• Journal of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.725-730
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• 2012

HEMA (2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate), EGDMA (ethylene glycol dimethacrylate; cross-linker), MMA (methyl methacrylate) and AA (acrylic acid) were copolymerized with ethyl gallate and propyl gallate as additives in the presence of AIBN (2,2'-azobisisobutyronitrile; initiator). The measurement of physical properties of the produced copolymers exhibited that refractive index, water content, visible transmittance, tensile strength, and contact angle were in the range of 1.433-1.435, 38.71-38.99%, 85.4-88.8%, 0.2468-0.2740 kgf and $49.77-36.29^{\circ}$, respectively. The transmittances of the copolymers were measured to be in the range of 49.0-7.4% and 71.0-43.4% for UV-B and UV-A, respectively, indicating that the copolymers have UV-blocking effect. The produced copolymers containing ethyl gallate and propyl gallate satisfied the basic physical properties required for the fabrication of hydrogel contact lenses. The copolymers showed an increase of wettability and UV-blocking effects while having no significant change in water content compared to the gallate-free copolymers.

• Journal of Energy Engineering
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.1-7
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• 2008

The present study has been conducted to understand the heat and mass transfer characteristics of humid airflow in frosting conditions. A flat plate of aluminum was used for the simulation of flat surface part of the fin of the heat exchanger. The aluminum surface temperatures were measured and analyzed to clarify the heat and mass transfer characteristics under frosting conditions. Also, the pressure drops were measured to clarify the air-blocking effect of frost in the mini channel of the air-side hoot exchangers. A data reduction method was developed far the analysis of local characteristics of humid air under frosting conditions.

• Biomolecules & Therapeutics
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• v.28 no.3
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• pp.230-239
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• 2020

Previous studies have shown disrupted synaptic plasticity and neural activity in depression. Such alteration is strongly associated with disrupted synaptic structures. Chronic stress has been known to induce changes in dendritic structure in the basolateral amygdala (BLA) and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), but antidepressant effect on structure of these brain areas has been unclear. Here, the effects of imipramine on dendritic spine density and morphology in BLA and mPFC subregions of stressed mice were examined. Chronic restraint stress caused depressive-like behaviors such as enhanced social avoidance and despair level coincident with differential changes in dendritic spine structure. Chronic stress enhanced dendritic spine density in the lateral nucleus of BLA with no significant change in the basal nucleus of BLA, and altered the proportion of stubby or mushroom spines in both subregions. Conversely, in the apical and basal mPFC, chronic stress caused a significant reduction in spine density. The proportion of stubby or mushroom spines in these subregions overall reduced while the proportion of thin spines increased after repeated stress. Interestingly, most of these structural alterations by chronic stress were reversed by imipramine. In addition, structural changes caused by stress and blocking the changes by imipramine were corelated well with altered activation and expression of synaptic plasticity-promoting molecules such as phospho-CREB, phospho-CAMKII, and PSD-95. Collectively, our data suggest that imipramine modulates stress-induced changes in synaptic structure and synaptic plasticity-promoting molecules in a coordinated manner although structural and molecular alterations induced by stress are distinct in the BLA and mPFC.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.1457-1470
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• 2015

In wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSN), the latency of transmission is an increasingly problem. With the improvement of resolution, the time cost in image and video compression is more and more, which seriously affects the real-time of WMSN. In JPEG system, the core of the system is DCT, but DCT-JPEG is not the best choice. Block-based DCT transform coding has serious blocking artifacts when the image is highly compressed at low bit rates. APBT is used in this paper to solve that problem, but APBT does not have a fast algorithm. In this paper, we analyze the structure in JPEG and propose a parallel framework to speed up the algorithm of JPEG on GPU. And we use all phase biorthogonal transform (APBT) to replace the discrete cosine transform (DCT) for the better performance of reconstructed image. Therefore, parallel APBT-JPEG is proposed to solve the real-time of WMSN and the blocking artifacts in DCT-JPEG in this paper. We use the CUDA toolkit based on GPU which is released by NVIDIA to design the parallel algorithm of APBT-JPEG. Experimental results show that the maximum speedup ratio of parallel algorithm of APBT-JPEG can reach more than 100 times with a very low version GPU, compared with conventional serial APBT-JPEG. And the reconstructed image using the proposed algorithm has better performance than the DCT-JPEG in terms of objective quality and subjective effect. The proposed parallel algorithm based on GPU of APBT also can be used in image compression, video compression, the edge detection and some other fields of image processing.

• Membrane Journal
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.220-225
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• 2013

Hydrophilic monomers were polymerized for lamination on polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) membrane surface for hydrophilization of the membranes. Hydrophilization reduced the contact angle from $95^{\circ}$ to $55^{\circ}$ and enhanced the water flux by 10 times while it reduced the bovine serum albumin (BSA) adsorption amount to 1/4 level. Thermal polymerization process was optimized by examining several operation parameters. Dimethyl oxobuthyl acrylamide (DOAA) showed the best effect due to its better hydrophilicity than others. Increase of amount of monomer enhanced the performance until the optimum concentration of 30 wt%, beyond which excess amount of monomer resulted in homopolymerization to deteriorate the performance. Azobis (isobutyronitrile)(AIBN) initiator has greater activation temperature range than benzoyl peroxide (BPO) and it showed better hydrophilation performance. Two stage lamination process, application of initiator followed by monomer addition, was more effective than one stage process, addition of initiator and monomer at once, which still reduced the contact angle but also reduced the water flux by pore blocking phenomena.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics S
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• v.36S no.8
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• pp.101-112
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• 1999

In this paper, the codebook design method of VQ (vector quantization) is proposed an method to extract feature data of image for multimedia information searching. Conventional VQ codebook design methods are unsuitable to extract the feature data of images because they have too much computation time, memory for vector decoding and blocking effects like DCT (discrete cosine transform). The proposed design method is consists of the feature extraction by WT (wavelet transform) and the data group divide method by PCA (principal component analysis). WT is introduced to remove the blocking effect of an image with high compressing ratio. Computer simulations show that the proposed method has the better performance in processing speed than the VQ design method using SOM (self-organizing map).

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.39 no.6
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• pp.59-68
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• 2002

In this paper, we design the two-dimensional Discrete Wavelet Transform (2D DWT) filter that is widely used in various applications such as image compression because it has no blocking effects and relatively high compression rate. The filter that we used here is two-channel four-taps QMF(Quadrature Mirror Filter) Lattice filter with PR (Perfect Reconstruction) property. The proposed DWT architecture, with two consecutive inputs shows an efficient performance with a minimum of such hardware resources as multipliers, adders, and registers due to a simple scheduling. The proposed architecture was verified by the RTL simulation, and utilizes the hardware 100%. Our architecture shows a relatively high performance with a minimum hardware when compared with other approaches. An efficient memory mapping and address generation techniques are introduced and the fixed-point arithmetic analysis for minimizing the PSNR degradation due to quantization is discussed.

• Development and Reproduction
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.37-43
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• 2013

Cynomorium songaricum (CS) has been used in traditional Korean medicine in treating male impotence and sexual dysfunction. We investigated the effects of aqueous CS extract on the reproductive activity of golden hamsters whose spermatogenetic capacity is active in summer and inactive in winter. The animals were divided into 5 groups: long photoperiod (LP) control, short photoperiod (SP) control, and SP animals treated with low, middle, or high concentrations of CS. The animals were orally ingested with low (0.5 g/kg), middle (1.0 g/kg), or high (2.5 g/kg) concentrations of the aqueous extracts for 8 weeks on the daily basis. The control animals received the vehicle. As results, the LP control animals showed active testicular function but SP control animals displayed remarkably reduced testicular weights. The outcomes of the reproductive activity from low and middle concentrations of CS treatments were identical and marked as low dose. The consequences were a partial blocking of regressing activity by SP. On the other hand, the animals treated with high dose of CS extract showed remarkable significance in comparison to the SP control, indicative of a complete blocking effect of the CS on the regressing testes by SP. There were a dose-dependent effects of the CS on the sexual function. These results suggest that the CS extract promotes the male fertility by strengthening the spermatogenesis in the golden hamsters.

• The Korean Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.585-595
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• 2018

Amitriptyline, a tricyclic antidepressant, is commonly used to treat depression and neuropathic pain, but its mechanism is still unclear. We tested the effect of amitriptyline on 5-hydroxytryptamine 3 ($5-HT_3$) receptor currents and studied its blocking mechanism because the clinical applications of amitriptyline overlapped with $5-HT_3$ receptor therapeutic potentials. Using a whole-cell voltage clamp method, we recorded the currents of the $5-HT_3$ receptor when 5-HT was applied alone or co-applied with amitriptyline in cultured NCB-20 neuroblastoma cells known to express $5-HT_3$ receptors. To elucidate the mechanism of amitriptyline, we simulated the $5-HT_3$ receptor currents using Berkeley $Madonna^{(R)}$ software and calculated the rate constants of the agonist binding and receptor transition steps. The $5-HT_3$ receptor currents were inhibited by amitriptyline in a concentration-dependent, voltage-independent manner, and a competitive mode. Amitriptyline accelerated the desensitization of the $5-HT_3$ receptor. When amitriptyline was applied before 5-HT treatment, the currents rose slowly until the end of 5-HT treatment. When amitriptyline was co-applied with 5-HT, currents rose and decayed rapidly. Peak current amplitudes were decreased in both applications. All macroscopic currents recorded in whole cell voltage clamping experiments were reproduced by simulation and the changes of rate constants by amitriptyline were correlated with macroscopic current recording data. These results suggest that amitriptyline blocks the $5-HT_3$ receptor by close and open state blocking mechanisms, in a competitive manner. We could expand an understanding of pharmacological mechanisms of amitriptyline related to the modulation of a $5-HT_3$ receptor, a potential target of neurologic and psychiatric diseases through this study.

• Macromolecular Research
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.343-347
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• 2006

A novel, blue light-emitting polymer, poly(phenyl-9,9-dioctyl-9',9'dihexanenitrile)fluorene (PPFC6N), containing an alkyl and cyano group in the side chain, was synthesized by Suzuki polymerization and characterized. The polymer structure was confirmed by $^1H-NMR$. The number average molecular weight and the weight average molecular weight of the obtained polymer were 9,725 and 9,943 respectively. The resulting polymer was thermally stable with a glass transition temperature ($T_g$) of $93^{\circ}C$, and was easily soluble in common organic solvents such as THF, toluene, chlorobenzene and chloroform. The HOMO and LUMO energy levels of the polymer were revealed as 5.8 and 2.88 eV by cyclic voltammetry study, respectively. The ITO/PEDOT:PSS (40 nm)/PPFC6N (80 m)/LiF (1 nm)/Al (150 nm) device fabricated from the polymer emitted a PL spectrum at 450 nm and showed a real blue emission for pure PPFC6N in the EL spectrum. When t-butyl PBD was introduced as a hole blocking layer, the device performance was largely improved and the EL spectrum was slightly shifted toward deep blue. The device with PPFC6N containing t-butyl PBD layer showed the maximum luminance of 3,200 $cd/m^2$ at 9.5 V with a turnon voltage of 7 V.