• Analytical Science and Technology
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• v.20 no.6
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• pp.524-528
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• 2007

Variations of the twenty one metal components (Mg, Al, V, Cr, Co, Sr, Ba, Na, K Mn, Fe, Cu, Zn, As, Hg, Pb, Ca, P, Mo, Cd, Sb) were analyzed in human hair sample by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). The effect of bleach and permanent wave manipulation on the elemental composition of hair were investigated. It was found that the composition of hair varied with hair bleach and permanent wave. Hair sample was collected from male in the age of thirties. Hair sample (0.05 g) was added to the Teflon digestion bomb together with 1.5 mL of nitric acid and an appropriate amount of In as an internal standard. The sample was then decomposed in the microwave digestion system. In normal hair, the contents of V, Cr, Mn, Fe, Co, Cu, Zn, As, Mo, Cd, Sb and P were increased in permanent wave hair, and Mg, Al, V, Co, Sr, Ba, Na and K were increased in bleached hair. But Mg, Al, Sr, Ba, Hg, Pb, Na, K, and Ca contents were decreased with permanent wave hair, Mn, Fe, Cu, Zn, As, Hg, Pb and Ca contents were decreased with bleached hair.

• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
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• 2022.05a
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• pp.85-85
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• 2022

The world's most extensive and active deltas, Louisiana's wetlands, are deteriorating rapidly due to multiple stressors such as the discharge of the Mississippi River, sea-level rise, and coastal retreat, the substantial but spatially and temporally variable impacts. However, the ecological and anthropogenic histories, the mode of environmental changes on a multi-millennial timescale have not been thoroughly documented. This study, a palynology-based multiproxy analysis, investigates hydrological, geological, geochemical, and anthropogenic impacts on southern Louisiana wetlands and a variety of external forcing agents influencing ecological succession. Sediment cores extracted from a small pond on a mangrove-dominate island near Port Fourchon, Louisiana, USA yielded a 4,000-year record. The site has been transformed from freshwater to saline water environments, to a mangrove dominant island over the late Holocene. The multivariate principal component analysis identified the relative strength of external drivers responsible for each ecological shift. The Mississippi River delta cycle (lobe switching) was the dominant driver of ecosystem changes during the late Holocene, while relative sea-level rise, tropical cyclones, climate, and anthropogenic effects have been the main drivers late in the site's history.

• IMMUNE NETWORK
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.5.1-5.22
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• 2022

The approval of immunotherapies such as checkpoint inhibitors (CPIs), adoptive cell therapies and cancer vaccines has revolutionized the way cancer treatment is approached. While immunotherapies have improved clinical outcome in a variety of tumor types, some cancers have proven harder to combat using single agents, underscoring the need for multi-targeted immunotherapy approaches. Efficacy of CPIs and cancer vaccines requires patients to have a competent immune system with adequate cell numbers while the efficacy of adoptive cellular therapy is limited by the expansion and persistence of cells after infusion. A promising strategy to overcome these challenges is combination treatment with common gamma-chain cytokines. Gamma-chain cytokines play a critical role in the survival, proliferation, differentiation and function of multiple immune cell types, including CD8 T-cells and NK cells, which are at the center of the anti-tumor response. While the short halflife of recombinant cytokines initially limited their application in the clinic, advancements in protein engineering have led to the development of several next-generation drug candidates with dramatically increased half-life and bioactivity. When combining these cytokines with other immunotherapies, strong evidence of synergy has been observed in preclinical and clinical cancer settings. This promising data has led to the initiation of 70 ongoing clinical trials including IL-2, IL-7, IL-15 and IL-21. This review summarizes the recent advancements of common gamma-chain cytokines and their potential as a cancer immunotherapy.

• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• v.34 no.2
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• pp.240-248
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• 2024

In cancer treatment, multi-target approach has paid attention to a reasonable strategy for the potential agents. We investigated whether (E)-2-methoxy-4-(3-(4-methoxyphenyl) prop-1-en-1-yl) phenol (MMPP) could exert an anticancer effect by dual-regulating VEGFR2 and PPARγ. MMPP showed modulating effects in TNBC type (MDA-MB-231 and MDA-MB-468) and luminal A type (MCF7) breast cancer cell lines. MMPP enhanced PPARγ transcriptional activity and inhibited VEGFR2 phosphorylation. MMPP-induced signaling by VEGFR2 and PPARγ ultimately triggered the downregulation of AKT activity. MMPP exhibited anticancer effects, as evidenced by growth inhibition, inducement of apoptosis, and suppression of migration and invasion. At the molecular level, MMPP activated pro-apoptotic proteins (caspase3, caspase8, caspase9, and bax), while inhibiting the anti-apoptotic proteins (bcl2). Additionally, MMPP inhibited the mRNA expressions of EMT-promoting transcription factors. Therefore, our findings showed molecular mechanisms of MMPP by regulating VEGFR2 and PPARγ, and suggested that MMPP has potential to treat breast cancer.

• Progress in Medical Physics
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.235-243
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• 2009

The purpose of this experiment is to know the relation of the detection and characterization of liver's diseases as comparison of finding at MR imaging using a Ferucarbotran (SPIO) and Gd-EOB-DTPA (Primovist) agents in diffuse liver disease. A total of 50 patients (25 men and 25 women, mean age: 50 years) with liver diseases were investigated at 3.0T machine (GE, General Electric Medical System, Excite HD) "with 8 Ch body coil for comparison of diseases and contrast's uptake relation, which used the LAVA, MGRE." All images were performed on the same location with before and after Ferucarbotran and Gd-EOB-DTPA administrations (p<0.05). Contrast to noise ratio of Ferucarbotran and Gd-EOB-DTPA in the HCC were $3.08{\pm}0.12$ and $7.00{\pm}0.27$ with MGRE and LAVA pulse sequence, $3.62{\pm}0.13$ and $2.60{\pm}0.23$ in the hyper-plastic nodule, $1.70{\pm}0.09$ and $2.60{\pm}0.23$ in the meta, $2.12{\pm}0.28$ and $5.86{\pm}0.28$ in the FNH, $4.45{\pm}0.28$ and $1.73{\pm}0.02$ in the abscess and ANOVA test was used to evaluate the diagnostic performance of each disease (p<0.05). In conclusions, two techniques were well demonstrated with the relation of the detection and characterization of liver's diseases.

• Journal of Korea Society of Industrial Information Systems
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.111-124
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• 2011

The apartment' share of the housing has steadily increased and property assets have been valued in importance as the one of asset value. Information retrieval system using internet is particularly active in the real estate market. However, user satisfaction on real estate information system is not very high, and there is a lack of research on real estate retrieval to increasing efficiency until now. This study presents a new knowledge information system developed to consider region-related factor and individual-related factor in the real estate market. In addition it enables a real estate knowledge system to search various preferential requirements for buyers such as school district, living convenience, easy maintenance as well as price. We made a survey of the search condition preference of experts on 30 real estate agents and then analyzed the result using AHP methodology. Furthermore, this research is to build apartment ontology using semantic web technologies to standardize various terminologies of apartment information and to show how it can be used to help buyers find apartments of the interest. After designing architecture of a real estate knowledge information system, this system is applied to the Busan real estate market to estimate the solutions of retrieval through Multi-Attribute Decision Making(MADM). Based on the results of the analysis, we endowed the buyer and expert's selected factors with weights in the system. Evaluation results indicate that this new system is to raise not only the value satisfaction of user, but also make it possible to effectively search and analyze the real estate through entropy analysis of MADM. This new system is to raise not only the value satisfaction of buyer's real estate, but also make it possible to effectively search and analyze the related real estate, consequently saving the searching cost of the buyers.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.73-94
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• 2010

The attending system is a medical system that allows doctors in clinics to use the extra equipment in hospitals-beds, laboratory, operating room, etc-for their patient's care under a contract between the doctors and hospitals. Therefore, the system is very beneficial in terms of the efficiency of the usage of medical resources. However, it is necessary to develop a strong support system to strengthen its weaknesses and supplement its merits. If doctors use hospital beds under the attending system of hospitals, they would be able to check a patient's condition often and provide them with nursing care services. However, the current attending system lacks delivery and assistance support. Thus, for the successful performance of the attending system, a networking system should be developed to facilitate communication between the doctors and nurses. In particular, the nursing records in the attending system could help doctors monitor the patient's condition and provision of nursing care services. A nursing record is the formal documentation associated with nursing care. It is merely a data repository that helps nurses to track their activities; nursing records thus represent a resource of primary information that can be reused. In order to maximize their usefulness, nursing records have been introduced as part of computerized patient records. However, nursing records are internal data that are not disclosed by hospitals. Moreover, the lack of standardization of the record list makes it difficult to share nursing records. Under the attending system, nurses would want to minimize the amount of effort they have to put in for the maintenance of additional records. Hence, they would try to maintain the current level of nursing records in the form of record lists and record attributes, while doctors would require more detailed and real-time information about their patients in order to monitor their condition. Therefore, this study developed a system for assisting in the maintenance and sharing of the nursing records under the attending system. In contrast to previous research on the functionality of computer-based nursing records, we have emphasized the practical usefulness of nursing records from the viewpoint of the actual implementation of the attending system. We suggested that nurses could design a nursing record dictionary for their convenience, and that doctors and nurses could confirm the definitions that they looked up in the dictionary through negotiations with intelligent agents. Such an agent-based system could facilitate networking among medical institutes. Multi-agent systems are a widely accepted paradigm for the distribution and sharing of computation workloads in the scientific community. Agent-based systems have been developed with differences in functional cooperation, coordination, and negotiation. To increase such communication, a framework for a multi-agent based system is proposed in this study. The agent-based approach is useful for developing a system that promotes trade-offs between transactions involving multiple attributes. A brief summary of our contributions follows. First, we propose an efficient and accurate utility representation and acquisition mechanism based on a preference scale while minimizing user interactions with the agent. Trade-offs between various transaction attributes can also be easily computed. Second, by providing a multi-attribute negotiation framework based on the attribute utility evaluation mechanism, we allow both the doctors in charge and nurses to negotiate over various transaction attributes in the nursing record lists that are defined by the latter. Third, we have designed the architecture of the nursing record management server and a system of agents that provides support to the doctors and nurses with regard to the framework and mechanisms proposed above. A formal protocol has also been developed to create and control the communication required for negotiations. We verified the realization of the system by developing a web-based prototype. The system was implemented using ASP and IIS5.1.

• Korean Journal of Environmental Biology
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.240-246
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• 2008

From the 4 sampling stations located in the basin of the Han River, total 46 strains of Enterococcus spp. composed of 15 E. faecium strains, 26 E. casseliflavus strains, 1 E. faecalis strain and 4 E. hirae strains were isolated. Among the 46 strains, 45 strains exhibited streptomycin-resistance, while 21 and 19 stains were resistant against tetracycline and quinupristin/dalfopristin, respectively. As for gentamicin and vancomycin, 15 strains and 1 strain showed resistance against the respective antimicrobial agents. Among the 46 strains, 39 strains showed resistance against more than 2 antimicrobial agents, and 10 strains demonstrated resistance to more than 5 antimicrobial agents. Especially, the strain isolated from the station C at Anyangcheon, exhibited resistance against all the 8 kinds of the antimicrobial agents. As the sampling site approached to the lower stream of the Han-river, the antibiotic resistant strains and the multi-drug resistant strains were detected more frequently. The MIC values of the antibiotic resistant strains measured by the disc diffusion method disclosed that 16 strains possessed maximum MIC value of 4,096 ${\mu}g$ mL$^{-1}$ against streptomycin and 17 strains possessed maximum MIC value of 2,048 ${\mu}g$ mL$^{-1}$ against gentamicin. Meanwhile, 1 strain exhibited maximum MIC value of 5121 ${\mu}g$ mL$^{-1}$ against vancomycin. As for quinupristin/dalfopristin and tetracycline, 2 and 33 strains showed maximum MIC value of 641 ${\mu}g$ mL$^{-1}$, respectively. Comparison of the MIC values of the strains of the this study with those of the strains of the other research groups isolated from the hospital drainage and also those from the live stock farm drainage indicated that the strains resistant against vancomycin and quinupristin/dalfopristin may be originated from the livestock farm drainage.

• Radiation Oncology Journal
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.77-90
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• 2004

Purpose: The purpose of this review Is to provide an update on novel radiation treatments for head and neck cancer Recent Findings: Despite the remarkable advances In chemotherapy and radiotherapy techniques, the management of advanced head and neck cancer remains challenging. Epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) Is an appealing target for novel therapies In head and neck cancer because not only EGFR activation stimulates many important signaling pathways associated with cancer development and progression, and importantly, resistance to radiation. Furthermore, EGFR overexpression Is known to be portended for a worse outcome in patients with advanced head and neck cancer. Two categories of compounds designed to abrogate EGFR signaling, such as monoclonal antibodies (Cetuxlmab) and tyrosine kinase inhibitors (ZD1839 and 051-774) have been assessed and have been most extensively studied In preclinical models and clinical trials. Additional TKIs In clinical trials include a reversible agent, Cl-1033, which blocks activation of all erbB receptors. Encouraging preclinical data for head and neck cancers resulted In rapid translation Into the clinic. Results from Initial clinical trials show rather surprisingly that only minority of patients benefited from EGFR inhibition as monotherapy or In combination with chemotherapy. In this review, we begin with a brief summary of erbB- mediated signal transduction. Subsequently, we present data on prognostic-predictive value of erbB receptor expression in HNC followed by preclinlcal and clinical data on the role of EGFR antagonists alone or in combination with radiation In the treatment of HNC. Finally, we discuss the emerging thoughts on resistance to EGFR biockade and efforts In the development of multiple-targeted therapy for combination with chemotherapy or radiation. Current challenges for investigators are to determine (1 ) who will benefit from targeted agents and which agents are most appropriate to combine with radiation and/or chemotherapy, (2) how to sequence these agents with radiation and/or cytotoxlc compounds, (3) reliable markers for patient selection and verification of effective blockade of signaling in vivo, and (4) mechanisms behind intrinsic or acquired resistance to targeted agents to facilitate rational development of multi-targeted therapy, Other molecuiar-targeted approaches In head and neck cancer were briefly described, Including angloenesis Inhibitors, farnesyl transferase inhibitors, cell cycle regulators, and gene therapy Summary: Novel targeted theraples are highly appealing in advanced head and neck cancer, and the most premising strategy to use them Is a matter of intense Investigation.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.35 no.3
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• pp.179-188
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• 2008

An important issue in multiagent reinforcement learning is how an agent should team its optimal policy through trial-and-error interactions in a dynamic environment where there exist other agents able to influence its own performance. Most previous works for multiagent reinforcement teaming tend to apply single-agent reinforcement learning techniques without any extensions or are based upon some unrealistic assumptions even though they build and use explicit models of other agents. In this paper, basic concepts that constitute the common foundation of multiagent reinforcement learning techniques are first formulated, and then, based on these concepts, previous works are compared in terms of characteristics and limitations. After that, a policy model of the opponent agent and a new multiagent reinforcement learning method using this model are introduced. Unlike previous works, the proposed multiagent reinforcement learning method utilize a policy model instead of the Q function model of the opponent agent. Moreover, this learning method can improve learning efficiency by using a simpler one than other richer but time-consuming policy models such as Finite State Machines(FSM) and Markov chains. In this paper. the Cat and Mouse game is introduced as an adversarial multiagent environment. And effectiveness of the proposed multiagent reinforcement learning method is analyzed through experiments using this game as testbed.