• Radiation Oncology Journal
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• v.31 no.2
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• pp.57-65
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• 2013

Beta-lapachone (${\beta}$-Lap; 3,4-dihydro-2, 2-dimethyl-2H-naphthol[1, 2-b]pyran-5,6-dione) is a novel anti-cancer drug under phase I/II clinical trials. ${\beta}$-Lap has been demonstrated to cause apoptotic and necrotic death in a variety of human cancer cells in vitro and in vivo. The mechanisms underlying the ${\beta}$-Lap toxicity against cancer cells has been controversial. The most recent view is that ${\beta}$-Lap, which is a quinone compound, undergoes two-electron reduction to hydroquinone form utilizing NAD(P)H or NADH as electron source. This two-electron reduction of ${\beta}$-Lap is mediated by NAD(P)H:quinone oxidoreductase (NQO1), which is known to mediate the reduction of many quinone compounds. The hydroquinone forms of ${\beta}$-Lap then spontaneously oxidizes back to the original oxidized ${\beta}$-Lap, creating futile cycling between the oxidized and reduced forms of ${\beta}$-Lap. It is proposed that the futile recycling between oxidized and reduced forms of ${\beta}$-Lap leads to two distinct cell death pathways. First one is that the two-electron reduced ${\beta}$-Lap is converted first to one-electron reduced ${\beta}$-Lap, i.e., semiquinone ${\beta}$-Lap $(SQ)^{{\cdot}-}$ causing production of reactive oxygen species (ROS), which then causes apoptotic cell death. The second mechanism is that severe depletion of NAD(P)H and NADH as a result of futile cycling between the quinone and hydroquinone forms of ${\beta}$-Lap causes severe disturbance in cellular metabolism leading to apoptosis and necrosis. The relative importance of the aforementioned two mechanisms, i.e., generation of ROS or depletion of NAD(P)H/NADH, may vary depending on cell type and environment. Importantly, the NQO1 level in cancer cells has been found to be higher than that in normal cells indicating that ${\beta}$-Lap may be preferentially toxic to cancer cells relative to non-cancer cells. The cellular level of NQO1 has been found to be significantly increased by divergent physical and chemical stresses including ionizing radiation. Recent reports clearly demonstrated that ${\beta}$-Lap and ionizing radiation kill cancer cells in a synergistic manner. Indications are that irradiation of cancer cells causes long-lasting elevation of NQO1, thereby sensitizing the cells to ${\beta}$-Lap. In addition, ${\beta}$-Lap has been shown to inhibit the repair of sublethal radiation damage. Treating experimental tumors growing in the legs of mice with irradiation and intraperitoneal injection of ${\beta}$-Lap suppressed the growth of the tumors in a manner more than additive. Collectively, ${\beta}$-Lap is a potentially useful anti-cancer drug, particularly in combination with radiotherapy.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.11 no.8
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• pp.339-346
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• 2022

Recently, the resource depletion and climate change problem caused by the massive usage of fossil fuels for electric power generation has become a critical issue worldwide. According to this issue, interest in renewable energy resources that can replace fossil fuels is increasing. Especially, photovoltaic power has gaining much attention because there is no risk of resource exhaustion compared to other energy resources and there are low restrictions on installation of photovoltaic system. In order to use the power generated by the photovoltaic system efficiently, a more accurate photovoltaic power forecasting model is required. So far, even though many machine learning and deep learning-based photovoltaic power forecasting models have been proposed, they showed limited success in terms of interpretability. Deep learning-based forecasting models have the disadvantage of being difficult to explain how the forecasting results are derived. To solve this problem, many studies are being conducted on explainable artificial intelligence technique. The reliability of the model can be secured if it is possible to interpret how the model derives the results. Also, the model can be improved to increase the forecasting accuracy based on the analysis results. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an explainable photovoltaic power forecasting scheme based on BiLSTM (Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory) and SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations).

• Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.181-190
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• 2005

Severe loss or hydrogen occurred in most anaerobic hydrogen fermentation reactors. Several selected methods were applied to suppress the consumption of hydrogen and increase the potential of production. As the first trial, pH shock was applied. The pH of reactor was dropped nearly to 3.0 by stopping alkalinity supply and on]y feeding glucose (5 g/L-d). As the pH was increase to $4.8{\pm}0.2,$ the degradation pathway was derived to solventogenesis resulting in disappearance of hydrogen in the headspace. In the aspect of bacterial community, methanogens weren't detected after 22 and 35 day, respectively. Even though, however, there was no methanogenic bacterium detected with fluorescence in-situ hybridization (FISH) method, hydrogen loss still occurred in the reactor showing a continuous increase of acetate when the pH was increased to $5.5{\pm}0.2$. This result was suggesting the possibility of the survival of spore fanning acetogenic bacteria enduring the severely acidic pH. As an alternative and additive method, nitrate was added in a batch experiment. It resulted in the increase of maximum hydrogen fraction from 29 (blank) to 61 % $(500\;mg\;NO_3/L)$. However, unfortunately, the loss of hydrogen occurred right after the depletion of nitrate by denitrification. In order to prevent the loss entangled with acetate formation, $CO_2$ scavenging in the headspace was applied to the hydrogen fermentation with heat-treated sludge since it was the primer of acetogenesis. As the $CO_2$ scavenging was applied, the maximum fraction of hydrogen was enhanced from 68 % to 87 %. And the loss of hydrogen could be protected effectively.

• Journal of the Microelectronics and Packaging Society
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.49-54
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• 2022

The copper plating process used to fabricate the submicron damascene pattern of Cu wiring for Si wafer was applied to the plating of a PCB pattern of several tens of microns in size using the same organic additives and current density conditions. In this case, the non-uniformity of the plating thickness inside the pattern was observed. In order to quantitatively analyze the cause, a numerical calculation considering the solution flow and electric field was carried out. The calculation confirmed that the depletion of Cu²⁺ ions in the solution occurred relatively earlier at the bottom corner than the upper part of the pattern due to the plating of the sidewall and the bottom at the corner of the pattern bottom. The diffusion coefficient of Cu²⁺ ions is 2.65 10^-10 m²/s, which means that Cu²⁺ ions move at 16.3 ㎛ per second on average. In the cases of small damascene patterns, the velocity of Cu²⁺ ions is high enough to supply sufficient ions to the inside of the patterns, while sufficient time is required to replenish the exhausted copper ions in the case of a PCB pattern having a size of several tens of microns. Therefore, it is found that the thickness uniformity can be improved by reducing the current density to supply sufficient copper ions to the target area.