• Journal of Korean Neurosurgical Society
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• v.40 no.2
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• pp.90-94
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• 2006

Objective : Acute vertebral burst fractures warrant extensive fixation and fusion on the spine. Osteoplasty [vertebroplasty with high density resin without vertebral expansion] has been used to treat osteoporotic vertebral compression fractures. We report our experiences with osteoplasty in acute vertebral burst fractures. Methods : Twenty-eight cases of acute vertebral burst fracture were operated with osteoplasty. Eighteen patients had osteoporosis concurrently. Preoperative MRI was performed in all cases to find fracture level and to evaluate the severity of injury. Preoperative CT revealed burst fracture in the series. The patients with severe ligament injury or spinal canal compromise were excluded from indication. Osteoplasty was performed under local anesthesia and high density polymethylmethacrylate[PMMA] was injected carefully avoiding cement leakage into spinal canal. The procedure was performed unilaterally in 21 cases and bilaterally in 7 cases. The patients were allowed to ambulate right after surgery. Most patients discharged within 5 days and followed up at least 6 months. Results : There were 12 men and 16 women with average age of 45.3[28-82]. Five patients had 2 level fractures and 2 patients had 3 level fractures. The average injection volume was 5.6cc per level Average VAS [Visual Analogue Scale] improved 26mm after surgery. The immediate postoperative X-ray showed 2 cases of filler spillage into spinal canal and 4 cases of leakage into the retroperitoneal space. One patient with intraspinal leakage was underwent the laminectomy to remove the resin. Conclusion : Osteoplasty is a safe and new treatment option in the burst fractures. Osteoplasty with minimally invasive technique reduced the hospital stay and recovery time in vertebral fracture patients.

• Tunnel and Underground Space
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.304-311
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• 2002

This study reports the influence of vocid geometry on fracture closure and permeability from numerical experiments. As the aperture distributions of rock fractures are characterized by statistical methods, synthetic fractures have successfully been simulated in this way. Based on the generated fracture models, models for fracture closure and flow calculation have been developed. A fracture closure model has been developed by considering the asperity compression and half-space deformation, and flow calculations have been performed using a finite difference method adopting a local cubic law. The results of numerical experiments have shown that the increase in the aperture spatial correlation leads the fracture closure and the decrease in fracture permeability to increase. Also, it has been indicated that there is an implicit relation between fracture normal stiffness and permeability. The importance of this study is to enhance the understanding the hydro-mechanical behavior of fractured rock massed due to engineering projects.

• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.319-325
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• 2015

Remarkable advances in wireless communication technology have enabled communications among people who are far away from each other. In recent, the needs of local area voice communication using a wireless system based on low-cost and simple hardware are rapidly rising. However, since these applications require that the multi-users communicate on the same wireless channel in a small area, the existing voice technologies are not suitable for directly applying to these applications. Therefore, in this paper I propose a novel idea enabling multi-user voice communication. In particular, as a short range wireless solution, I employ the IEEE 802.15.4 based on low power and low cost. However, since originally the standard is not developed for voice communication, we extend the original scheme to be suitable for the voice communication by utilizing the extended concept of GTS. The capacity and validity of the proposed scheme are evaluated through quantitative analysis in various voice compression rates.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.41 no.5
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• pp.165-173
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• 2004

Since the conventional image segmentation methods using mathematical morphology tend to yield over-segmented results, they normally need postprocess which merges small regions to obtain larger ones. To solve this over-segmentation problem without postprocess had to increase size of structuring element used marker extraction. As size of structuring element is very large, edge of region segments incorrectly. Therefore, this paper selectively applies structuring element of mathematical morphology to improve performance of image segmentation and classifies input image into texture region, edge region and simple region using averaged local variance and image gradient. Proposed image segmentation method removes the cause for over-segmentation of image as selectively applies size of structuring element to each region. Simulation results show that proposed method correctly segment for pixel region of similar luminance value and more correctly search texture region and edge region than conventional methods.

• Biomolecules & Therapeutics
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• v.24 no.5
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• pp.489-494
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• 2016

Neuropathic pain (NPP) is the main culprit among chronic pains affecting the normal life of patients. Procaine is a frequently-used local anesthesia with multiple efficacies in various diseases. However, its role in modulating NPP has not been reported yet. This study aims at uncovering the role of procaine in NPP. Rats were pretreated with procaine by intrathecal injection. Then NPP rat model was induced by sciatic nerve chronic compression injury (CCI) and behavior tests were performed to analyze the pain behaviors upon mechanical, thermal and cold stimulations. Spinal expression of Janus kinase 2 (JAK2) and signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3) was detected by qRT-PCR and western blot. JAK2 was also overexpressed in procaine treated model rats for behavior tests. Results showed that procaine pretreatment improved the pain behaviors of model rats upon mechanical, thermal and cold stimulations, with the best effect occurring on the $15^{th}$ day post model construction (p<0.05). Procaine also inhibited JAK2 and STAT3 expression in both mRNA (p<0.05) and protein levels. Overexpression of JAK2 increased STAT3 level and reversed the improvement effects of procaine in pain behaviors (p<0.01). These findings indicate that procaine is capable of attenuating NPP, suggesting procaine is a potential therapeutic strategy for treating NPP. Its role may be associated with the inhibition on JAK2/STAT3 signaling.

• Journal of Korean Society of Steel Construction
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.231-241
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• 2015

The direct strength method (DSM) has been adopted by the NAS (2004) and AS/NZS 4600 (2005) for the design of cold-formed steel members. The method can be successfully applied to the design of welded steel members. This paper reviews the development of the DSM for welded steel structural members. The design strength formulae for welded section columns and beams for the DSM are based on the test results performed on welded H-section, C-section, circular and rectangular hollow section columns, plate girders and stiffened plates. The comparison between the design strength of welded sections predicted by the DSM and that estimated by existing specifications is also provided. The comparison verifies that the DSM can properly predict the compressive, flexural and shear strength of welded section columns and beams with the interaction between local and overall buckling.

• Journal of Korean Society of Steel Construction
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• v.27 no.5
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• pp.447-454
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• 2015

The researches on circular hollow section(CHS) connections have been conducted continuously because of development of material properties and complex local behavior of the connections. The purpose of this study is that the effects of material strength and chord wall slenderness on chord plastification and strength of CHS X-joint truss connection under compression on branch member were evaluated. To this end, finite element analyses were performed for various connections, using ANSYS Mechanical APDL program. Based on the analysis results, the design strength of the connections according to chord plastification limit state in KBC were examined. Finally, special considerations for CHS X-joint connection design were suggested.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.461-474
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• 2020

Analysing the incompatible deformation and damage evolution around the tunnels in mixed strata is significant for evaluating the tunnel stability, as well as the interaction between the support system and the surrounding rock mass. To investigate this issue, confined compression tests were conducted on upper-soft and lower-hard strata specimens containing a circular hole using a rock testing system, the physical mechanical properties were then investigated. Then, the incompatible deformation and failure modes of the specimens were analysed based on the digital speckle correlation method (DSCM) and Acoustic Emission (AE) data. Finally, numerical simulations were conducted to explore the damage evolution of the mixed strata. The results indicate that at low inclination angles, the deformation and v-shaped notches inside the hole are controlled by the structure plane. Progressive spalling failure occurs at the sidewalls along the structure plane in soft rock. But the transmission of the loading force between the soft rock and hard rock are different in local. At high inclination angles, v-shaped notches are approximately perpendicular to the structure plane, and the soft and hard rock bear common loads. Incompatible deformation between the soft rock and hard rock controls the failure process. At inclination angles of 0°, 30° and 90°, incompatible deformations are closely related to rock damage. At 60°, incompatible deformations and rock damage are discordant due that the soft rock and hard rock alternately bears the major loads during the failure process. The failure trend and modes of the numerical results agree very well with those observed in the experimental results. As the inclination angles increase, the proportion of the shear or tensile damage exhibits a nonlinear increase or decrease, suggesting that the inclination angle of mixed strata may promote shear damage and restrain tensile damage.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.15 no.5
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• pp.617-630
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• 2010

At 37th VCEG meeting in Jan. 2009, Toshiba proposed Quadtree-based Adaptive Loop Filter (QALF). The basic concept of QALF is to apply Wiener filter to decoded image after the conventional deblocking filter and to represent the filter on/off flag data for each basic filtering unit in a more efficient way of quadtree structure. QALF could enhance the compression performance of around more than 9%, but the structure of one filter for a decoded frame leaves room for further improvement in the sense that optimal filter for one region of a frame could quite different from the optimal filter for other parts of a picture. This paper proposes multiple adaptive loop filters for better utilization of local characteristics of decoded frame to optimize the region-based Wiener filters. Additional filters, proposed in this paper, cover separate spatial area of each decoded frame according to the performance of previously designed filter(s) to provide the flexibility of rate-distortion based selection of the number of filters.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.38A no.8
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• pp.669-679
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• 2013

When an image is converted from HDR (high dynamic range) to LDR (low dynamic range), a tone mapping process is the essential component. Many TMOs (tone mapping operators) have been motivated by human vision which has lower physical luminance range than that in real scene. The representative of human vision properties which motivate TMOs is the local adaptation. However, TMOs are ultimately compressing image information such as contrast, saturation, etc. and the compression causes defects in image quality. In this paper, in order to compensate the degradation of the image which is caused by TMOs, the visual acuity-based edge stop function is proposed for applying the property of human vision to base-detail separation. In addition, using CSF (contrast sensitivity function) which represents the relationship among spatial frequency, contrast sensitivity, and luminance, the sharpness filter is designed and adaptively applied to the detail layer in regard to surround luminance.