• Journal of Pharmaceutical Investigation
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• v.33 no.4
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• pp.267-272
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• 2003

Herpes simplex virus (HSV) thymidine kinase (TK) has been widely used for suicidal gene therapy in combination with nucleoside analogs such as ganciclovir (GCV). The use of HSV-TK is limited due to the side effect of GCV at high concentrations. Previous studies showed that stable transfectants of mutant HSV-TK with enhanced affinity to GCV were killed at lower GCV concentrations. In this study, we tested whether mutant HSV-TK can provide enhanced suicidal effect when transiently transfected with Epstein-Barr virus (EBV)-based plasmid. EBV-based plasmid which contains OriP and EBNA-1 sequence is well known for a stable episomal maintenance in human cells. Optimal transfection condition was assessed for SNU-638 gastric cancer cell line using polyetylnimine (PEI). Maximum transfection efficiency was achieved when DNA:PEI was 1:3 (w/v). Cytotoxicities of mutant and wild type HSV-TK were compared before and after partially selecting transfected cells. The cells were sensitive to $100\;{\mu}g/ml$ hygromycin. Following GCV treatment, more cells were killed after hygromycin selection than before selection. The mutant HSV-TK showed enhanced cytotoxicity compared with the wild type HSV-TK. Our results suggest that the EBV-based plasmid encoding mutant HSV-TK may be useful to treat the diseases caused by uncontrolled cell proliferation such as cancer and rheumatoid arthritis.

• The Korea Journal of Herbology
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• v.36 no.5
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• pp.37-46
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• 2021

Objective : This study aims to examine the effectiveness and safety of herbal medicines in upper respiratory tract infection by conducting systematic review against amoxicillin. Methods : Relevant randomized controlled trials (RCTs) published by December 2020 were searched in PubMED database. Study selection was conducted according to the PRISMA guideline. The Risk of Bias of the RCTs were evaluated based on the Cochrane criteria. Study selection and bias assessment were conducted independently by two researchers, and the third party was involved if there is a disagreement. Results : Three RCTs were included. Meta-analysis was not performed due to different specific disease and outcome measurements among the included studies. Herbal medicine showed statistically significant improvement in symptoms and endoscopic findings compared to amoxicillin in acute rhinosinusitis. In addition, herbal medicine showed statistically significant improvement in symptoms and a smaller dose of additional antibiotics in acute tonsillitis. However, herbal medicine showed no significant effects compared to amoxicillin in chronic sinusitis patients after functional endoscopic sinus surgery. In terms of adverse events, no significant difference was observed between the herbal medicine group and the amoxicillin group in all studies. Conclusion : Herbal medicine might be more effective than amoxicillin in the treatment of upper respiratory tract infection. Nevertheless, it is hard to clear that conclusion due to the fact that the collected studies were conducted on different specific diseases and herbal medicine, and that the included studies had flaws in the research methodology.

• Journal of Convergence for Information Technology
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• v.8 no.5
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• pp.131-135
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• 2018

The heart disease taking the second place of the cause of the death of modern people is a terrible disease that makes sudden death without noticing. To judge the aortic valve disease of heart diseases a name of disease was diagnosed using psychological data provided from physioNet. Aortic valve is a valve of the area that blood is spilled from left ventricle to aorta. Aortic stenosis of heart troubles is a disease when the valve does not open appropriately in contracting the left ventricle to aorta due to narrowed aortic valve. In this paper, 3126 samples of cardiac sound data were used as an experiment data composed of 180 characteristics including normal people and aortic valve stenosis patients. To diagnose normal and aortic valve stenosis patients, NEWFM was utilized. By using an average method of weight as an feature selection method of NEWFM, the result shows 91.0871% accuracy.

• Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health
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• v.42 no.4
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• pp.267-273
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• 2009

Objectives : To compare the performance of three comorbidity measurements (Charlson comorbidity index, Elixhauser s comorbidity and comorbidity selection) with the effect of different comorbidity lookback periods when predicting in-hospital mortality for patients who underwent percutaneous coronary intervention. Methods : This was a retrospective study on patients aged 40 years and older who underwent percutaneous coronary intervention. To distinguish comorbidity from complications, the records of diagnosis were drawn from the National Health Insurance Database excluding diagnosis that admitted to the hospital. C-statistic values were used as measures for in comparing the predictability of comorbidity measures with lookback period, and a bootstrapping procedure with 1,000 replications was done to determine approximate 95% confidence interval. Results : Of the 61,815 patients included in this study, the mean age was 63.3 years (standard deviation: ${\pm}$10.2) and 64.8% of the population was male. Among them, 1,598 2.6%) had died in hospital. While the predictive ability of the Elixhauser's comorbidity and comorbidity selection was better than that of the Charlson comorbidity index, there was no significant difference among the three comorbidity measurements. Although the prevalence of comorbidity increased in 3 years of lookback periods, there was no significant improvement compared to 1 year of a lookback period. Conclusions : In a health outcome study for patients who underwent percutaneous coronary intervention using National Health Insurance Database, the Charlson comorbidity index was easy to apply without significant difference in predictability compared to the other methods. The one year of observation period was adequate to adjust the comorbidity. Further work to select adequate comorbidity measurements and lookback periods on other diseases and procedures are needed.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.289-294
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• 2020

Peptic ulcer disease is a gastrointestinal disorder caused by Helicobacter pylori infection and the use of nonsteroid anti-inflammatory drugs. While many studies have been conducted to find the risk factors of peptic ulcers, there are no studies on the suggestion of peptic ulcer prediction models for Koreans. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to implement peptic ulcer prediction model using machine learning based on demographic information, obesity information, blood information, and nutritional information for middle-aged and elderly people. For model building, wrapper-based variable selection method and naive Bayes algorithm were used. The classification accuracy of the female prediction model was the area under the receiver operating characteristics curve (AUC) of 0.712, and males showed an AUC of 0.674, which is lower than that of females. These results can be used for prediction and prevention of peptic ulcers in the middle and elderly people.

• The Korean Journal of Applied Statistics
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• v.28 no.3
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• pp.407-415
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• 2015

$Na{\ddot{i}}ve$ Bayes Classification is based on input variables that are a conditionally independent given output variable. The $Na{\ddot{i}}ve$ Bayes assumption is unrealistic but simplifies the problem of high dimensional joint probability estimation into a series of univariate probability estimations. Thus $Na{\ddot{i}}ve$ Bayes classier is often adopted in the analysis of massive data sets such as in spam e-mail filtering and recommendation systems. In this paper, we propose a variable selection method based on ${\chi}^2$ statistic on input and output variables. The proposed method retains the simplicity of $Na{\ddot{i}}ve$ Bayes classier in terms of data processing and computation; however, it can select relevant variables. It is expected that our method can be useful in classification problems for ultra-high dimensional or big data such as the classification of diseases based on single nucleotide polymorphisms(SNPs).

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.32 no.2
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• pp.134-143
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• 2011

The selection of meaningful clinical tests and its reference values from a high-dimensional clinical data with imbalanced class distribution, one class is represented by a large number of examples while the other is represented by only a few, is an important issue for differential diagnosis between similar diseases, but difficult. For this purpose, this study introduces methods based on the concepts of both discernibility matrix and function in rough set theory (RST) with two discretization approaches, equal width and frequency discretization. Here these discretization approaches are used to define the reference values for clinical tests, and the discernibility matrix and function are used to extract a subset of significant clinical tests from the translated nominal attribute values. To show its applicability in the differential diagnosis problem, we have applied it to extract the significant clinical tests and its reference values between normal (N = 351) and abnormal group (N = 101) with either cholecystitis or cholelithiasis disease. In addition, we investigated not only the selected significant clinical tests and the variations of its reference values, but also the average predictive accuracies on four evaluation criteria, i.e., accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and geometric mean, during l0-fold cross validation. From the experimental results, we confirmed that two discretization approaches based rough set approximation methods with relative frequency give better results than those with absolute frequency, in the evaluation criteria (i.e., average geometric mean). Thus it shows that the prediction model using relative frequency can be used effectively in classification and prediction problems of the clinical data with imbalanced class distribution.

• Parasites, Hosts and Diseases
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• v.61 no.2
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• pp.216-224
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• 2023

In several schistosomiasis-endemic countries, the prevalence has remained high in some areas owing to reinfection despite repeated mass drug administration (MDA) interventions; these areas are referred to as persistent hot spots. Identifying hotspots is critical for interrupting transmission. This study aimed to determine an effective means of identifying persistent hot spots. First, we investigated the differences between Schistosoma haematobium and Schistosoma mansoni prevalence among school-aged children (SAC) estimated by a community-based survey, for which local key informants purposively selected communities, and a randomly sampled school-based survey. A total of 6,225 individuals residing in 60 villages in 8 districts of North Kordofan, Blue Nile, or Sennar States, Sudan participated in a community-based survey in March 2018. Additionally, the data of 3,959 students attending 71 schools in the same 8 districts were extracted from a nationwide school-based survey conducted in January 2017. The community-based survey identified 3 districts wherein the prevalence of S. haematobium or S. mansoni infection among SAC was significantly higher than that determined by the randomly sampled school survey (e.g., S. haematobium in the Sennar district: 10.8% vs. 1.1%, P<0.001). At the state level, the prevalence of schistosomiasis among SAC, as determined by the community-based survey, was consistently significantly higher than that determined by the school-based survey. Purposeful selection of villages or schools based on a history of MDA, latrine coverage, open defecation, and the prevalence of bloody urine improved the ability for identifying persistent hot spots.

• Korean Journal of Acupuncture
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• v.34 no.2
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• pp.88-99
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• 2017

Objectives : Saam acupuncture initiated by Saamdoin in $17^{th}$ century is one of the most widely adopted acupuncture techniques used by Korean medical doctors in clinic. Our study aimed to analyze the application of the Saam acupuncture method to pain diseases based on the literature data. Methods : Based on the contents described in "(Do Hae Kyo Kam) Saam's acupuncture method", the texts related to pain condition were analyzed. The frequency of prescription of Saam acupuncture method was analyzed, and then the relationships between each acupoint were visualized by network analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis for the quantitative aspect. Results and conclusions: In our study, Lung tonifying and Liver tonifying acupuncture were the most frequently used method for the treatment of pain disease. As the acupoints, BL66 and SI5 were used the most frequently. It was found that visceral pattern identification was considered as the most important factor in the selection of the Saam acupuncture method. Network analysis and hierarchical clustering analysis showed that each acupoint was closely related to other acupoints, and most of them were connected more closely according to the method of Saam acupuncture operation. The experiential prescriptions of Saam acupuncture were classified as an independent group. In the future, fundamental research on the principle of Saam acupuncture method is needed for the various diseases, and research for the clinical efficacy and the mechanism of Saam acupuncture method should be preceded.

• Journal of Korean Neurosurgical Society
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• v.51 no.6
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• pp.350-358
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• 2012

Objective : Life expectancy for humans has increased dramatically and with this there has been a considerable increase in the number of patients suffering from lumbar spine disease. Symptomatic lumbar spinal disease should be treated, even in the elderly, and surgical procedures such as fusion surgery are needed for moderate to severe lumbar spinal disease. However, various perioperative complications are associated with fusion surgery. The aim of this study was to examine perioperative complications and assess risk factors associated with lumbar spinal fusion, focusing on geriatric patients at least 70 years of age in the Republic of Korea. Methods : We retrospectively investigated 489 patients with various lumbar spinal diseases who underwent lumbar spinal fusion surgery between 2003 and 2007 at our institution. Three fusion procedures and the number of fused segments were analyzed in this study. Chronic diseases were also evaluated. Risk factors for complications and their association with age were analyzed. Results : In this study, 74 patients experienced complications (15%). The rate of perioperative complications was significantly higher in patients 70 years of age or older than in other age groups (univariate analysis, p=0.001; multivariate analysis, p=0.004). However, perioperative complications were not significantly associated with the other factors tested (sex, comorbidities, operation procedures, fusion segments involved). Conclusion : Increasing age was an important risk factor for perioperative complications in patients undergoing lumbar spinal fusion surgery whereas other factors were not significant. We recommend good clinical judgment and careful selection of geriatric patients undergoing lumbar spinal fusion surgery.