• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.54 no.1
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• pp.49-60
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• 2021

This study presents a methodology to estimate two distinct fractal dimensions of natural river basin by using fractal tree concept. To this end, an analysis is performed on fractal features of a complete drainage network which consists of all possible drainage paths within a river basin based on the growth process of fractal tree. The growth process of fractal tree would occur only within the limited drainage paths possessing stream flow features in a river basin. In the case of small river basin, the bifurcation process of network is more sensitive to the growth step of fractal tree than the meandering process of stream segment, so that various bifurcation structures could be generated in a single network. Therefore, fractal dimension of network structure for small river basin should be estimated in the form of a range not a single figure. Furthermore, the network structures with fractal tree from this study might be more useful information than stream networks from a topographic or digital map for analysis of drainage structure on small river basin.

• Journal of Korean Neurosurgical Society
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• v.64 no.1
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• pp.88-99
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• 2021

Objective : The treatment of choice for spinal epidural abscess (SEA) generally is urgent surgery in combination with intravenous antibiotic treatment. However, the optimal duration of antibiotic treatment has not been established to date, although 4-8 weeks is generally advised. Moreover, some researchers have reported that bacteremia is a risk factor for failure of antibiotic treatment in SEA. In this study, we investigated the clinical characteristics of SEA accompanied by bacteremia and also determined whether the conventional 4-8 weeks of antibiotic treatment is sufficient. Methods : We retrospectively reviewed the medical records and radiological data of 23 patients with bacterial SEA who underwent open surgery from March 2010 to April 2020. All patients had bacteremia preoperatively and underwent weeks of perioperative antibiotic treatments based on their identified organisms until all symptoms of infection disappeared. All patients underwent microbiological studies of peripheral blood, specimens from SEA and concomitant infections. The mean follow-up duration was 35.2 months, excluding three patients who died. Results : The male : female ratio was 15 : 8, and the mean age was 68.9 years. The SEA most commonly involved the lumbar spinal segment (73.9%), and the mean size was 2.9 vertebral body lengths. Mean time periods of 8.4 days and 16.6 days were required from admission to diagnosis and from admission to surgery, respectively. Concomitant infections more frequently resulted in delayed diagnosis (p=0.032), masking the symptoms of SEA. Methicillin-sensitive Staphylococcus aureus was the most commonly identified pathogen in both blood and surgical specimens. Seventeen patients (73.9%) showed no deficits at the final follow-up. The overall antibiotic treatment duration was a mean of 66.6 days, excluding three patients who died. This duration was longer than the conventionally advised 4-8 weeks (p=0.010), and psoas or paraspinal abscess required prolonged duration of antibiotic treatment (p=0.038). Conclusion : SEA accompanied by bacteremia required a longer duration (>8 weeks) of antibiotic treatment. In addition, the diagnosis was more frequently delayed in patients with concomitant infections. The duration of antibiotic treatment should be extended for SEA with bacteremia, and a high index of suspicion is mandatory for early diagnosis, especially in patients with concomitant infections.

• Journal of radiological science and technology
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• v.45 no.2
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• pp.151-158
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• 2022

The Cardiac Gated Blood Pool (GBP) scintigram, a nuclear medicine imaging, calculates the left ventricular Ejection Fraction (EF) by segmenting the left ventricle from the heart. However, in order to accurately segment the substructure of the heart, specialized knowledge of cardiac anatomy is required, and depending on the expert's processing, there may be a problem in which the left ventricular EF is calculated differently. In this study, using the DeepLabV3 architecture, GBP images were trained on 93 training data with a ResNet-50 backbone. Afterwards, the trained model was applied to 23 separate test sets of GBP to evaluate the reproducibility of the region of interest and left ventricular EF. Pixel accuracy, dice coefficient, and IoU for the region of interest were 99.32±0.20, 94.65±1.45, 89.89±2.62(%) at the diastolic phase, and 99.26±0.34, 90.16±4.19, and 82.33±6.69(%) at the systolic phase, respectively. Left ventricular EF was calculated to be an average of 60.37±7.32% in the ROI set by humans and 58.68±7.22% in the ROI set by the deep learning segmentation model. (p<0.05) The automated segmentation method using deep learning presented in this study similarly predicts the average human-set ROI and left ventricular EF when a random GBP image is an input. If the automatic segmentation method is developed and applied to the functional examination method that needs to set ROI in the field of cardiac scintigram in nuclear medicine in the future, it is expected to greatly contribute to improving the efficiency and accuracy of processing and analysis by nuclear medicine specialists.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.26 no.10
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• pp.1490-1499
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• 2022

Arrhythmia is a condition in which the heart has an irregular rhythm or abnormal heart rate, early diagnosis and management is very important because it can cause stroke, cardiac arrest, or even death. In this paper, we propose arrhythmia classification using hybrid combination model of CNN-BLSTM. For this purpose, the QRS features are detected from noise removed signal through pre-processing and a single bit segment was extracted. In this case, the GAN oversampling technique is applied to solve the data imbalance problem. It consisted of CNN layers to extract the patterns of the arrhythmia precisely, used them as the input of the BLSTM. The weights were learned through deep learning and the learning model was evaluated by the validation data. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, classification accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score were compared by using the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database. The achieved scores indicate 99.30%, 98.70%, 97.50%, 98.06% in terms of the accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, respectively.

• Journal of the Korea Fashion and Costume Design Association
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.33-48
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• 2022

This study aimed to investigate bag purchase behaviors according to materialism value. The subjects were 443 male and female adult consumers in their 20s to 50s. The research method was a survey, and the questionnaire consisted of questions on materialism value, bag purchase behaviors, and demographic characteristics. For data analysis, descriptive statistics, Cronbach's α, χ² test, factor analysis, cluster analysis, ANOVA, and Duncan's multiple range test were performed. The results of this study were as follows. First, materialism value was derived from three factors (happiness pursuit, possession-oriented, and success judgment). Second, subjects could be divided into three groups (happiness pursuit group, success judgment pursuit group, and immaterialism group) based on the materialism value variable. Third, the derived groups showed many differences in bag purchase behaviors. The happiness pursuit group considered all bag evaluation criteria factors (practicality, aesthetics, economy, symbolism) and bag purchasing information sources factors (mass media and personal sources) more than other groups, and showed a tendency to prefer select shops and complex shopping malls as bag purchasing places. In addition, the average annual cost and frequency of purchasing bags of this group were higher than those of other groups. The success judgment pursuit group considered symbolism as a bag evaluation criteria more than other groups, and considered personal sources as bag purchasing information sources more than mass media sources, and preferred luxury stores and department stores as bag purchasing places. On the other hand, the immaterialism group considered practicality and aesthetics as bag evaluation criteria and placed less importance on all information sources than other groups, and preferred Internet shopping malls as purchasing places. This group had the lowest average annual purchase cost and frequency among the three consumer groups. This study suggested that materialism value is a useful variable to segment male and female adult consumer markets effectively, and to understand the bag purchase behaviors of consumer groups divided by materialism value.

• Journal of Veterinary Science
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• v.23 no.5
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• pp.67.1-67.11
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• 2022

Background: Budgerigar fledgling disease polyomavirus (BFDV) is the pathogen that causes budgerigar fledgling disease in psittacine species. The clinical signs of PBFV infection include ascites, hepatitis, and crop stasis. BFDV is associated with a high mortality rate in nestling birds. In contrast, adult birds only have mild symptoms such as feather dystrophy. Objectives: This study aimed to determine the prevalence, genetic characteristics, and phylogenetic analysis of BFDV in pet parrots in Korea. Methods: Fecal and tissue samples were collected from 217 pet parrots from 10 veterinary hospitals including Chungbuk National University Veterinary Hospital. The molecular screening was performed using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) analysis of the small t/large T antigen gene segment. Full-length genome sequencing with the Sanger and phylogenetic analysis were performed on BFDV-positive samples. Results: The PCR results based on the small t/large T antigen gene marker indicated that BFDV DNA was present in 10 out of 217 screened samples. A whole-genome sequence was obtained from six strains and phylogenetic analysis revealed no significant relationship existed between the species and geographical locations amongst them. Conclusions: The prevalence of BFDV infection in South Korea is not high when compared to the prevalence of BFDV in other parts of the world, however, it has been reported sporadically in various species and geographic locations. The whole-genome analysis revealed 0.2%-0.3% variation in intragenomic homogeneity among the six strains analyzed. Korean strains are separately on the phylogenetic tree from their counterparts from China and Japan which might reflect the substantial genetic variation.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.80 no.6
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• pp.749-765
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• 2021

Suspension bridges bear large eccentric live loads in rush hours when most vehicles travel in one direction on the left or right side of the bridge. With the increasing number and weight of vehicles and the girder widening, the eccentric live load effect on the bridge behavior, including bending and distortion of the main girder, gets more pronounced, even jeopardizing bridge safety. This study proposes an analytical algorithm based on multi-catenary theory for predicting the suspension bridge responses to eccentric live load via the nonlinear generalized reduced gradient method. A set of governing equations is derived to solve the following unknown values: the girder rigid-body displacement in the longitudinal direction; the horizontal projection lengths of main cable's segments; the parameters of catenary equations and horizontal forces of the side span cable segments and the leftmost segments of middle span cables; the suspender tensions and the bearing reactions. Then girder's responses, including rigid-body displacement in the longitudinal direction, deflections, and torsion angles; suspenders' responses, including the suspender tensions and the hanging point displacements; main cables' responses, including the horizontal forces of each segment; and the longitudinal displacement of the pylons' tower top under eccentric load can be calculated. The response of an exemplar suspension bridge with three spans of 168, 548, and 168 m is calculated by the proposed analytical method and the finite element method in two eccentric live load cases, and their results prove the former's feasibility. The nonuniform distribution of the live load in the lateral direction is shown to impose a greater threat to suspension bridge safety than that in the longitudinal direction, while some other specific features revealed by the proposed method are discussed in detail.

• Journal of Positioning, Navigation, and Timing
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.83-89
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• 2023

The Korea Augmentation Satellite System (KASS) system is a Satellite Based Augmentation System (SBAS) under development to provide APV-I SBAS service in the Republic of Korea. The KASS ground segment generates correction and integrity information for GPS measurements of KASS users using the accurate positions of KASS Reference Station (KRS) antenna phase centers. For this reason, the accuracy of KRS reference points through geodetic survey campaigns is one of the important factors for providing the KASS service in compliance with the required navigation performance. In order to obtain accurate positions, two geodetic survey campaigns were performed at several reference points, such as Mark, Center of Mast at Ground Level (CMGL), and Center of Hole in Top Plate (CHTP), of each KRS site using three different survey methods, the Virtual Reference Station (VRS), Flächen Korrektur Parameter (FKP), and raw data post-processing methods. By comparing and analyzing the results, the computed coordinates of the reference points were verified and Antenna Phase Center (APC) positions were calculated using KRS Antenna Reference Point (ARP) data, and the first KASS Site Acceptance Test (SAT#1) was performed successfully using the verified APC coordinates. After the first site survey activities, the KASS operators should maintain the coordinates with the required performance such that the overall KASS navigation performance commitment is guaranteed during the lifetime of 15 years. Therefore, the maintenance plan for the KRS antenna coordinates should be developed before the commissioning of KASS operation planned after 2023. Therefore, this paper presents a geodetic survey method selected for the maintenance activities and provides the rationale for using this method.

• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.22 no.6
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• pp.39-44
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• 2022

The advent, course, and possible consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic are now the focus of global attention. From whichever side the geopolitical centers of influence might view it, the problem of the coronavirus concerns all world leaders and the representatives of all branches of science, especially physicians, economists, and politicians - virtually the entire population of the planet. The uniqueness of the COVID-19 phenomenon lies in the uncertainty of the problem itself, the peculiarities and specifics of the course of the biological processes in modern conditions, as well as the sharp confrontation of the main political players on the world stage. Based on an analysis of scientific research, the article describes the profile of the emotional concept of "anxiety" in Russian linguoculture. Through monitoring the headlines of Russian media reports in the "COVID-19" section of Google News and Mail News news aggregators dated August 4-6, 2021, the study establishes the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of the alarm-generating news products on coronavirus in the Russian segment of the Internet and interprets the specifics of media information about COVID-19. The level of mass media criticism in Russia is determined through a phone survey. It is concluded that coronavirus reports in online media conceptualize anxiety about the SARS virus and the COVID-19 disease as a complex cognitive structure. The media abuse the trick of "magic numbers" and emotionally expressive words in news headlines, which are perceived by mass information consumers first and typically uncritically.

• Ecology and Resilient Infrastructure
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.154-162
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• 2022

In this study, a technique for estimating water surface velocity fields in the Universal Transverse Mercator coordinate system using the GPS information of a propagating drone but not ground control points is developed. First, we determine the image direction in which the upper side of an image is directed based on the navigation information of the drone. Subsequently, we assign the start and end frames of the video used and determine the analysis range. Using these two frames, we segment the measurement cross-section into a few subsections at regular intervals. At these subsections, we analyze 30 frame images to create spatio-temporal volumes for calculating the velocity fields. The results of the developed method (propagating drone surface image velocimetry) are compared with those of the existing method (hovering drone surface image velocimetry), and relatively good agreement is indicated between both in terms of the velocity fields.