• Applied Microscopy
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• v.39 no.2
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• pp.125-132
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• 2009

Extracts and fractions of Inonotus obliquus (Chaga in Russia) have been known to have various biological activities, including antimutagenic, anticancer, antioxidative, and immunostimulating effects. This study was performed to confirm anticancer effect of 10% superfine Chaga mushroom processed by nano-mill technology on C57BL/6 mice. Chaga particles belonged in the size of 1 ${\mu}m$ was about 40% after nanomill processing according to the volume distribution. As the result of subcutaneous injection of B16BL6 melanoma cells to the mice, the tumor volume (p<0.001) and tumor weight (p<0.01) was significantly decreased in the experimental (NCh) group as compared with control (C) group and the tumor growth inhibitory rate was 29.2%. On examination of survival rate after intraperitoneal injection of B16BL6 melanoma cells, the mean survival time per a mouse was 17.7 and 26.0 days in C and NCh group respectively. The survival rate of NCh group was 40% when that of C group was 0% at the 35th day. On the result of examination to confirm histological toxicity by Chaga superfine particles, both groups did not show any morphological and pathological changes in the small and large intestine under the light microscope. These results suggest that feeding of superfine Chaga produced by nanomill technique has a tumor growth inhibitory effect in vivo.

• Journal of the Korean Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons
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• v.31 no.5
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• pp.440-453
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• 2005

Objectives : To develop a bioactive membrane for guided bone regeneration (GBR), the biocompatibility and bone regenerating capacity of the cellulose membrane obtained from the Ascidians squirt skin were evaluated. Materials and methods : After processing the pure cellulose membrane from the squirt skin, the morphological study, amino acid analysis and the immunoreactivity of the cellulose membrane were tested. Total eighteen male Spraque-Dawley rats (12 weeks, weighing 250 to 300g) were divided into two control (n=8) and another two experimental groups (n=10). In the first experimental group (n=5), the cellulose membrane was applicated to the 8.0 mm sized calvarial bone defect and the same sized defect was left without cellulose membrane in the first control group (n=4). In the another experimental group (n=5), the cellulose membrane was applicated to the same sized calvarial bone defect after femoral bone graft and the same sized defect with bone graft was left without cellulose membrane in the another control group (n=4). Each group was sacrificed after 6 weeks, the histological study with H&E and Masson trichrome stain was done, and immunohistochemical stainings of angiogenin and VEGF were also carried out. Results : The squirt skin cellulose showed the bio-inductive effect on the bone and mesenchymal tissues in the periosteum of rat calvarial bone. This phenomenon was found only in the inner surface of the cellulose membrane after 6 weeks contrast to the outer surface. Bone defect covered with the bioactive cellulose membrane showed significantly greater bone formation compared with control groups. Mesenchymal cells beneath the inner surface of the bioactive cellulose membrane were positive to the angiogenin and VEGF antibodies. Conclusion : We suppose that there still remains extremely little amount of peptide fragment derived from the basement membrane matrix proteins of squirt skin, which is a kind of anchoring protein composed of glycocalyx. This composition could prevent the adverse immunological hypersensitivity and also induce bioactive properties of cellulose membrane. These properties induced the effective angiogenesis with rapid osteogenesis beneath the inner surface of cellulose membrane, and so the possibilities of clinical application in dental field as a GBR material will be able to be suggested.

• Korean journal of food and cookery science
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• v.23 no.6
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• pp.908-918
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• 2007

To prepare ready-to-use rice flour as de novo material for processed rice foods, glutinous(W) and normal rice grains (N) were soaked for 1, 8, and 12 hours prior to processing. One half (DG) was air-dried and milled, and the other (WG) was milled and air-dried. General, morphological and pasting properties of the flours (NDG, NWG, WDG, WWG) were compared to those of a control (raw milled rice without soaking). The general compositions of the rice flours varied with soaking. Crude ash was considerably decreased at the beginning of soaking (1 hour). With the soaking, the rice flour, having polygonal shaped particles and a layered surface, acquired particles with smooth edges, which were then uniformly distributed. Additionally, the WG flour was lighter and had a lower ${\Delta}E$ value than the DG flour, due to a higher L and less +b as a result of soaking. Compared to the control, the WBC of the normal rice flour was decreased significantly with soaking, and the WG flour had significantly lower WBCs than the DG flour. Stirring number (SN), an indicator of ${\alpha}-amylase$ activity, was highly and significantly correlated with WBC (r=-0.85, p=0.0001) in the normal rice flour. At $80^{\circ}C$, the SP and solubility of all the soaked rice flours were much higher than those of the control. Positive (r=+0.85, p=0.0001) and negative (r=-0.61, p=0.02) correlations between the SP and solubility of the normal and glutinous rice flours were found, respectively. Using RVA, the pasting temperature of NDG was lower than that of NWG (p<0.0001). The peak viscosities of all the soaked flours were significantly decreased with soaking (p<0.0l), with the highest viscosity in the normal rice flour soaked for 8 hrs. Total setback, indicative of retrogradation, was lower in NDG than in NWG, with the lowest setback at 8 hrs of' soaking. Based on these finding, the NDG flour with 8 hrs of soaking was less damaged, and had a lower total setback and lower pasting temperature, which would make it an appropriate rice flour for commercial mass production.

• Korean Journal of Plant Resources
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.359-366
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• 2005

Effects of neutron beam irradiation on seed germination, growth and RAPD pattern of tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum L. cv.; N. plumbaginifolia) and rice (Orya sativa L. cv.) plants were estimated. Seed germination rate was not significantly changed by the neutron beam treatment in both tobacco and rice seeds. And there was no significant differance in growth of the plants by the neutron beam treatment. Interestingly, however, some of morphological changes, including leaf shape (about $36\%$), stem color and leaf color were observed in neutron beam treated tobacco plants. In addition, abnormal flower in petal was observed in the neutron beam treated plant. This results indicate that neutron beam is able to use as an effective mutagen in plant mutations. Scorable products from 20 primers were obtained by RAPD analysis in the leaves of the beam irradiated tobacco plants and most of the plants showed the similar band patterns.

• The Journal of Internal Korean Medicine
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• v.34 no.2
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• pp.178-191
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• 2013

Objectives : In this study, we made an effort to investigate the protective mechanism of Ukgan-san (UGS) extracts on hypoxia-induced C6 glial cell death. Methods : The cell viability was assessed by 3-[4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl]-2,5-diphenyl tetrazolium bromide (MMT) assay and cell morphological changes were analysed with microscope after staining with crystal violet (CV). Reactive oxygen species (ROS) formation was assessed by flow cytometer after staining with 2'7'-dichlorofluorescein diacetate (DCF-DA). We also analyzed expression of hypoxia-inducible factor-1 alpha (HIF-$1{\alpha}$) and p53, processing of procaspase-3 and procyclic acidic repetitive protein (PARP) by western blot method. Results : We estimated the elevated cell viability by UGS extract on $CoCl_2$-induced C6 glial cells. UGS attenuated $CoCl_2$-induced ROS formation in C6 glial cells and also showed a protective activity compared to antioxidants and exhibited abrogation of LDH-released by $CoCl_2$. UGS suppressed the typical apoptotic cell death markers, caspase-3 and PARP activation. UGS inhibited $CoCl_2$-induced HIF-1${\alpha}$ expression which is known as a major regulator for hypoxia-induced cell death, and suppressed p53 expression. Conclusions : These results suggest that UGS extract contains protective constituents for hypoxia-induced C6 glial cell death.

• Progress in Medical Physics
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.159-168
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• 1999

Cardiac disease is one of the leading causes of death in Korea. In quantitative analysis of cardiac function and morphological information by three-dimensional reconstruction of magnetic resonance images, left ventricle provides an important role functionally and physiologically. However, existing procedures mostly rely on the extensive human interaction and are seldom evaluated on clinical applications. In this study, we developed a system which could perform automatic extraction of enpicardial and endocardial contour and analysis of cardiac function to evaluate reliability and stability of each system comparing with the result of ARGUS system offered 1.5T Siemens MRI system and manual method performed by clinicians. For various aspects, we investigated reliability of each system by compared with left ventricular contour, end-diastolic volume (EDV), end-systolic volume (ESV), stock volume (SV), ejection fraction (EF), cardiac output (CO) and wall thickness (WT). When comparing with manual method, extracted results of developed process using minimum error threshold (MET) method that automatically extracts contour from cardiac MR images and ARGUS system were demonstrated as successful rate 90% of the contour extraction. When calculating cardiac function parameters using MET and comparing with using correlation coefficients analysis method, the process extracts endocardial and epicardial contour using MET, values from automatic and ARGUS method agreed with manual values within :t 3% average error. It was successfully demonstrated that automatic method using threshold technique could provide high potential for assessing of each parameters with relatively high reliability compared with manual method. In this study, the method developed in this study could reduce processing time compared with ARGUS and manual method due to a simple threshold technique. This method is useful for diagnosis of cardiac disease, simulating physiological function and amount of blood flow of left ventricle. In addition, this method could be valuable in developing automatic systems in order to apply to other deformable image models.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartA
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• v.13A no.5 s.102
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• pp.465-472
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• 2006

Recently, many suggestions have been made in image segmentation methods for extracting human organs or disease affected area from huge amounts of medical image datasets. However, images from some areas, such as brain, which have multiple structures with ambiruous structural borders, have limitations in their structural segmentation. To address this problem, clustering technique which classifies voxels into finite number of clusters is often employed. This, however, has its drawback, the influence from noise, which is caused from voxel by voxel operations. Therefore, applying image enhancing method to minimize the influence from noise and to make clearer image borders would allow more robust structural segmentation. This research proposes an efficient structural segmentation method by filtering based clustering to extract detail structures such as white matter, gray matter and cerebrospinal fluid from brain MR. First, coherence enhancing diffusion filtering is adopted to make clearer borders between structures and to reduce the noises in them. To the enhanced images from this process, fuzzy c-means clustering method was applied, conducting structural segmentation by assigning corresponding cluster index to the structure containing each voxel. The suggested structural segmentation method, in comparison with existing ones with clustering using Gaussian or general anisotropic diffusion filtering, showed enhanced accuracy which was determined by how much it agreed with the manual segmentation results. Moreover, by suggesting fine segmentation method on the border area with reproducible results and minimized manual task, it provides efficient diagnostic support for morphological abnormalities in brain.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.29 no.3C
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• pp.374-386
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• 2004

The mammogram provides the way to observe detailed internal organization of breasts to radiologists for the early detection. This paper is mainly focused on efficiently detecting the Microcalcification's Region Of Interest(ROI)s. Breast cancers can be caused from either microcalcifications or masses. Microcalcifications are appeared in a digital mammogram as tiny dots that have a little higher gray levels than their surrounding pixels. We can roughly determine the area which possibly contain microcalifications. In general, it is very challenging to find all the microcalcifications in a digital mammogram, because they are similar to some tissue parts of a breast. To efficiently detect microcalcifications ROI, we used four sequential processes; preprocessing for breast area detection, modified multilevel thresholding, ROI selection using simple thresholding filters and final ROI selection with two stages of neural networks. The filtering process with boundary conditions removes easily-distinguishable tissues while keeping all microcalcifications so that it cleans the thresholded mammogram images and speeds up the later processing by the average of 86％. The first neural network shows the average of 96.66％ recognition rate. The second neural network performs better by showing the average recognition rate 98.26％. By removing all tissues while keeping microcalcifications as much as possible, the next parts of a CAD system for detecting breast cancers can become much simpler.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.18 no.12
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• pp.157-163
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• 2017

The object segmentation approach has the merit of reducing the processing cost required to detect moths of interest, because it applies a moth detection algorithm to the segmented objects after segmenting the objects individually in the moth image. In this paper, an object segmentation method for moth detection in pheromone trap images is proposed. Our method consists of preprocessing, thresholding, morphological filtering, and object labeling processes. Thresholding in the process is a critical step significantly influencing the performance of object segmentation. The proposed method can threshold very elaborately by reflecting the local properties of the moth images. We performed thresholding using global and local versions of Ostu's method and, used the proposed method for the moth images of Carposina sasakii acquired on a pheromone trap placed in an orchard. It was demonstrated that the proposed method could reflect the properties of light and background on the moth images. Also, we performed object segmentation and moth classification for Carposina sasakii images, where the latter process used an SVM classifier with training and classification steps. In the experiments, the proposed method performed the detection of Carposina sasakii for 10 moth images and achieved an average detection rate of 95% of them. Therefore, it was shown that the proposed technique is an effective monitoring method of Carposina sasakii in an orchard.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.32 no.11
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• pp.1121-1135
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• 2005

This paper proposes a moving object extraction method using the contrast map and salient points. In order to make the contrast map, we generate three-feature maps such as luminance map, color map and directional map and extract salient points from an image. By using these features, we can decide the Attention Window(AW) location easily The purpose of the AW is to remove the useless regions in the image such as background as well as to reduce the amount of image processing. To create the exact location and flexible size of the AW, we use motion feature instead of pre-assumptions or heuristic parameters. After determining of the AW, we find the difference of edge to inner area from the AW. Then, we can extract horizontal candidate region and vortical candidate region. After finding both horizontal and vertical candidates, intersection regions through logical AND operation are further processed by morphological operations. The proposed algorithm has been applied to many video sequences which have static background like surveillance type of video sequences. The moving object was quite well segmented with accurate boundaries.