• Health Policy and Management
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.58-73
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• 2010

Background : Cancer is a disease that not only places a significant burden on patients clinically but also requires significant expense for diagnosis and treatment. Although the cancer coverage of health insurance has recently been expended, the need for financial assistance among cancer patients and their families is still expected to be significant. In this study, cancer patients' need for financial assistance in Korea was examined and its influence factors were analyzed. Methods : Target study subjects were those who are over 18 years of age and were diagnosed with cancer more than four months prior at the National Cancer Center and 9 Regional Cancer Centers in Korea during the period from July to August of 2008. Quarter sampling was conducted according to the ratio of the type of each cancer. A face to face interview survey was conducted. A total of 2,661 cancer patients finished the survey. Medical charts were reviewed in order to obtain the cancer type and SEER stage of cancer patients. An ordered logistic regression model was used to examine the level of need for financial assistance according to the demographical, clinical, and socio-economic variables of cancer patients. Result : The percentage of cancer patients who needed financial assistance was 69.0%, and 36.9% needed significant financial assistance. The need for financial assistance was perceived to be greater in males, younger age group, low income group, low education group, medical aid recipients, those who were diagnosed recently, those with a low level of quality of life measured through EQ5D, and those with decreased income after cancer diagnosis. Conclusion : In spite of the current policy to increase health insurance coverage, the majority of cancer patients and their families in Korea still need financial assistance due to cancer. In particular, there were more vulnerable groups, such as the low income, or low education group. In the future, policies that focus on the disadvantaged, which strengthen social security, should be considered for achievement of a substantially better quality of life for cancer patients and their families.

• The Journal of Korean Society for Radiation Therapy
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• v.32
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• pp.53-59
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• 2020

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to compare and analyze the difference between the MLC log file-based software (Mobius) and the conventional phantom-ionization chamber (ArcCheck) dose verification method according to the change of target volume. Material and method: Radius 0.25cm, 0.5cm, 1cm, 2cm, 3cm, 4cm, 5cm, 6cm, 7cm, 8cm, 9cm, 10cm with a Sphere-shaped target Twelve plans were created and dose verification using Mobius and ArcCheck was conducted three times each. The irradiated data were compared and analyzed using the point dose error value and the gamma passing rate (3%/3mm) as evaluation indicators. Result: Mobius point dose error values were -9.87% at a radius of 0.25cm and -4.39% at 0.5cm, and the error value was within 3% at the remaining target volume. The gamma passing rate was 95% at a radius of 9cm and 93.9% at 10cm, and a passing rate of more than 95% was shown in the remaining target volume. In ArcCheck, the average error value of the point dose was about 2% in all target volumes. The gamma passing rate also showed a pass rate of 98% or more in all target volumes. Conclusion: For small targets with a radius of 0.5cm or less or a large target with a radius of 9cm or more, considering the uncertainty of DQA based on MLC log files, phantom-ionized DQA is used in complementary ways to include point dose, gamma index, DVH, and target coverage. It is believed that it is desirable to verify the dose delivery through a comprehensive analysis.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.10 no.7
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• pp.449-458
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• 2010

The e-Learning quality assurance is a part of responsibility for education in latest information age, and should be understood as a basic direction for qualitative enhancement rather than quantifiable expansion. In such a context, this study sought to survey latest trends of e-Learning quality assurance activities deployed around overseas countries, so that it could give possible implications on how to plan and perform e-Learning quality assurance in Korea. So, this study focused on surveying actual conditions, coverage, target and useful indices of e-Learning quality assurance activities deployed by 9 institutions across 5 countries, and characterizing those activities across 5 countries. As a result, this study could find out its implications such as acquisition of various resources available for e-Learning, nationwide consolidation of e-Learning quality assurance activities, development of specialists in e-Learning quality assurance, and choice and focus for e-Learning quality assurance system. In other words, it was found that e-Learning quality assurance should be approached from nationwide standpoint in the interest of better educational quality, rather than from viewpoint of task.

• Journal of The Korean Society of Agricultural Engineers
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• v.60 no.3
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• pp.1-13
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• 2018

Recently, the frequency and intensity of drought have been increasing due to the sudden abnormal climate in Korea. The occurrence of agricultural drought has been steadily increasing from 5 times in the 1980s to 2000s in 20 years, 6 times in the 10 years from 2000 to 2010, and 4 times in the recent period from 2011 to 2015. Therefore, this study analyzed the effect of water shortage caused by drought by improving the function of agricultural reservoir. The target area analyzed the data such as "Comprehensive Information System for Rural Water" operated by Korea Rural Community Corporation. As a result, we selected the target area as Wanju - gun, Jeollabuk - do in consideration of the rate of water storage compared with the normal 25 years, the completion year of the facility, the area of coverage per reservoir site and the low capacity. As a result of evaluating the improvement effect of agricultural facilities, it was analyzed that the irrigation area increased by about 25.7% when the water level was increased by 1m and the irrigation area increased by about 51.3% when the water level was increased by 2m. The results of the drought impact assessment after improving the function of the agricultural facilities were analyzed that it was effective to improve the function after more than 4m depth.

• Journal of Navigation and Port Research
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• v.37 no.5
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• pp.447-452
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• 2013

Vessel traffic system uses multiple sea surveillance radars as a primary sensor to obtain maritime traffic information like as ship's position, speed, course. The systematic errors such as the range bias and the azimuth bias of the two-dimensional radar system can significantly degrade the accuracy of the radar image and target tracking information. Therefore, the systematic errors of the radar system should be corrected precisely in order to provide the accurate target information in the vessel traffic system. In this paper, it is proposed that the method compensates the range bias and the azimuth bias using AtoN information installed at VTS coverage. The radar measurement residual error model is derived from the standard error model of two-dimensional radar measurements and the position information of AtoN, and then the linear Kalman filter is designed for estimation of the systematic errors of the radar system. The proposed method is validated via Monte-Carlo runs. Also, the convergence characteristics of the designed filter and the accuracy of the systematic error estimates according to the number of AtoN information are analyzed.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.42 no.5
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• pp.992-998
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• 2017

For local advertising based on D2D communications, sources want advertisement messages to be diffused to unspecified users as many as possible. It is one of challenging issues to select target-areas for advertising if users are uniformly distributed. In this paper, we propose D2D based advertisement dissemination algorithm using user clustering with expectation-maximization. The user distribution of each cluster can be estimated by principal components (PCs) obtained from each cluster. That is, PCs enable the target-areas and routing paths to be properly determined according to the user distribution. Consequently, advertisement messages are able to be disseminated to many users. We evaluate performances of our proposed algorithm with respect to coverage probability and average reception number per user.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.39B no.10
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• pp.664-673
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• 2014

This paper analyzes the power allocation scheme to maximize the sum-rate for heterogeneous networks based on asynchronous time division duplex. We consider heterogeneous networks where a small cell exists in the macro cell coverage and the small cell and the macro cell share the same time-frequency resources. We formulate the optimization problem which maximizes the sum-rate of the heterogeneous network subject to the target signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio. We analyze the feasible region in order for the optimal solution to exists and the optimal power allocation scheme for maximizing the sum-rate. Simulation results show that the proposed power allocation schemes outperform the maximum power transmission scheme.

• Journal of Korean Society for Geospatial Information Science
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.17-24
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• 2014

This paper proposes an automatic extraction method of control point based on Geospatial Web Service. The proposed method consists of 3 steps. 1) The first step is to acquires reference data using the Geospatial Web Service. 2) The second step is to finds candidate control points in reference data and the target image by SURF algorithm. 3) By using RANSAC algorithm, the final step is to filters the correct matching points of candidate control points as final control points. By using the Geospatial Web Service, the proposed method increases operation convenience, and has the more extensible because of following the OGC Standard. The proposed method has been tested for SPOT-1, SPOT-5, IKONOS satellite images and has been used military standard data as reference data. The proposed method yielded a uniform accuracy under RMSE 5 pixel. The experimental results proved the capabilities of continuous improvement in accuracy depending on the resolution of target image, and showed the full potential of the proposed method for military purpose.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Electromagnetic Engineering and Science
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• v.23 no.12
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• pp.1388-1398
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• 2012

SAR(Synthetic Aperture Radar) systems can provide images of wide coverage in day, night, and all-weather conditions. However wideband SAR systems are known to be vulnerable to interferences from other devices operating at in-band or adjacent spectrums and this may lead to image corruptions. In this paper, a SAR point target simulator is developed that provides performance analysis on image distortion caused by interferences from other devices. Interference signals are generated based on the experimental data observed from acquired SAR raw data. Simulation results include typical SAR performance measures such as spatial resolution, peak to sidelobe ratio and integrated sidelobe ratio. Finally, SAR target simulations are performed and shown to correspond to the image corruptions found in real SAR missions affected by RF interferences.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.131-137
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• 2010

Genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have greatly contributed to the identification of common variants responsible for numerous complex traits. There are, however, unavoidable limitations in detecting causal and/or rare variants for traits in this approach, which depends on an LD-based tagging SNP microarray chip. In an effort to detect potential casual and/or rare variants for complex traits, such as type 2 diabetes (T2D) and triglycerides (TGs), we conducted a targeted resequencing of loci identified by the Korea Association REsource (KARE) GWAS. The target regions for resequencing comprised whole exons, exon-intron boundaries, and regulatory regions of genes that appeared within 1 Mb of the GWA signal boundary. From 124 individuals selected in population-based cohorts, a total of 0.7 Mb target regions were captured by the NimbleGen sequence capture 385K array. Subsequent sequencing, carried out by the Roche 454 Genome Sequencer FLX, generated about 110,000 sequence reads per individual. Mapping of sequence reads to the human reference genome was performed using the SSAHA2 program. An average of 62.2% of total reads was mapped to targets with an average 22X-fold coverage. A total of 5,983 SNPs (average 846 SNPs per individual) were called and annotated by GATK software, with 96.5% accuracy that was estimated by comparison with Affymetrix 5.0 genotyped data in identical individuals. About 51% of total SNPs were singletons that can be considered possible rare variants in the population. Among SNPs that appeared in exons, which occupies about 20% of total SNPs, 304 nonsynonymous singletons were tested with Polyphen to predict the protein damage caused by mutation. In total, we were able to detect 9 and 6 potentially functional rare SNPs for T2D and triglycerides, respectively, evoking a further step of replication genotyping in independent populations to prove their bona fide relevance to traits.