• The Journal of Korean Medicine
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• v.27 no.2 s.66
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• pp.134-144
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• 2006

Tongue diagnosis is an important diagnostic method in traditional Oriental medicine. It has been especially accepted that quantitative analysis of tongue images allows the accurate diagnosis of the exterior-interior and cold-heat patterns of a patient. However, to ensure stable and reliable results, the color reproduction of such images must first be error-tree. Moreover, tongue diagnosis is much influenced by the surrounding illumination and subjective color recognition, so it has to be performed objectively and quantitatively using a digital diagnostic machine. In this study, 457 tongue images of outpatients were collected using the Digital Tongue Inspection System. Through statistical analysis, the result shows that the heat and cold patterns can be distinguished clearly based on the hue value of the tongue images. The average hue value (1.00) of the tongue's image in the cold pattern is higher than that in the heat pattern (0.99).

• Journal of Physiology & Pathology in Korean Medicine
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• v.19 no.5
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• pp.1437-1442
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• 2005

Tongue Diagnosis is the important traditional oriental medical diagnosis method that observes not only the general physiological state but also some kinds of disease. However, manual tongue diagnosis is much influenced by surrounding illumination. Therefore, Digital Tongue Inspection System(DigiTis) is needed for the quantification of objective tongue information, In this research, Tongue images of 98 malignant Neoplasm patients and 34 normal persons were collected by Digital Tongue Inspection System. Statistical analysis of tongue images and patient data indicates that cancer group has more blue-purple components in tongue body(舌質) and yellow components in tongue coating than normal group. Also, there are a lot of rose-pink components in the cancer group of second stage and blue-purple components in the cancer group of third or fourth stage. Our study shows that tongue image is a useful index for distinction between disease and health. Furthermore we need more extended research through the additional sampling and various disease.

• Biomedical Science Letters
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.195-202
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• 2004

Lung cancer is a leading cause of cancer death worldwide; however, despite major advances in cancer treatment during the past two decades, the prognostic outcome of lung cancer patients has improved only minimally. This is largely due to the inadequacy of the traditional screening approach of diagnosis in lung cancer, which detects only well­established overt cancers and fails to identify precursor lesions in premalignant conditions of the bronchial tree. In recent years this situation has fundamentally changed with the identification of molecular abnormalities characteristic of premalignant changes; these concern tumour suppressor genes, loss of heterozygosity at crucial sites and activation of oncogenes. Basic knowledge at the molecular level has extremely important clinical implications with regard to early diagnosis, risk assessment and prevention, and therapeutic targets. In this study we used a 'cap-finder' subtractive hybridization method, 'long distance' polymerase chain reaction (PCR), streptavidin magnetic beads mediated subtraction, and spin column chromatography to detect differential expression genes of human small cell lung carcinoma. We have now isolated ninety two genes that expressed differentially in the human small cell lung carcinoma cells and analyzed of 12 clones with sequencing, nine cDNAs include tapasin (NGS-17) mRNA, BC200 alpha scRNA, chromosome 12q24 PAC RPCI3-462E2, protein phosphatase 1 (PPPICA), translocation protein 1 (TLOC1), ribosomal protein S24 (RPS24) mRNA, protein phosphatase (PPEF2), cathepsin Z, MDM2 gene and three novel genes. They may be oncogenesis­related proteins.

• Biomedical Science Letters
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• v.28 no.4
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• pp.298-306
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• 2022

Pathological tissue fixation using formalin has been widely used for histological samples in many hospitals and institutions. In general, formalin fixatives were either manufactured in laboratories or purchased commercially because of the risks and environmental concerns of handling organic compounds. In this study, the efficacy of three kinds of commercially purchased and one laboratory-made formalin fixative was compared in the PCR-based molecular diagnosis using the extracted DNA from formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissues. The quality of extracted DNA from FFPE tonsil tissues with four kinds of formalin solutions was evaluated, and PCR for beta-globin gene and microsatellite instabilities (MSI) tests for pentaplex panel markers were performed using the extracted DNA. There was no difference in PCR and MSI tests as molecular diagnoses regardless of the types of formalin used in this study. However, the total amount and average length of double-stranded DNA extracted from FFPE tonsil tissue showed significant differences according to the type of formalin fixative. Optimized formalin fixatives and methods for DNA extraction might be sophisticated to extract good quality DNA from the small size of specific tissue samples. Further studies are needed to select the most effective formalin fixative for histology and molecular pathology using human FFPE tissues.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2005.05a
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• pp.36-38
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• 2005

Photodynamic diagnosis is a modern method for the fluorescence imaging of cancer. 5-ALA induced protoporphyrin IX fluorescence benefits the tumour selective accumulation of protoporphyrin ; therefore, tumours can be differentiated from healthy tissue. This paper develops Photodynamic diagnosis (PDD) system about ALA that apply tissue absorption coefficient. About other photosensitizer, application capacitate. In this paper, we will expect effective result by working PDD with PDT (photodynamic therapy) system that is a therapy device of cancer.

• Journal of the Optical Society of Korea
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.55-59
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• 2014

Sarcopenia, or reduced muscle mass and volume, is due to various factors such as senile change, neuronal degeneration, drug, malignancy, and sepsis. Sarcopenia with the aging process has been evidenced by the decline in muscle mass by 0.5 to 1% per year with 3-5% reduction in muscle strength for 10 years between the ages of 40 and 50, and a 1-2% of decline of mass every year in people aged 60-70. Therefore, early diagnosis and understanding the mechanism of sarcopenia are crucial in the prevention of muscle loss. However, it is still difficult to image changes of muscle microstructure due to a lack of techniques. In this study, we developed an animal model using denervated rats to induce a rapid atrophy in the tibialis anterior (TA) and imaged its structural changes using optical coherence tomography (OCT) along with histologic and ultrasound analyses. Ultrasound showed changes of overall muscle size. Histology revealed that the atrophic TA muscle displayed an increased size variability of muscle fiber and inflammatory changes. Three dimensional OCT imaged the changes of perimysial grid and muscle fiber structure in real time without sacrifice. These observed advantages of multimodal imaging using OCT and ultrasound would provide clinical benefits in the diagnosis of sarcopenia.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.42 no.3
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• pp.71-79
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• 2021

Currently, the naked eyes-based diagnosis of bone metastases on CT images relies on qualitative assessment. For this reason, there is a great need for a state-of-the-art approach that can assess and follow-up the bone metastases with quantitative biomarker. Radiomics can be used as a biomarker for objective lesion assessment by extracting quantitative numerical values from digital medical images. In this study, therefore, we evaluated the clinical applicability of non-invasive and objective bone metastases computer-aided diagnosis using radiomics-based biomarkers in CT. We employed a total of 21 approaches consist of three-classifiers and seven-feature selection methods to predict bone metastases and select biomarkers. We extracted three-dimensional features from the CT that three groups consisted of osteoblastic, osteolytic, and normal-healthy vertebral bodies. For evaluation, we compared the prediction results of the classifiers with the medical staff's diagnosis results. As a result of the three-class-classification performance evaluation, we demonstrated that the combination of the random forest classifier and the sequential backward selection feature selection approach reached AUC of 0.74 on average. Moreover, we confirmed that 90-percentile, kurtosis, and energy were the features that contributed high in the classification of bone metastases in this approach. We expect that selected quantitative features will be helpful as biomarkers in improving the patient's survival and quality of life.

• Biomedical Science Letters
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.24-28
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• 2016

Tuberculosis (TB) remains an unsolved community health problem since identification of its causing microorganism called Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) by Robert Koch in 1882. Annually, eight million TB cases are newly reported and 2~3 million patients die from TB. Pulmonary TB is highly infectious and untreated pulmonary TB patients are believed to infect >10 people in a year. The conventional methods for diagnosis of TB are chest X-ray and isolation of the causing microorganisms from patient specimens. Screening of TB is conducted with smeared sputum in slides, and TB is confirmed by identification of MTB in cultured specimens. One of the fatal pitfalls of screening detection for smeared sputum is that it is impossible to distinguish MTB and other acid-fast bacilli (AFB) because they are stained equally with Ziehl-Neelsen (ZN) stain. Culture of MTB is the most reliable method for diagnosis of TB but it takes 4~8 weeks. In this report, we suggest a fast and highly-reliable MTB detection method that distinguishes AFB in sputum samples. Purified DNA from the AFB stained slide samples offered by The Korean Institute of Tuberculosis were used to detect infected MTB in patients. PCR, real-time PCR and reverse blot hybridization assay (REBA) methods were applied to purified DNA. Conclusively, the real-time PCR method was confirmed to produce high sensitivity and we were able to further detect drug-resistant MTB with REBA.

• Journal of Physiology & Pathology in Korean Medicine
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.202-208
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• 2006

The goal of this study is to develop knowledge representation method for the construction and evaluation of ontology for diagnosis in oriental medicine. To develop the expert system for decision making on diagnosis and treatment, the systematic and structural knowledge which can be processible in EMR(Electronic Medical Record) must be precedent, and the Computational Process which control the system as well. This study set up an ontology as a trial model to represent the oriental medical knowledge into the machine processible one. Protege 2.1 has been used to build the ontology, and the serialization format of our ontology is the XML document based on OWL. The components of oriental medical diagnosis was arranged with the combination of symptoms which belong to the certain symptom patterns. Then natural language which expresses the oriental medical diagnosis components were converted into the logical sentence, and individual characteristic symptoms into each values of specific properties. In addition to the study, the diagnosis software for oriental medicine was developed and it used the ontology which we developed. Sequently, we tested the software to confirm the appropriateness of ontology. The result of the test shows that diagnostic questions are automatically formulated according to the diagnosis components of this ontology and that as such diagnostic results are induced. Therefore, the ontology system in this study will be efficient to develop the diagnosis program and useful as a tool for doctors to make decision. But, it is not recommendable to apply the system to the clinical environment until the clear diagnosis standards are introduced, and the more reliable diagnosis program can be developed based on the more appropriate ontology mentioned above.

• Korean Journal of Acupuncture
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.51-60
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• 2009

Objectives : It is considered not easy to diagnose the condition of acupoints or meridians. Oriental Medical instruments have rarely complied with Oriental Medical diagnostic/therapeutic theories. The aim of this study was to develop a system which measures meridian electric potential(MEP) in proportion to bio-electric charge for the purpose of Oriental Medical diagnosis. Method : To evaluate a meridian energy measurement system(MEMS), we carried out a performance test. For significance test, we conducted a clinical trial which measured the MEP of ST36(Chok-samni) on Stomach Meridian(ST). Results & Conclusions : We could evaluate the balance or the imbalance of the MEPs on the left/right ST36. Also, through the comparison of MEPs before and after meals, we could identify the correlation between the MEP and the condition of internal organs. Namely, MEP reflects the condition of acupoints/meridians and internal organs, therefore, we propose this new method for measuring and analyzing the condition of meridians and acupoints for Oriental Medical diagnosis.