• Journal of Korean Neurosurgical Society
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• v.58 no.1
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• pp.65-71
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• 2015

Objective : Lumbar spinal stenosis is conventionally treated with surgical decompression. However, bilateral decompression and laminectomy is more invasive and may not be necessary for lumbar stenosis patients with unilateral radiculopathy. We aimed to report the outcomes of unilateral laminectomy and bilateral pedicle screw fixation with fusion for patients with lumbar spinal stenosis and unilateral radiculopathy. Methods : Patients with lumbar spinal stenosis with unilateral lower extremity radiculopathy who received limited unilateral decompression and bilateral pedicle screw fixation were included and evaluated using visual analog scale (VAS) pain and the Oswestry Disability Index (ODI) scores preoperatively and at follow-up visits. Ligamentum flavum thickness of the involved segments was measured on axial magnetic resonance images. Results : Twenty-five patients were included. The mean preoperative VAS score was $6.6{\pm}1.6$ and $4.6{\pm}3.1$ for leg and back pain, respectively. Ligamentum flavum thickness was comparable between the symptomatic and asymptomatic side (p=0.554). The mean follow-up duration was 29.2 months. The pain in the symptomatic side lower extremity (VAS score, $1.32{\pm}1.2$) and the back (VAS score, $1.75{\pm}1.73$) significantly improved (p=0.000 vs. baseline for both). The ODI improved significantly postoperatively ($6.60{\pm}6.5$; p=0.000 vs. baseline). Significant improvement in VAS pain and ODI scores were observed in patients receiving single or multi-segment decompression fusion with fixation (p<0.01). Conclusion : Limited laminectomy and unilateral spinal decompression followed by bilateral pedicle screw fixation with fusion achieves satisfactory outcomes in patients with spinal stenosis and unilateral radiculopathy. This procedure is less damaging to structures that are important for maintaining posterior stability of the spine.

• Journal of Korean Neurosurgical Society
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• v.51 no.6
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• pp.343-349
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• 2012

Objective : Pedicle-based dynamic stabilization systems, in which semi-rigid rods or cords are used to restrict or control spinal segmental motion, aim to reduce or eliminate the drawbacks associated with rigid fusion. In this study, we analyzed the two-year clinical outcomes of patients treated with the NFlex (Synthes Spine, Inc.), a pedicle-based dynamic stabilization system. Methods : Five sites participated in a retrospective study of 72 consecutive patients who underwent NFlex stabilization. Of these 72 patients, 65 were available for 2-year follow-up. Patients were included based on the presence of degenerative disc disease (29 patients), degenerative spondylolisthesis (16 patients), lumbar stenosis (9 patients), adjacent segment degeneration (6 patients), and degenerative lumbar scoliosis (5 patients). The clinical outcome measures at each assessment were Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) to measure back pain, and Oswestry Disability Index (ODI) to measure functional status. Radiographic assessments included evidence of instrumentation failure or screw loosening. Results : Sixty-five patients (26 men and 39 women) with a mean age of 54.5 years were included. Mean follow-up was 25.6 months. The mean VAS score improved from 8.1 preoperatively to 3.8 postoperatively, representing a 53% improvement, and the ODI score from 44.5 to 21.8, representing a 51% improvement. Improvements in pain and disability scores were statistically significant. Three implant-related complications were observed. Conclusion : Posterior pedicle-based dynamic stabilization using the NFlex system seems effective in improving pain and functional scores, with sustained clinical improvement after two years. With appropriate patient selection, it may be considered an effective alternative to rigid fusion.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.19 no.6
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• pp.791-802
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• 2023

The manual inspection of photovoltaic (PV) panels to meet the requirements of inspection work for large-scale PV power plants is challenging. We present a hot spot detection and positioning method to detect hot spots in batches and locate their latitudes and longitudes. First, a network based on the YOLOv3 architecture was utilized to identify hot spots. The innovation is to modify the RU_1 unit in the YOLOv3 model for hot spot detection in the far field of view and add a neural network residual unit for fusion. In addition, because of the misidentification problem in the infrared images of the solar PV panels, the DeepLab v3+ model was adopted to segment the PV panels to filter out the misidentification caused by bright spots on the ground. Finally, the latitude and longitude of the hot spot are calculated according to the geometric positioning method utilizing known information such as the drone's yaw angle, shooting height, and lens field-of-view. The experimental results indicate that the hot spot recognition rate accuracy is above 98%. When keeping the drone 25 m off the ground, the hot spot positioning error is at the decimeter level.

• Transactions of Materials Processing
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• v.33 no.1
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• pp.36-42
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• 2024

Additive manufacturing with 3XX austenitic stainless steels has been widely investigated during a decade due to its high strength, good corrosion resistance, and fair weldability. However, in recently, Ni price drastically increased due to the high demand of secondary battery for electric mobilities. Thus, it is essential to substitute the Ni with Mn for reducing stainless steels price. Meanwhile, the chemical composition changes in stainless steels not only affect to its properties but also change the optimal processing parameters during additive manufacturing. Therefore, it is necessary to optimize the processing parameters of each alloy for obtaining high-quality product using additive manufacturing. After processing optimization, mechanical properties and microstructure of the laser-powder bed fusion processed Fe-15Cr-7Ni-3Mn alloy were investigated in both room (298 K) and cryogenic (77 K) temperatures. Since the temperature reduction affects to the deformation mechanism transition, multi-scale microstructural characterization technique was conducted to reveal the deformation mechanism of each sample.

• Journal of the Korea Computer Graphics Society
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.127-135
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• 2023

Accurate segmentation of histopathology whole slide images (WSIs) is a crucial task for disease diagnosis and treatment planning. However, conventional automated segmentation algorithms may not always be applicable to WSI segmentation due to their large size and variations in tissue appearance, staining, and imaging conditions. Recent advances in interactive segmentation, which combines human expertise with algorithms, have shown promise to improve efficiency and accuracy in WSI segmentation but also presented us with challenging issues. In this paper, we propose a novel interactive segmentation method, ZoomISEG, that leverages multi-resolution WSIs. We demonstrate the efficacy and performance of the proposed method via comparison with conventional single-scale methods and an ablation study. The results confirm that the proposed method can reduce human interaction while achieving accuracy comparable to that of the brute-force approach using the highest-resolution data.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Surveying, Geodesy, Photogrammetry and Cartography
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• v.32 no.5
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• pp.459-467
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• 2014

The importance of fusion and association using established spatial information has increased gradually with the production and supply of various spatial data by public institutions. The generation of necessary spatial information without field investigation and additional surveying can reduce time, labor, and financial costs. However, the study of the integration of the newly introduced road name address map with the digital map is very insufficient. Even though the use of the road name address map is encouraged for public works related to spatial information, the digital map is still widely used because it is the national basic map. Therefore, in this study, building matching and update were performed to associate the digital map with the road name address map. After geometric calibration using the block-based ICP (Iterative Closest Point) method, multi-scale corresponding pair searching with hierarchical clustering was applied to detect the multi-type match. The accuracy assessment showed that the proposed method is more than 95% accurate and the matched building layer of the two maps is useful for the integrated application and fusion. In addition, the use of the road name address map, which carries the latest and most frequently renewed data, enables cost-effective updating of new buildings.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Surveying, Geodesy, Photogrammetry and Cartography
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• v.37 no.3
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• pp.209-219
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• 2019

Satellite imagery occurs geometric and radiometric errors due to external environmental factors at the acquired time, which in turn causes false-alarm in change detection. These errors should be eliminated by geometric and radiometric corrections. In this study, we propose a methodology that automatically and simultaneously performs geometric and radiometric corrections by using the SURF (Speeded-Up Robust Feature) algorithm and the mask filter. The MPs (Matching Points), which show invariant properties between multi-temporal imagery, extracted through the SURF algorithm are used for automatic geometric correction. Using the properties of the extracted MPs, PIFs (Pseudo Invariant Features) used for relative radiometric correction are selected. Subsequently, secondary PIFs are extracted by generated mask filters around the selected PIFs. After performing automatic using the extracted MPs, we could confirm that geometric and radiometric errors are eliminated as the result of performing the relative radiometric correction using PIFs in geo-rectified images.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2013.02a
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• pp.550-551
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• 2013

Large-area RF-driven ion source is being developed at Germany for the heating and current drive of ITER plasmas. Negative hydrogen (deuterium) ion sources are major components of neutral beam injection systems in future large-scale fusion experiments such as ITER and DEMO. RF ion sources for the production of positive hydrogen ions have been successfully developed at IPP (Max-Planck- Institute for Plasma Physics, Garching) for ASDEX-U and W7-AS neutral beam injection (NBI) systems. In recent, the first NBI system (NBI-1) has been developed successfully for the KSTAR. The first and second long-pulse ion sources (LPIS-1 and LPIS-2) of NBI-1 system consist of a magnetic bucket plasma generator with multi-pole cusp fields, filament heating structure, and a set of tetrode accelerators with circular apertures. There is a development plan of large-area RF ion source at KAERI to extract the positive ions, which can be used for the second NBI (NBI-2) system of KSTAR, and to extract the negative ions for future fusion devices such as ITER and K-DEMO. The large-area RF ion source consists of a driver region, including a helical antenna (6-turn copper tube with an outer diameter of 6 mm) and a discharge chamber (ceramic and/or quartz tubes with an inner diameter of 200 mm, a height of 150 mm, and a thickness of 8 mm), and an expansion region (magnetic bucket of prototype LPIS in the KAERI). RF power can be transferred up to 10 kW with a fixed frequency of 2 MHz through a matching circuit (auto- and manual-matching apparatus). Argon gas is commonly injected to the initial ignition of RF plasma discharge, and then hydrogen gas instead of argon gas is finally injected for the RF plasma sustainment. The uniformities of plasma density and electron temperature at the lowest area of expansion region (a distance of 300 mm from the driver region) are measured by using two electrostatic probes in the directions of short- and long-dimension of expansion region.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Surveying, Geodesy, Photogrammetry and Cartography
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• v.28 no.5
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• pp.493-504
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• 2010

This study proposes a classification method based on an automated training extraction procedure that may be used with very high resolution (VHR) images of non-accessible areas. The proposed method overcomes the problem of scale difference between VHR images and geographic information system (GIS) data through filtering and use of a Landsat image. In order to automate maximum likelihood classification (MLC), GIS data were used as an input to the MLC of a Landsat image, and a binary edge and a normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) were used to increase the purity of the training samples. We identified the thresholds of an NDVI and binary edge appropriate to obtain pure samples of each class. The proposed method was then applied to QuickBird and SPOT-5 images. In order to validate the method, visual interpretation and quantitative assessment of the results were compared with products of a manual method. The results showed that the proposed method could classify VHR images and efficiently update GIS data.

• Progress in Superconductivity and Cryogenics
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.1-7
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• 2022

So far, large-scale scientific devices such as nuclear fusion tokamaks and high energy circular accelerators were constructed using high-current conductors made of metallic superconducting wires. Recently, as REBCO superconducting wires usable in high magnetic fields have been developed by several companies, researchesto apply high current cable type REBCO conductors to next-generation large superconducting magnets were also started. High critical currents of several kA or more in high magnetic fields have been successfully demonstrated on test samples of REBCO cable conductors by several research groups. In this review article, the main features and properties of the representative high current REBCO conductors such as CORC(Conductor On Round Core), TSTC(Twisted Stacked-Tape Cable) and RACC(Roebel-Assembled Coated Conductor), which are currently being developed at abroad are briefly introduced. Research activities of high-current density REBCO MHOS(Multi HTS layers on One Substrate) conductor at KERI, whose structure is different from other cable type REBCO conductors are also shortly introduced.