they have advantages that they don't require huge training data and have low possibility of overfitting. However, a user must determine several design factors by heuristics in order to use SVM. For example, the selection of appropriate kernel function and its parameters and proper feature subset selection are major design factors of SVM. Other than these factors, the proper selection of instance subset may also improve the forecasting performance of SVM by eliminating irrelevant and distorting training instances. Nonetheless, there have been few studies that have applied instance selection to SVM, especially in the domain of stock market prediction. Instance selection tries to choose proper instance subsets from original training data. It may be considered as a method of knowledge refinement and it maintains the instance-base. This study proposes the novel instance selection algorithm for SVMs. The proposed technique in this study uses genetic algorithm (GA) to optimize instance selection process with parameter optimization simultaneously. We call the model as ISVM (SVM with Instance selection) in this study. Experiments on stock market data are implemented using ISVM. In this study, the GA searches for optimal or near-optimal values of kernel parameters and relevant instances for SVMs. This study needs two sets of parameters in chromosomes in GA setting : The codes for kernel parameters and for instance selection. For the controlling parameters of the GA search, the population size is set at 50 organisms and the value of the crossover rate is set at 0.7 while the mutation rate is 0.1. As the stopping condition, 50 generations are permitted. The application data used in this study consists of technical indicators and the direction of change in the daily Korea stock price index (KOSPI). The total number of samples is 2218 trading days. We separate the whole data into three subsets as training, test, hold-out data set. The number of data in each subset is 1056, 581, 581 respectively. This study compares ISVM to several comparative models including logistic regression (logit), backpropagation neural networks (ANN), nearest neighbor (1-NN), conventional SVM (SVM) and SVM with the optimized parameters (PSVM). In especial, PSVM uses optimized kernel parameters by the genetic algorithm. The experimental results show that ISVM outperforms 1-NN by 15.32%, ANN by 6.89%, Logit and SVM by 5.34%, and PSVM by 4.82% for the holdout data. For ISVM, only 556 data from 1056 original training data are used to produce the result. In addition, the two-sample test for proportions is used to examine whether ISVM significantly outperforms other comparative models. The results indicate that ISVM outperforms ANN and 1-NN at the 1% statistical significance level. In addition, ISVM performs better than Logit, SVM and PSVM at the 5% statistical significance level.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
• /
• v.9 no.2
• /
• pp.201-219
• /
• 2014

The Republic of Korea in the real economy to a knowledge economy, and a center of creativity and imagination in the creative economy is changing the paradigm. As the core of creating economic, creative industries with the technology and information play an important role in the industry individuals. In order to solve the problem of the polarization of the economy and high youth unemployment rate of Korea, to recognize the role of the creative industries, as objection part, dimensions pan-national and one creative companies in industries of Mobile Apps various policies that support has been promoted. Support these policies to be able to contribute to the establishment of the success of mobile apps one-person creating company, we performed this study targeting one-person company that creates mobile apps area, we conducted a demonstration study of success factors, and thus more effective and efficient in an attempt to seek out support measures. In this study, we derive a research 4 hypothesis about the success factors of one creative enterprise through literature discussion, a study was made on the basis of empirical data of one-person company that creates mobile apps. The results of the analysis, first, if the development rate of the mobile application technology is fast and a new competition associated product is appeared, it was possible to find a tendency to be higher at the performance quantitative companies. Second, if the founder is a founding for the benefit and rewarding work and come to terms with the risk, it was possible to discover tends to be higher achievement quantitative. Third, if one-person company select a target market with capture intensively, it was possible to find a tendency for higher qualitative results. Fourth, it could be found that the reliability of the contact frequency of the network related performance business environment these characteristics enterprise management strategy and act as a significant modulatory effect. Provision of information relating to management and entrepreneurship education to be one creative enterprise is required, these results suggest that there is a provision continuing need for the opportunity to be able to meet and network and reliable variety have. In this study, to take advantage to promote the elimination measures that can increase the likelihood of success of the company of institutions to support one company that creates knowledge-based, such as in the field of mobile application.

• Korea Journal of Hospital Management
• /
• v.12 no.1
• /
• pp.1-30
• /
• 2007

The study carried out a survey with employees of hospitals located in Daejeon, Chungnam, and Chungbuk from Sep. 12 to Sep. 30, 2005 in order to derive primary elements that affect the improvement of hospital's competitiveness. The study investigated and analyzed the employees' recognition on the change of competitive environment caused by the change of medical environment. The study also analyzed the elements that affect the hospital's competitiveness and the competitive strategies of the hospitals. The conclusion of this study can be summarized as follows. 1. Summary 1) Most of the employees responded that there is a rival in the competitive environment and the competitive is intense. Especially when the employees are married, live in urban areas, have an education level of university graduate or are managers, they tend to think the competitive is very intense. Also, they said that the competitive is based upon the quality of medical service. They mentioned the element that has the biggest effect on the competitiveness is the element of medical consumer and they recognized that the medical services in university and general hospitals have more competitiveness than the one-department hospitals. 2) It was investigated that the medical technique service has the most effect on the hospital's competitiveness. Also, the external service of medical techniques also has a large effect on the hospital's competitiveness. 3) When they were asked for the factors that affect the patients' decision on selecting a hospital, most of them responded "capability and technique of the medical staffs." Also, they said that "sufficient explanation from doctors" and "special center and clinic" are the factors that have big effects on the patients' decision. 4) In the SWOT analysis, most of them responded that the strength is the hospital's characteristics and the weakness is insufficient and obsolete equipment. They said the opportunity is the demands for professional medical service and the risk is the intense competitive among the hospitals. 5) In the SWOT strategy, they emphasized the strategy that uses the opportunity and the strength and the strategy that uses the opportunity while overcoming the weakness. 6) As for the basic competition strategy, most of them thought of the strategy of professionalizing the medical service most importantly. Next, they focused on the strategy of distinct service and the strategy of lower prime cost. 2. Conclusion 1) Because service competition between hospitals is happening seriously, need competitiveness security through right awareness transfer and satisfaction upgrade about medical consumer. 2) For medical technique service upgrade that equip Hospital's competitiveness but affects most, must solidify the countermeasure because professionalizing the medical service and newest medical technique induction should be achieved first, and compose task force for the external service of medical techniques improvement. 3) To improve SWOT of hospital, opportunity and the strength strategy choice that rescue hospital's characteristics heightening professionalizing the medical service level is fancied. 4) As for the basic competition strategy, will have to try in phase triangular position of hospital which is trusted medical level upgrade and excellent manpower security and finance independence through upgrade. The study was only done with hospitals in Daejeon, Chungnam and Chungbuk. Also, it is a study from the side of suppliers of medical service so there are limitations. However, the significance of the study is to present the basic data for improvement of hospital's competitiveness by examining the importance of medical techniques and external service of medical techniques that are the main effects on the improvement of hospital's competitiveness.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
• /
• v.14 no.1
• /
• pp.47-58
• /
• 2019

This paper is brought to analyze an impact of coaching activities over entrepreneur with respect to entrepreneurs' personal characteristics on the performance of Startups focusing on entrepreneur's awareness conversion effect. In particular, the situation of falling focus of serious startup failure on uncoachable obstinate entrepreneur among the several causes of startup failures, this paper define the research mission of reducing this risk by inducing coaching types of cooperations between senior entrepreneur having serial successful startup experiences and beginning entrepreneur. This paper carry out literature reviews chiefly on startup coaching researches rather than mentoring studies because coaching stressing on self-oriented problem defining and solving by entrepreneur actively tend to be more effective than mentoring relying on mentor's guideline passively as solving startup's main upcoming problems. This paper implement four related researches. First, the impact analysis of entrepreneur's personal characteristics on coaching activities, second, influences of entrepreneurs environmental factors on them, Third, impact of coaching activities on entrepreneur's awareness conversion effect, Fourth, how strongly this conversion effect contributing on the performance of startup. As results of empirical research, first, this paper prove that entrepreneur's environmental factors impact positively on coaching activities over entrepreneur although failing on validating on significant impact of entrepreneur's personal characteristics on coaching activities. Second, this paper prove that coaching activities positively influence on entrepreneur's awareness conversion, hence ultimately positively on the performance of startups. As conclusion, this paper validate that coaching activities over entrepreneur through inducing on the conversion of entrepreneur's awareness lead entrepreneur to setting the bar high and accountable planning of business milestone. This paper contribute on delivering policy implication that government initiatin action-oriented training program for entrepreneurs should accept the module of coaching session to produce more effective results.

• Journal of Chest Surgery
• /
• v.38 no.5 s.250
• /
• pp.335-348
• /
• 2005

Background: This retrospective review examines the preoperative condition, postoperative course, mortality and cause of death for the patients who underwent modified Blalock-Taussig shunt for complex congenital heart defects in early infancy. Material and Method: Fifty eight patients underwent modified Blalock-Taussig shunts from January 2000 to November 2003. The mean age at operation was $23.1\pm16.2$ days ($5\~81\;days$), and the mean body weight was $3.4\pm0.7\;kg\;(2.1\~4.3\;kg)$. Indications for surgery were pulmonary atresia with ventricular septal defect in 12 cases, pulmonary atresia with intact ventricular septum in 17, single ventricle (SV) in 18, and hypoplastic left heart syndrome (HLHS) in 11. Total anomalous pulmonary venous return (TAPVR) was associated with SV in 4 cases. Result: There were 11 ($19.0\%$) early, and 5 ($10.6\%$) late deaths. Causes of early death included low cardiac output in 9, arrhythmia in 1, and multiorgan failure in 1. Late deaths resulted from pneumonia in 2, hypoxia in 1, and sepsis in 1. Risk factors influencing mortality were preoperative pulmonary hypertension, metabolic acidosis, use of cardiopulmonary bypass, HLHS and TAPVR. Twenty four patients ($41.4\%$) had hemodynamic instability during the 48 postoperative-hours. Six patients underwent shunt revision for occlusion, and 1 shunt division for pulmonary overflow. Conclusion: Modified Blalock-Taussig shunt for complex congenital heart defects in early infancy had satisfactory results except in high risk groups. Many patients had early postoperative hemodynamic instability, which means that continuous close observation and management are mandatory in this period. Aggressive management may appear warranted based on understanding of hemodynamic changes for high risk groups.