• Korean Journal of Radiology
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.770-781
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• 2021

Objective: Chemical exchange-dependent saturation transfer (CEST) MRI is sensitive for detecting solid-like proteins and may detect changes in the levels of mobile proteins and peptides in tissues. The objective of this study was to evaluate the characteristics of chemical exchange proton pools using the CEST MRI technique in patients with dementia. Materials and Methods: Our institutional review board approved this cross-sectional prospective study and informed consent was obtained from all participants. This study included 41 subjects (19 with dementia and 22 without dementia). Complete CEST data of the brain were obtained using a three-dimensional gradient and spin-echo sequence to map CEST indices, such as amide, amine, hydroxyl, and magnetization transfer ratio asymmetry (MTR_asym) values, using six-pool Lorentzian fitting. Statistical analyses of CEST indices were performed to evaluate group comparisons, their correlations with gray matter volume (GMV) and Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) scores, and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves. Results: Amine signals (0.029 for non-dementia, 0.046 for dementia, p = 0.011 at hippocampus) and MTR_asym values at 3 ppm (0.748 for non-dementia, 1.138 for dementia, p = 0.022 at hippocampus), and 3.5 ppm (0.463 for non-dementia, 0.875 for dementia, p = 0.029 at hippocampus) were significantly higher in the dementia group than in the non-dementia group. Most CEST indices were not significantly correlated with GMV; however, except amide, most indices were significantly correlated with the MMSE scores. The classification power of most CEST indices was lower than that of GMV but adding one of the CEST indices in GMV improved the classification between the subject groups. The largest improvement was seen in the MTR_asym values at 2 ppm in the anterior cingulate (area under the ROC curve = 0.981), with a sensitivity of 100 and a specificity of 90.91. Conclusion: CEST MRI potentially allows noninvasive image alterations in the Alzheimer's disease brain without injecting isotopes for monitoring different disease states and may provide a new imaging biomarker in the future.

• Korean Journal of Radiology
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.263-280
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• 2021

Percutaneous transthoracic needle biopsy (PTNB) is one of the essential diagnostic procedures for pulmonary lesions. Its role is increasing in the era of CT screening for lung cancer and precision medicine. The Korean Society of Thoracic Radiology developed the first evidence-based clinical guideline for PTNB in Korea by adapting pre-existing guidelines. The guideline provides 39 recommendations for the following four main domains of 12 key questions: the indications for PTNB, pre-procedural evaluation, procedural technique of PTNB and its accuracy, and management of post-biopsy complications. We hope that these recommendations can improve the diagnostic accuracy and safety of PTNB in clinical practice and promote standardization of the procedure nationwide.

• Korean Journal of Radiology
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.621-630
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• 2019

Objective: To study the prevalence and clinical characteristics of decreased myocardial blood flow (MBF) quantified by dynamic computed tomography (CT) myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI) in symptomatic patients without in-stent restenosis. Materials and Methods: Thirty-seven (mean age, 71.3 ± 10 years; age range, 48-88 years; 31 males, 6 females) consecutive symptomatic patients with patent coronary stents and without obstructive de novo lesions were prospectively enrolled to undergo dynamic CT-MPI using a third-generation dual-source CT scanner. The shuttle-mode acquisition technique was used to image the complete left ventricle. A bolus of contrast media (50 mL; iopromide, 370 mg iodine/mL) was injected into the antecubital vein at a rate of 6 mL/s, followed by a 40-mL saline flush. The mean MBF value and other quantitative parameters were measured for each segment of both stented-vessel territories and reference territories. The MBF_ratio was defined as the ratio of the mean MBF value of the whole stent-vessel territory to that of the whole reference territory. An MBF_ratio of 0.85 was used as the cut-off value to distinguish hypoperfused from non-hypoperfused segments. Results: A total of 629 segments of 37 patients were ultimately included for analysis. The mean effective dose of dynamic CT-MPI was 3.1 ± 1.2 mSv (range, 1.7-6.3 mSv). The mean MBF of stent-vessel territories was decreased in 19 lesions and 81 segments. Compared to stent-vessel territories without hypoperfusion, the mean MBF and myocardial blood volume were markedly lower in hypoperfused stent-vessel territories (77.5 ± 16.6 mL/100 mL/min vs. 140.4 ± 24.1 mL/100 mL/min [p < 0.001] and 6.4 ± 3.7 mL/100 mL vs. 11.5 ± 4 mL/100 mL [p < 0.001, respectively]). Myocardial hypoperfusion in stentvessel territories was present in 48.6% (18/37) of patients. None of clinical parameters differed statistically significantly between hypoperfusion and non-hypoperfusion subgroups. Conclusion: Decreased MBF is commonly present in patients who are symptomatic after percutaneous coronary intervention, despite patent stents and can be detected by dynamic CT-MPI using a low radiation dose.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.45 no.3
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• pp.173-191
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• 2024

Typhoons are significant meteorological phenomena that cause interactions among the ocean, atmosphere, and land within Earth's system. In particular, wind speed, a key characteristic of typhoons, is influenced by various factors such as central pressure, trajectory, and sea surface temperature. Therefore, a comprehensive understanding based on actual observational data is essential. In the 2015 revised secondary school textbooks, typhoon wind speed is presented through text and illustrations; hence, exploratory activities that promote a deeper understanding of wind speed are necessary. In this study, we developed a data visualization program with a graphical user interface (GUI) to facilitate the understanding of typhoon wind speeds with simple operations during the teaching-learning process. The program utilizes red-green-blue (RGB) image data of Typhoons Mawar, Guchol, and Bolaven -which occurred in 2023- from the Korean geostationary satellite GEO-KOMPSAT-2A (GK-2A) as the input data. The program is designed to calculate typhoon wind speeds by inputting cloud movement coordinates around the typhoon and visualizes the wind speed distribution by inputting parameters such as central pressure, storm radius, and maximum wind speed. The GUI-based program developed in this study can be applied to typhoons observed by GK-2A without errors and enables scientific exploration based on actual observations beyond the limitations of textbooks. This allows students and teachers to collect, process, analyze, and visualize real observational data without needing a paid program or professional coding knowledge. This approach is expected to foster digital literacy, an essential competency for the future.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.47-60
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• 2012

Video data comes in the form of the unstructured and the complex structure. As the importance of efficient management and retrieval for video data increases, studies on the video parsing based on the visual features contained in the video contents are researched to reconstruct video data as the meaningful structure. The early studies on video parsing are focused on splitting video data into shots, but detecting the shot boundary defined with the physical boundary does not cosider the semantic association of video data. Recently, studies on structuralizing video shots having the semantic association to the video scene defined with the semantic boundary by utilizing clustering methods are actively progressed. Previous studies on detecting the video scene try to detect video scenes by utilizing clustering algorithms based on the similarity measure between video shots mainly depended on color features. However, the correct identification of a video shot or scene and the detection of the gradual transitions such as dissolve, fade and wipe are difficult because color features of video data contain a noise and are abruptly changed due to the intervention of an unexpected object. In this paper, to solve these problems, we propose the Scene Detector by using Color histogram, corner Edge and Object color histogram (SDCEO) that clusters similar shots organizing same event based on visual features including the color histogram, the corner edge and the object color histogram to detect video scenes. The SDCEO is worthy of notice in a sense that it uses the edge feature with the color feature, and as a result, it effectively detects the gradual transitions as well as the abrupt transitions. The SDCEO consists of the Shot Bound Identifier and the Video Scene Detector. The Shot Bound Identifier is comprised of the Color Histogram Analysis step and the Corner Edge Analysis step. In the Color Histogram Analysis step, SDCEO uses the color histogram feature to organizing shot boundaries. The color histogram, recording the percentage of each quantized color among all pixels in a frame, are chosen for their good performance, as also reported in other work of content-based image and video analysis. To organize shot boundaries, SDCEO joins associated sequential frames into shot boundaries by measuring the similarity of the color histogram between frames. In the Corner Edge Analysis step, SDCEO identifies the final shot boundaries by using the corner edge feature. SDCEO detect associated shot boundaries comparing the corner edge feature between the last frame of previous shot boundary and the first frame of next shot boundary. In the Key-frame Extraction step, SDCEO compares each frame with all frames and measures the similarity by using histogram euclidean distance, and then select the frame the most similar with all frames contained in same shot boundary as the key-frame. Video Scene Detector clusters associated shots organizing same event by utilizing the hierarchical agglomerative clustering method based on the visual features including the color histogram and the object color histogram. After detecting video scenes, SDCEO organizes final video scene by repetitive clustering until the simiarity distance between shot boundaries less than the threshold h. In this paper, we construct the prototype of SDCEO and experiments are carried out with the baseline data that are manually constructed, and the experimental results that the precision of shot boundary detection is 93.3% and the precision of video scene detection is 83.3% are satisfactory.

• Journal of Practical Agriculture & Fisheries Research
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.71-86
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• 2021

This study was conducted to find information on the university's image from words related to 'Korea National College of Agriculture and Fisheries (KNCAF)' in Naver News. For this purpose, word frequency analysis, TF-IDF evaluation and semantic network analysis were performed using web crawling technology. In word frequency analysis, 'agriculture', 'education', 'support', 'farmer', 'youth', 'university', 'business', 'rural', 'CEO' were important words. In the TF-IDF evaluation, the key words were 'farmer', 'dron', 'agricultural and livestock food department', 'Jeonbuk', 'young farmer', 'agriculture', 'Chonju', 'university', 'device', 'spreading'. In the semantic network analysis, the Bigrams showed high correlations in the order of 'youth' - 'farmer', 'digital' - 'agriculture', 'farming' - 'settlement', 'agriculture' - 'rural', 'digital' - 'turnover'. As a result of evaluating the importance of keywords as five central index, 'agriculture' ranked first. And the keywords in the second place of the centrality index were 'farmers' (Cc, Cb), 'education' (Cd, Cp) and 'future' (Ce). The sperman's rank correlation coefficient by centrality index showed the most similar rank between Degree centrality and Pagerank centrality. The KNCAF articles of Naver News were used as important words such as 'agriculture', 'education', 'support', 'farmer', 'youth' in terms of word frequency. However, in the evaluation including document frequency, the words such as 'farmer', 'dron', 'Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs', 'Jeonbuk', and 'young farmers' were found to be key words. The centrality analysis considering the network connectivity between words was suitable for evaluation by Cd and Cp. And the words with strong centrality were 'agriculture', 'education', 'future', 'farmer', 'digital', 'support', 'utilization'.

• Korean Business Review
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• v.17
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• pp.53-81
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• 2004

The purpose of this study is to understand the realities and the subject of environmental management for small and medium-sized companies in Gwangwon area, through surveying the present status as to acquiring the certification of ISO14001, and to seek for a plan to facilitate environmental management. Given summarizing key results, those are as follows. First, while the number of companies in our country which acquired the certification of ISO14001, amounts to 1,215 businesses as of April of 2003, the number of small and medium-sized companies in Gwangwon area which obtained the certification of ISO14001 reached only 26 businesses, the lowest level among metropolitan municipalities. Second, for the reason that companies who didn't acquire the certification, strive not to receive the certification, it did present the point that' costs to be needed in acquiring and maintaining the certification are larger than practical benefit. Third, the biggest reason for either companies which did not acquire the certification of ISO14001 or companies which did (try to) acquire the certification of ISO1400, was, enhancement of a corporate image,' and the effect after a company who obtained the certification introduced the environmental management system, was also shown to be 'the improvement of a corporate image.' Fourth, many companies who acquired the certification of ISO1400 pointed out the response related to 'burden on document creation and costs' and 'lack of manpower' as problems when introducing the environmental management system. On the basis of major results of a study as the above, given presenting the subject and a plan for activating the environmental management of small and medium-sized companies in Gwangwon area, those are as follows. First, because most of companies who did not obtain the certification of ISO1400 have low recognition of ISO14001, it needs continuous and positive publicity, education and a training system. Second, it requires to carry out an educational program to nurture professional manpower due to lack of manpower relevant to environmental management, to expand payment of subsidies, to open exclusive-charge department and consulting contact, to have the relevant information be database and to develop software. Third, in order to make the certification obtained through inexpensive costs and simple procedures, it needs to positively consider the creation of public approval system for a small and medium-sized company, group approval system, industrial-complex approval system, and others.

• The Korean Journal of Nuclear Medicine
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• v.39 no.6
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• pp.445-455
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• 2005

Purpose: We developed an animal SPECT system using clinical Philips ARGUS scintillation camera and pinhole collimator with specially manufactured small apertures. In this study, we evaluated the physical characteristics of this system and biological feasibility for animal experiments. Materials and Methods: Rotating station for small animals using a step motor and operating software were developed. Pinhole inserts with small apertures (diameter of 0.5, 1.0, and 2.0 mm) were manufactured and physical parameters including planar spatial resolution and sensitivity and reconstructed resolution were measured for some apertures. In order to measure the size of the usable field of view according to the distance from the focal point, manufactured multiple line sources separated with the same distance were scanned and numbers of lines within the field of view were counted. Using a Tc-99m line source with 0.5 mm diameter and 12 mm length placed in the exact center of field of view, planar spatial resolution according to the distance was measured. Calibration factor to obtain FWHM values in 'mm' unit was calculated from the planar image of two separated line sources. Te-99m point source with i mm diameter was used for the measurement of system sensitivity. In addition, SPECT data of micro phantom with cold and hot line inserts and rat brain after intravenous injection of [I-123]FP-CIT were acquired and reconstructed using filtered back protection reconstruction algorithm for pinhole collimator. Results: Size of usable field of view was proportional to the distance from the focal point and their relationship could be fitted into a linear equation (y=1.4x+0.5, x: distance). System sensitivity and planar spatial resolution at 3 cm measured using 1.0 mm aperture was 71 cps/MBq and 1.24 mm, respectively. In the SPECT image of rat brain with [I-123]FP-CIT acquired using 1.0 mm aperture, the distribution of dopamine transporter in the striatum was well identified in each hemisphere. Conclusion: We verified that this new animal SPECT system with the Phlilps ARGUS scanner and small apertures had sufficient performance for small animal imaging.

• The Korean Journal of Nuclear Medicine
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• v.32 no.5
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• pp.414-424
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• 1998

Purpose: Cross-modality coregistration of positron emission tomography (PET) and magnetic resonance imaging (MR) could enhance the clinical information. In this study we propose a refined technique to improve the robustness of registration, and to implement more realistic visualization of the coregistered images. Materials and Methods: Using the sinogram of PET emission scan, we extracted the robust head boundary and used boundary-enhanced PET to coregister PET with MR. The pixels having 10% of maximum pixel value were considered as the boundary of sinogram. Boundary pixel values were exchanged with maximum value of sinogram. One hundred eighty boundary points were extracted at intervals of about 2 degree using simple threshold method from each slice of MR images. Best affined transformation between the two point sets was performed using least square fitting which should minimize the sum of Euclidean distance between the point sets. We reduced calculation time using pre-defined distance map. Finally we developed an automatic coregistration program using this boundary detection and surface matching technique. We designed a new weighted normalization technique to display the coregistered PET and MR images simultaneously. Results: Using our newly developed method, robust extraction of head boundary was possible and spatial registration was successfully performed. Mean displacement error was less than 2.0 mm. In visualization of coregistered images using weighted normalization method, structures shown in MR image could be realistically represented. Conclusion: Our refined technique could practically enhance the performance of automated three dimensional coregistration.

• The Korean Journal of Nuclear Medicine
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• v.30 no.3
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• pp.367-371
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• 1996

The $MAG_3$ is a tubular excreting radiopharmaceutical for renal image. We synthesized benzoyl $MAG_3\;(Bz-MAG_3)$ and made a kit for labeling with $^{99m}Tc$. We checked the labeling efficieny of $^{99m}Tc$ labeled $MAG_3$ and biodistribution. Labeling efficieny was checked by TLC-SG (acetonitrile/$H_2O$=2/1). After injecting of 1 mCi of $^{99m}Tc-MAG_3$ to ICR-mice, $T_{max}(min),\;T_{1/2}(min)$ were obtained in the renogram. Sequential images (30sec, 2min, 5min, 10min, 15min, 20min) of $^{99m}Tc-MAG_3$ were compared with those of commercial $^{99m}Tc$-DTPA (Du Pont Merck Pharmaceutical Co.) kit. 1) The $R_f$ value of synthesized $^{99m}Tc-MAG_3$ was 0.78 and labeling efficiency was $97.5{\pm}1.9%$ (n=10). 2) The dynamic images of the $^{99m}Tc-MAG_3$ were better than those of the $^{99m}Tc$-DTPA. 3) The $T_{max}(min.)$ and $T_{1/2}(min.)$ of $^{99m}Tc-MAG_3$ (n=10) were $1.5{\pm}0.5$ (left), $1.4{\pm}0.4$ (right), and $4.3{\pm}1.4$ (left), $4.8{\pm}2.0$ (right), respectively. The $T_{max}(min.)$ and $T_{1/2}(min.)$ of $^{99m}Tc$-DTPA (n=7) were $2.7{\pm}1.6$ (left), $2.7{\pm}1.6$ (right), and $3.8{\pm}1.7$ (left), $4.5{\pm}2.7$ (right), respectively. The quaility of image and labeling efficiency of the synthesized $Bz-MAG_3$ kit were excellent, that it was supposed to be used in routine clinical work.