• Journal of Ginseng Research
• /
• v.23 no.4
• /
• pp.222-229
• /
• 1999

Histopathological study has been carried out to elucidate the protective effect of Korean red ginseng water extract (KRG-WE) on 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD)-induced acute toxicity in male guinea pigs. Forty male guinea pigs ($200{\pm}20g$) were divided into 4 groups: normal controls (group 1) received vehicle and saline; group 2 (single TCDD-treated) received TCDD (5 ${\mu}g/kg$, single dose) and saline; group 3 received KRG-WE (200 mg/kg, i.p.) for 2 weeks starting 1 week before TCDD-exposure; group 4 received same dose of KRG-WE for 7 days from the day of TCDD-exposure. Weights of liver, testis, kidney, spleen and lung of the TCDD-exposed guinea pigs were significantly decreased. Thymus was severely shrunken, thereby could not be distinguished from adipose tissue in group 2 animals. Focal interstitial inflammation and fibrosis were observed from the lung parenchyma of group 2 animals. Furthermore, moderate swelling of hepatocyte, diffused aggregates of hemosiderin-laden macrophages from the Prussian blue stained spleen, marked decrease in spermatogenesis, and pyknotic and degenerative changes in the renal tubules were observed from intestinal organs of group 2 animals. On the other hand, histopathological damage was moderately to markedly alleviated in groups 3 and 4, but pretreatment of KRG-WE was more effective than the simultaneous treatment. In particular, TCDD-induced testicular atrophy was significantly attenuated by KRG-WE (p<0.01). From these results, it could be suggested that Korean red ginseng might be a useful herb that prevented TCDD-induced toxicity on liver, testis, kidney and spleen.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Food Science and Nutrition
• /
• v.35 no.10
• /
• pp.1349-1355
• /
• 2006

This study was conducted to investigate the effect of methanol extract of Allomyrina dichotoma larva (MEAL) on carbon tetrachloride $(CCl_4)-induced$ hepatotoxicity in mice. ICR mice were divided into 5 groups [Vehicle control, $CCl_4\;(10{\mu}g/g)$ alone, $CCl_4$ plus a low dose $(50{\mu}g/g)$ of MEAL, $CCl_4$ plus a high dose $(100{\mu}g/g)$ of MEAL]. Silymarin $(2{\mu}g/g)$ was used as the reference in the experiment. Administration of MEAL tended to decrease the serum alanine transaminase (ALT) activity induced by $CCl_4$ treatment in mice. Hepatic concentration of thiobarbituric acid-reactive substances (TBARS) in a high-dose group of diet decreased to the level of silymarin-treated group. Hepatic activity of glutathione S-transferase in MEAL-treated group was lower than that of $CCl_4-treated$ group. Serum concentration of bilirubin was significantly increased by $CCl_4$ treatment, but MEAL or silymarin recovered the level. These results suggest that MEAL may exert the protective effect against $CCl_4-induced$ hepatotoxicity in mice. However, more intensive studies would be needed to elucidate the protective mechanism of the beetle on hepatotoxicity of mice.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Food Science and Nutrition
• /
• v.38 no.4
• /
• pp.430-435
• /
• 2009

The effects of turmeric and fermented turmeric by Bacillus natto on antioxidant activities, liver function recovery of acute hepatotoxicity mice, and serum lipid parameters in high fat diet fed mice were investigated. In the results of antioxidant activity by DPPH method, fermented turmeric had higher antioxidative activity than turmeric. Acute hepatotoxicity was induced by 0.5 mL of carbon tetrachloride ($CCl_4$) per kg of mice. Unlike turmeric, fermented turmeric significantly reduced the levels of aspartate aminotransferase (AST) and alanine aminotransferase (ALT) after 5 days compared to the controls with 0.5% methyl cellulose (p<0.05). In addition, higher recovery of liver damage by $CCl_4$ was observed in mice with fermented turmeric than with turmeric. High fat (20%) diet fed mice were divided into 4 groups to investigate the effects of turmeric and fermented turmeric on serum lipid parameters: C (vehicle), TuL (low dose (80 mg/kg) with turmeric), TuH (high dose (160 mg/kg) with turmeric), FTuL (low dose with fermented turmeric), and FTuH (high dose with fermented turmeric). The levels of LDL-cholesterol and HDL-cholesterol were significantly reduced and increased in FTuL, FTuH and TuH groups compared to the C group, respectively. However, there was no significant change in triglyceride levels by either turmeric or fermented turmeric compared to those by control. Collectively, these results strongly suggest that fermented turmeric by Bacillus natto could be used as a functional food for enhancement of health with better consumer acceptance.

• The Korean Journal of Air & Space Law and Policy
• /
• v.34 no.1
• /
• pp.235-268
• /
• 2019

Under the Aviation Safety Act of Korea, any person who intends to operate a drone is required to follow the operational conditions listed below, unless approved by the Minister of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism; (i) Operation of drones in the daytime, (ii) Operation of drones within Visual Line of Sight, (iii) Maintenance of a certain operating distance between drones and persons or properties on the ground/ water surface, (iv) Do not operate drones over event sites where many people gather, (v) Do not transport hazardous materials such as explosives by drone, (vi) Do not drop any objects from drones. Requirements stated in "Airspace in which Flights are Prohibited" and "Operational Limitations" are not applied to flights for search and rescue operations by public organizations in case of accidents and disasters. This paper analyzes legal issues as to definition and regulations of drones in Korean Aviation Safety Act. This paper, also, offers some implications and suggestions for regulations of drones under Korean Aviation Safety Act by comparing the regulations of drones in Japanese Civil Aeronautics Act.

• Korean Journal of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology
• /
• v.25 no.1
• /
• pp.17-27
• /
• 2023

Weeds are one of the factors that reduce crop yield through nutrient and photosynthetic competition. Quantification of weed density are an important part of making accurate decisions for precision weeding. In this study, we tried to quantify the density of weeds in images of maize fields taken by unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). UAV image data collection took place in maize fields from May 17 to June 4, 2021, when maize was in its early growth stage. UAV images were labeled with pixels from maize and those without and the cropped to be used as the input data of the semantic segmentation network for the maize detection model. We trained a model to separate maize from background using the deep learning segmentation networks DeepLabV3+, U-Net, Linknet, and FPN. All four models showed pixel accuracy of 0.97, and the mIOU score was 0.76 and 0.74 in DeepLabV3+ and U-Net, higher than 0.69 for Linknet and FPN. Weed density was calculated as the difference between the green area classified as ExGR (Excess green-Excess red) and the maize area predicted by the model. Each image evaluated for weed density was recombined to quantify and visualize the distribution and density of weeds in a wide range of maize fields. We propose a method to quantify weed density for accurate weeding by effectively separating weeds, maize, and background from UAV images of maize fields.

• Korea Science and Art Forum
• /
• v.21
• /
• pp.31-43
• /
• 2015

Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is one of the technologies which represent the core value of the creative economy. It has served as a vehicle connecting the existing industry and corporate infrastructure, developing existing products and services and creating new products and services. In addition to the ICT, new devices including big data, mobile gadgets and wearable products are gaining a great attention sending an expectation for a new market-pioneering. Further, Internet of Things (IoT) is helping solidify the ICT-based social development connecting human-to-human, human-to-things and things-to-things. This means that the manufacturing-based hardware development needs to be achieved simultaneously with software development through convergence. The essential element the convergence between hardware and software is OS, for which world's leading companies such as Google and Apple have launched an intense development recognizing the importance of software. Against this backdrop, the status-quo of the software market has been examined for the study of the present report (Korea Evaluation Institute of Industrial Technology: Professional Design Technology Development Project). As a result, the software platform-based Google's android and Apple's iOS are dominant in the global market and late comers are trying to enter the market through various pathways by releasing web-based OS and similar OS to provide a new paradigm to the market. The present study is aimed at finding the way to utilize a smart content by which anyone can be a developer based on OS responding to such as social change, newly defining a smart content to be universally utilized and analyzing the market to deal with a rapid market change. The study method, scope and details are as follows: Literature investigation, Analysis on the app market according to a smart classification system, Trend analysis on the current content market, Identification of five common trends through comparison among the universal definition of smart content, the status-quo of application represented in the app market and content market situation. In conclusion, the smart content market is independent but is expected to develop in the form of a single organic body being connected each other. Therefore, the further classification system and development focus should be made in a way to see the area from multiple perspectives including a social point of view in terms of the existing technology, culture, business and consumers.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
• /
• v.29 no.1D
• /
• pp.25-32
• /
• 2009

Currently, various types of TDM (Transportation Demand Management) policies are being studied and implemented in an attempt to overcome the limitations of supply oriented policies. In this context, this paper addressed issues of effectiveness and possible domestic implementation of the HOT lane. The possible site of implementation selected for this simulation study is part of the Kyung-bu freeway, where a dedicated bus lane is currently being operated. Minimum length of distance required in between interchanges and access points of the HOT lane for vehicles to safely enter and exit the lane, and traffic management policies for effectively managing the weaving traffic trying to enter and exit the HOT lane were presented. A 5.2km section of freeway from Ki-heuing IC to Suwon IC and a 8.3km section from Hak-uei JC to Pan-gyo JC have been selected as possible sites of implementation for the HOT lane, in which congestion occurs regularly due to the high level of travel demand. VISSIM simulation program has been used to analyze the effects of the HOT lane under the assumption that one-lane HOT lane has been put into operation in these sections and that the lane change rate were in between 5% to 30%. The results of each possible scenario have proven that overall travel speed on the general lanes have increased as well by 1.57~2.62km/h after the implementation of the HOT lane. It is meaningful that this study could serve as a basic reference data for possible follow-up studies on the HOT lane as one effective method of TDM policies. Considering that the bus travel rate would continue increase and assuming the improvement in travel speed on general lanes, similar case study can be implemented where gaps between buses on bus lane are available, as a possible alternative of efficient bus lane management policies.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
• /
• v.39 no.5_1
• /
• pp.521-535
• /
• 2023

When converting rice fields into fields,sorghum (sorghum bicolor L. Moench) has excellent moisture resistance, enabling stable production along with soybeans. Therefore, it is a crop that is expected to improve the self-sufficiency rate of domestic food crops and solve the rice supply-demand imbalance problem. However, there is a lack of fundamental statistics,such as cultivation fields required for estimating yields, due to the traditional survey method, which takes a long time even with a large manpower. In this study, U-Net was applied to RGB images based on unmanned aerial vehicle to confirm the possibility of non-destructive segmentation of sorghum cultivation fields. RGB images were acquired on July 28, August 13, and August 25, 2022. On each image acquisition date, datasets were divided into 6,000 training datasets and 1,000 validation datasets with a size of 512 × 512 images. Classification models were developed based on three classes consisting of Sorghum fields(sorghum), rice and soybean fields(others), and non-agricultural fields(background), and two classes consisting of sorghum and non-sorghum (others+background). The classification accuracy of sorghum cultivation fields was higher than 0.91 in the three class-based models at all acquisition dates, but learning confusion occurred in the other classes in the August dataset. In contrast, the two-class-based model showed an accuracy of 0.95 or better in all classes, with stable learning on the August dataset. As a result, two class-based models in August will be advantageous for calculating the cultivation fields of sorghum.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
• /
• v.25 no.1
• /
• pp.99-107
• /
• 2024

Along with economic growth and industrial development, there is an increasing demand for various electronic components and device production of semiconductor, SMT component, and electrical battery products. However, these products may contain foreign substances coming from manufacturing process such as iron, aluminum, plastic and so on, which could lead to serious problems or malfunctioning of the product, and fire on the electric vehicle. To solve these problems, it is necessary to determine whether there are foreign materials inside the product, and may tests have been done by means of non-destructive testing methodology such as ultrasound ot X-ray. Nevertheless, there are technical challenges and limitation in acquiring X-ray images and determining the presence of foreign materials. In particular Small-sized or low-density foreign materials may not be visible even when X-ray equipment is used, and noise can also make it difficult to detect foreign objects. Moreover, in order to meet the manufacturing speed requirement, the x-ray acquisition time should be reduced, which can result in the very low signal- to-noise ratio(SNR) lowering the foreign material detection accuracy. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a five-step approach to overcome the limitations of low resolution, which make it challenging to detect foreign substances. Firstly, global contrast of X-ray images are increased through histogram stretching methodology. Second, to strengthen the high frequency signal and local contrast, we applied local contrast enhancement technique. Third, to improve the edge clearness, Unsharp masking is applied to enhance edges, making objects more visible. Forth, the super-resolution method of the Residual Dense Block (RDB) is used for noise reduction and image enhancement. Last, the Yolov5 algorithm is employed to train and detect foreign objects after learning. Using the proposed method in this study, experimental results show an improvement of more than 10% in performance metrics such as precision compared to low-density images.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
• /
• v.44 no.4
• /
• pp.519-529
• /
• 2024

Vehicle toll discounts on private roads are categorized into two types: non-sunset and sunset. Sunset types refer to provisions in which all or part of a law loses its effect upon a specific legislator-set deadline. Vehicles eligible for 'sunset' discounts include cargo vehicles operating late at night and eco-friendly vehicles powered by electricity or hydrogen. Korean government has subsidized all reduced toll fees for vehicles classified as non-sunset types on private roads to operators, but no subsidies have been provided for toll reductions on sunset vehicles. The rapid increase in electric hydrogen vehicles escalates the burden of reduced toll revenue on private road operators. This study analyzed traffic volume and toll reduction data from eight private road operators nationwide as of the end of 2023 to propose the necessity and method of supporting sunset-type toll reduction subsidies. In 2022, the subsidy for non-sunset types amounted to 87.5 billion won, or 18.6 % of total traffic revenue. The toll exemption and reduction ratio under the concession agreement ranged from 4.0 % to 5.65 % of total traffic volume for each operator. Although the proportion of vehicles exempted from sunset traffic increased from 0.85 % in 2017 to 2.79 % in 2022, the reduction amount ratio reached 4.2 % (KRW 25.5 billion) of total traffic revenue in 2022. The escalating number of registered eco-friendly vehicles is gradually causing operating profit losses on private roads. In alignment with the government's policy to expand eco-friendly vehicles, it is imperative to consider including vehicles eligible for toll reductions listed under the sunset category for subsidy payments. The study established a minimum ratio for toll reduction assistance at 4.0 %, agreed upon between the road authorities and private operators. Three policy alternatives were proposed to ensure preservation of amounts exceeding this threshold for sustaining adequate toll revenue for private road operators.