• Microbiology and Biotechnology Letters
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• v.21 no.5
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• pp.414-420
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• 1993

Escherichia coli mrdAts and mrdBts mutants forming spherical cells at 42C, were employed to investigate the possible role of both inner and outer membrance structures in the determination of cell shape of gram-negative cells. Spherical cells, but not rod-shaped wild types, were specifically killed by anionic detergents, such as sarkosyl, sodium dodecylsulfate and sodium deoxycholate. From the spherical intact cells grown overnight at 42C, much more proteins were released by sakosyl.

• Clinical and Experimental Pediatrics
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• v.53 no.11
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• pp.957-964
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• 2010

Purpose: Our study attempted to determine the prognostic significance of minimal residual disease (MRD) detected by a simplified flow cytometric assay during induction chemotherapy in children with B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL). Methods: A total of 98 patients were newly diagnosed with precursor B-ALL from June 2004 to December 2008 at the Asan Medical Center (Seoul, Korea). Of those, 37 were eligible for flow cytometric MRD study analysis on day 14 of their induction treatment. The flow cytometric MRD assay was based on the expression intensity of CD19/CD10/CD34 or aberrant expression of myeloid antigens by bone marrow nucleated cells. Results: Thirty-five patients (94.6%) had CD19-positive leukemic cells that also expressed CD10 and/or CD34, and 18 (48.6%) had leukemic cells with aberrant expression of myeloid antigens. Seven patients with ${\geq}1%$ leukemic cells on day 14 had a significantly lower relapse-free survival (RFS) compared to the 30 patients with lower levels (42.9 % [18.7%] vs. 92.0% [5.4%], $P$=0.004). Stratification into 3 MRD groups (${\geq}1%$, 0.1-1%, and <0.1%) also showed a statistically significant difference in RFS (42.9% [18.7%] vs. 86.9% [8.7%] vs. 100%, $P$=0.013). However, the MRD status had no significant influence on overall survival. Multivariate analysis demonstrated that the MRD level on day 14 was an independent prognostic factor with borderline significance. Conclusion: An MRD assay using simplified flow cytometry during induction chemotherapy may help to identify patients with B-ALL who have an excellent outcome and patients who are at higher risk for relapse.

• Archives of Plastic Surgery
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• v.33 no.4
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• pp.521-524
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• 2006

Purpose: The history of biometry dates back to ancient Greek. The ideal body ratio from biometry is used as a guideline in many works of art. Biometry is also used as a medical standard to determine normal or abnormal. Since the biometry of face is so complicated, many surgeons tend to regard preoperative evaluation as a bother and substitute medical records with some photographs. We introduce a new method to measure $MRD_1$ and levator function using digital photographs, which becomes widely used lately. Methods: $MRD_1$ can be measured with the primary-gaze-view photo which is magnified by PhotoshopR 7.0.1. The distance from coneal reflex of ring flash to upper eyelid margin is converted to mm-unit using the piece of ruler attached on the patient's face. Levator function can be measured with up-gaze-view photo and down-gaze-view photo which are superimposed on another. The excursion distance of upper eyelid margin (a) and the excursion distance of eyebrow (b) are measured respectively. The levator function can be assessed through subtraction of two values (a-b). This method is simple and precise and can be applied directly to patient without photos. Results: Using magnified digital photos and computer, this method can reduce personal error and instrumental error. Taking some digital photos doesn't take long time, so it can reduce the effort of preoperative evaluation and discomfort of patients. Conclusion: Digital photo-biometry is useful for retrospective study. Especially reducing personal error, it is useful when the number of specimens is huge. New levator function test is much more useful for Asian-specific eyes than Berke's method allowing frontalis muscle compensation.

• Archives of Plastic Surgery
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• v.43 no.2
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• pp.172-180
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• 2016

Background Conventional frontalis transfer may cause a range of complications. In order to overcome complications, we made modifications to the surgical technique, and compared the outcomes of patients who underwent conventional frontalis transfer with those of patients who underwent modified frontalis transfer. Methods We conducted a retrospective study of 48 patients (78 eyes) who underwent conventional frontalis transfer between 1991 and 2003 (group A) and 67 patients (107 eyes) who underwent modified frontalis transfer between 2004 and 2014 (group B). The frontalis transfer procedures were modified conform to the following principles. The tip of the frontalis muscle flap included soft tissue that was as thick as possible and the soft tissue on the tarsal plate was removed to the greatest extent possible. A double fold was created in cases of unilateral ptosis. In order to evaluate the objective effects of modification, preoperative and postoperative values of the marginal distance reflex 1 (MRD1), the corneal exposure area, and the decrease in eyebrow height were compared between the two groups. Results In group A, patients showed an improvement of 1.19 mm in the MRD1, a 6.31% improvement in the corneal exposure area, and a 7.82 mm decrease in eyebrow height. In group B, patients showed an improvement of 2.17 mm in the MRD1, an 8.39% improvement in the corneal exposure area, and an 11.54 mm decrease in eyebrow height. The improvements in group B were significantly greater than those in group A. Conclusions Modified frontalis transfer showed better results than the conventional procedure and provided satisfactory outcomes.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.13B no.2 s.105
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• pp.171-178
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• 2006

Most approaches for extracting hypernyms of a noun from its definitions in an MRD rely on lexical patterns compiled by human experts. Not only these approaches require high cost for compiling lexical patterns but also it is very difficult for human experts to compile a set of lexical patterns with a broad-coverage because in natural languages there are various expressions which represent same concept. To alleviate these problems, this paper proposes a new method for extracting hypernyms of a noun from its definitions in an MRD. In proposed approach, we use only syntactic (part-of-speech) patterns instead of lexical patterns in identifying hypernyms to reduce the number of patterns with keeping their coverage broad. Our experiment has shown that the classification accuracy of the proposed method is 92.37% which is significantly much better than that of previous approaches.