• Journal of Digital Convergence
• /
• v.19 no.2
• /
• pp.265-274
• /
• 2021

The Purpose of this paper was to explore the effect of hearing impairment on HRQOL in Korean elders. We carry out a cross-sectional analysis using nationally representative data from the KNHANES, 2016-2018. The survey was conducted on 4,754 elders who responded to questions about hearing impairment. Quality of life was compared between hearing impaired elders and elders with no hearing impairment using the t-test and chi-square test, and factors related to quality of life were analyzed by multivariate logistic regression using SPSS version 22.0. There was significant difference in quality of life between hearing impaired elders and elders with no hearing impairment. Walking exercise were identified as factors related to quality of life in elders with hearing impairment, while marriage status, walking exercise and limited movement were found to be related to quality of life among elders with no hearing impairment. In order to improve the HRQOL of elders with hearing impairment, multidisciplinary efforts and development of educational programs are required.

• Journal of Trauma and Injury
• /
• v.33 no.4
• /
• pp.242-247
• /
• 2020

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the incidence and characteristics of associated injuries in patients with spine trauma. Methods: Data of 3,920 consecutive patients admitted to a regional trauma center during a 3-year period were analyzed retrospectively. Results: Of the 3,920 patients who were admitted to the trauma center during the 3-year study period, 389 (9.9%) had major spinal injuries. Among these 389 patients, 303 (77.9%) had associated injuries outside the spine. The most common body region of associated injuries was the extremities or pelvis (194 cases, 49.4%), followed by the chest (154 cases, 39.6%) and face (127 cases, 32.6%). Of these 303 patients, 149 (64%) had associated injuries that required surgical treatment such as laparotomy or internal fixation. Associated injuries were more common in patients with lumbar injuries (93.3%) or multiple spinal injuries (100%) than in those with lower cervical injuries (67.4%). There was a significant correlation between the location of the spinal injury and the body region of the associated injury. However, distant associated injuries were also common. Conclusions: Associated injuries were very common in spinal injury patients. Based on demographic groups, the trauma mechanism, and the location of spinal injury, an associated injury should be suspected until proven otherwise. Using a multidisciplinary and integrated approach to treat trauma victims is of the paramount importance.

• International Journal of Knowledge Content Development & Technology
• /
• v.11 no.4
• /
• pp.101-111
• /
• 2021

The world is going through the most unprecedented time with the outbreak of novel Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), which has become a threat to millions. A Coronavirus is a group of viruses that cause a variety of diseases in mammals and birds leading to a range of illnesses in humans including common cold and more severe forms like severe acute respiratory syndrome Coronavirus (SARS-CoV), Middle East respiratory syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV) and COVID-19, which are life-threatening. The virus gets its name from its shape which takes the form of a crown with protrusions around it. In December 2019, a pneumonia outbreak was reported in the Wuhan City of China, which was later traced to a novel strain of Coronavirus and termed as Novel COVID-19. It typically causes flu-like symptoms including fever, cough and shortness of breath and is transmitted through human-to-human and there is no cure for it till now. Thus, this bibliometric study has been carried out to analyze the research progress in Coronavirus and literature published during a period of 30 years (1989-2019). Data for the study were fetched from Web of Science(WoS) multidisciplinary database and the publication trends in terms of total articles, productive countries, institutions, journals, productive authors, most cited articles and authors, etc have been analyzed. In total, 4917 articles were retrieved; these were from 711 sources and were contributed by 14442 authors. The collaboration index was 3.11, which clearly indicates that there has been a lot of collaboration in this field. The most preferred journal for the study period was "Journal of Virology" and the maximum contribution has been from the University of Hong Kong.

• Journal of Hospice and Palliative Care
• /
• v.25 no.1
• /
• pp.25-41
• /
• 2022

Purpose: This study investigated trends of nursing research on life-sustaining treatment in South Korea. Methods: The period for data search was set from January 2018 to December 2020. The major search terms used were advance directives and life-sustaining treatment. Of the 492 records identified in the initial search, 461 articles were excluded for various reasons. A total of 31 records were included in the final qualitative analysis. Results: Sixteen studies had nursing students as study subjects, while nine studies had nurses as study subjects. The majority of the studies employed cross-sectional descriptive surveys as their research design. The major themes that emerged from the studies were as follows: attitudes toward withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment, knowledge of and attitudes toward advance directives, perceptions of a good death, and nurses' attitude toward life support care. Most of the studies reviewed concluded that attitudes toward withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment significantly impacted both knowledge of and attitudes toward advance directives and perceptions of a good death. Conclusion: To date, Korea still lacks extensive nursing research concerning life support care. Further research is needed to provide systematic education for nursing ethics and life support care, as well as the introduction of a specialist course. Furthermore, a multidisciplinary approach is necessary to provide diverse support systems and policy measures. In particular, since nurses are directly responsible for providing life support care, nurses' roles should be expanded in accordance with the Act on Decisions on Life-Sustaining Treatment.

• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
• /
• v.12 no.5
• /
• pp.405-413
• /
• 2021

The purpose of this study was conducted to identify perceptions about the relationship between poverty and health and examined the attitudes toward poverty among nursing students. This study administered a standardized questionnaire to 198 nursing students at a university. The data were analyzed using SPSS 22.0. The results of the study showed that nursing students recognized the importance of nursing education for poverty. They also recognized that clinical practice and extra-curricular programs such as volunteer activities were necessary for nursing education. Furthermore, they were aware of the vicious cycle of poverty and health; however, their awareness of the health behavior of the poor was insufficient. In the perception of attitudes toward poverty, individual explanations of poverty tended to be more common than structural explanations, and there was a difference in scores according to age, economic level, political orientation, and clinical practice. In conclusion, it is necessary to develop programs, such as multidisciplinary convergence clinical practice education and volunteer activities, to produce competent nurses to health inequity care for the poor.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.30 no.6
• /
• pp.673-686
• /
• 2022

Deep learning algorithms for Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) have been extracting the interest of researchers and engineers. These algorithms commonly used loss functions and evaluation indices like the mean square error (MSE) which were not originally designed for SHM problems. An updated loss function which was specifically constructed for deep-learning-based structural damage detection problems has been proposed in this study. By tuning the coefficients of the loss function, the weights for damage localization and quantification can be adapted to the real situation and the deep learning network can avoid unnecessary iterations on damage localization and focus on the damage severity identification. To prove efficiency of the proposed method, structural damage detection using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) was conducted on a truss bridge model. Results showed that the validation curve with the updated loss function converged faster than the traditional MSE. Data augmentation was conducted to improve the anti-noise ability of the proposed method. For reducing the training time, the normalized modal strain energy change (NMSEC) was extracted, and the principal component analysis (PCA) was adopted for dimension reduction. The results showed that the training time was reduced by 90% and the damage identification accuracy could also have a slight increase. Furthermore, the effect of different modes and elements on the training dataset was also analyzed. The proposed method could greatly improve the performance for structural damage detection on both the training time and detection accuracy.

• Korean Journal of Head & Neck Oncology
• /
• v.38 no.2
• /
• pp.7-13
• /
• 2022

Human papillomavirus (HPV) is a causative agent for a subset of oropharyngeal cancer (OPC). The current standard of care (SOC) for locally advanced OPC is 70 Gy definitive radiotherapy (RT) concurrent with cisplatin, which entails significant proportions of acute and late grade 3 or higher toxicities. Accordingly, discovery of favorable prognosis of HPV-related OPC has led to enthusiasm to attenuate subspecialties therapy in multidisciplinary treatment. Diverse deintensification strategies were investigated in multiple phase 2 trials with an assumption that attenuated treatments result in comparable oncologic outcome and less toxicities compared with SOC. Several trials on chemotherapy deintensification revealed that concomitant administration of cisplatin is not to be omitted or substituted for cetuximab without compromising progression-free survival or local control. A transoral robotic surgery (TORS) is investigated as alternative local treatment, but TORS plus SOC or mild deintensified adjuvant RT showed similar toxicities and inferior oncologic outcomes compared with SOC definitive RT or moderately deintensified RT. However, it has been reported that TORS plus deintensified 30-36 Gy adjuvant RT results in excellent outcome and less late toxicity compared with SOC adjuvant RT. Several phase 2 trials reported apparently equivalent progression-free survival and local control and similar adverse effects with moderately deintensified 60 Gy RT compared with SOC 70 Gy RT. Further dose reduction below 60 Gy has been investigated using biology-directed approaches, which use response to induction chemotherapy or metabolic images to triage HPV-positive OPC for deintensified RT. In summary, these trials provide valuable insights for future directions. Available evidence consistently showed that moderately deintensified RT is effective and safe for HPV-positive OPC in both definitive and adjuvant settings. Concurrent cisplatin remains an essential component without which progression-free survival is significantly compromised for advanced HPV-positive OPC. A simple incorporation of TORS to SOC may be detrimental for oncologic outcome without anticipated toxicity reduction. Given the lack of level 1 evidence, it is prudent to curb an unjustified deviation from the current SOC and limit any deintensified strategies to clinical trials and adhere to the current SOC.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
• /
• v.25 no.12
• /
• pp.1797-1808
• /
• 2021

Artificial intelligence is considered one of the core technologies leading the 4th industrial revolution. It is adopted in various fields bringing about a huge paradigm shift throughout our society. The field of biotechnology is no exception. It is undergoing innovative development by converging with other disciplines such as computers, electricity, electronics, and so on. In drug discovery and development, big data-based AI technology has a great potential of improving the efficiency and quality of drug development, rapidly advancing to overcome the limitations in the existing drug development process. AI technology is to be specialized and developed for the purpose including clinical efficacy and safety-related end points based on the multidisciplinary knowledge such as biology, chemistry, toxicology, pharmacokinetics, etc. In this paper, we review the current status of AI technology applied for drug discovery and consider its limitations and future direction.

• Journal of Chest Surgery
• /
• v.56 no.1
• /
• pp.35-41
• /
• 2023

Background: We analyzed our experience with descending necrotizing mediastinitis (DNM) treatment and investigated the efficacy of video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery (VATS) for mediastinal drainage. Methods: This retrospective analysis included patients who underwent surgical drainage for DNM at our hospital from 2005 to 2020. We analyzed patients' baseline characteristics, surgical data, and perioperative outcomes and compared them according to the mediastinal drainage approach among patients with type II DNM. Results: Twenty-five patients (male-to-female ratio, 18:7) with a mean age of 54.0±12.9 years were enrolled in this study. The most common infection sources were pharyngeal infections (60%). Most patients had significantly increased white blood cell counts, elevated C-reactive protein levels, and decreased albumin levels on admission. The most common DNM type was type IIB (n=16, 64%), while 5 and 4 patients had types I and IIA, respectively. For mediastinal drainage, the transcervical approach was used in 15 patients and the transthoracic approach (VATS) in 10 patients. The mean length of hospital stay was 26.5±23.8 days, and the postoperative morbidity and in-hospital mortality rates were 24% and 12%, respectively. No statistically significant differences were found among patients with type II DNM between the transcervical and VATS groups. However, the VATS group showed shorter mean antibiotic therapy duration, drainage duration, and hospital stay length than the transcervical group. Conclusion: DNM manifested as severe infection requiring long-term inpatient treatment, with a mortality rate of 12%. Thus, active treatment with a multidisciplinary approach is crucial, and mediastinal drainage using VATS is considered relatively safe and effective.

• Journal of Advanced Technology Convergence
• /
• v.2 no.3
• /
• pp.25-32
• /
• 2023

This study was conducted to find out the relationship between knowledge and attitudes about COVID-19 and infection control performance among college students in paramedicine. The subjects of the study were 154 university students attending a 3-4 year paramedicine located in Gwangju Metropolitan City, Jeollabuk-do Province, and the collected data were frequency, percentage, sum, average and It was analyzed by standard deviation, t-test, ANOVA(Scheffe), Pearson's Correlation Coefficient, and Multiple Linear Regression. The order of attitude and knowledge about COVID-19 affected the infection control performance of college students in the paramedicine. Therefore, it is necessary to develop and apply regular or non-regular curriculum and multidisciplinary curriculum that can improve knowledge and attitudes about COVID-19 in order to improve the infection control performance of paramedic students.