• Journal of Multimedia Information System
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.1-10
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• 2021

Heart Rate is a crucial physiological parameter that provides basic information about the state of the human body in the cardiovascular system, as well as in medical diagnostics and fitness assessments. At present day, it has been demonstrated that facial video-based photoplethysmographic signal captured using a low-cost RGB camera is possible to retrieve remote heart rate. Traditional heart rate measurement is mostly obtained by direct contact with the human body, therefore, it can result inconvenient for long-term measurement due to the discomfort that it causes to the subject. In this paper, we propose a non-contact-based remote heart rate measuring approach of the subject which depends on the color intensity variation of the subject's facial skin. The proposed method is applied in two regions of the subject's face, forehead and cheeks. For this, three different algorithms are used to measure the heart rate. i.e., Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The average accuracy for the three algorithms utilizing the proposed method was 89.25% in both regions. It is also noteworthy that the FastICA algorithm showed a higher average accuracy of more than 92% in both regions. The proposed method obtained 1.94% higher average accuracy than the traditional method based on average color value.

• Journal of Auto-vehicle Safety Association
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.65-70
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• 2022

Lane change in urban environments is a challenge for both human-driving and automated driving due to their complexity and non-linearity. With the recent development of deep-learning, the use of the RNN network, which uses time series data, has become the mainstream in this field. Many researches using RNN show high accuracy in highway environments, but still do not for urban environments where the surrounding situation is complex and rapidly changing. Therefore, this paper proposes a lane change possibility decision network by adopting Attention layer, which is an SOTA in the field of seq2seq. By weighting each time step within a given time horizon, the context of the road situation is more human-like. A total 7D vectors of x, y distances and longitudinal relative speed of side front and rear vehicles, and longitudinal speed of ego vehicle were used as input. A total 5,614 expert data of 4,098 yield cases and 1,516 non-yield cases were used for training, and the performance of this network was tested through 1,817 data. Our network achieves 99.641% of test accuracy, which is about 4% higher than a network using only LSTM in an urban environment. Furthermore, it shows robust behavior to false-positive or true-negative objects.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.16 no.10
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• pp.3230-3255
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• 2022

Causality mining in NLP is a significant area of interest, which benefits in many daily life applications, including decision making, business risk management, question answering, future event prediction, scenario generation, and information retrieval. Mining those causalities was a challenging and open problem for the prior non-statistical and statistical techniques using web sources that required hand-crafted linguistics patterns for feature engineering, which were subject to domain knowledge and required much human effort. Those studies overlooked implicit, ambiguous, and heterogeneous causality and focused on explicit causality mining. In contrast to statistical and non-statistical approaches, we present Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) integrated with Multi-level Feature Networks (MFN) for causality recognition, called BERT+MFN for causality recognition in noisy and informal web datasets without human-designed features. In our model, MFN consists of a three-column knowledge-oriented network (TC-KN), bi-LSTM, and Relation Network (RN) that mine causality information at the segment level. BERT captures semantic features at the word level. We perform experiments on Alternative Lexicalization (AltLexes) datasets. The experimental outcomes show that our model outperforms baseline causality and text mining techniques.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.46.1-46.7
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• 2022

Influenza A virus (IAV) is the most widespread pathogen causing human respiratory infections. Although polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based methods are currently the most commonly used tools for IAV detection, PCR is not ideal for point-of-care testing. In this study, we aimed to develop a more rapid and sensitive method than PCR-based tools to detect IAV using loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) technology. We designed reverse-transcriptional (RT)-LAMP primers targeting the hemagglutinin gene. RNAs from reference H1N1 and H3N2 showed specific RT-LAMP signals with the designed primers. We optimized the reaction conditions and developed universal reaction conditions for both LAMP assays. Under these conditions, the detection limit was 50 copies for both RT-LAMP assays. There was no non-specific signal to 19 non-IAV respiratory viruses, such as influenza B virus, coronaviruses, and respiratory syncytial viruses. Regarding the reaction time, a positive signal was detected within 25 min after starting the reaction. In conclusion, our RT-LAMP assay has high sensitivity and specificity for the detection of the H1 and H3 subtypes, making it suitable for point-of-care IAV testing.

• PNF and Movement
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.281-289
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• 2023

Purpose: This study investigated the effects of the non-elastic taping method for controlling internal hip joint rotation on internal and external hip rotator muscle activity in healthy people. Methods: In this study, 18 healthy volunteers were instructed to perform the small knee bending (SKB) test. All participants completed the test following two methods (using non-elastic taping and not using taping). Muscle activation during the two methods was measured using a surface electromyography (EMG) device. Surface EMG data were collected from the gluteus medius, gluteus maximus, and tensor fasciae femoris muscles while performing the SKB test with and without non-elastic taping. Results: Muscle activity in the gluteus maximus was significantly higher during the SKB test with non-elastic taping than during the conventional SKB test with taping (p < 0.05). Tensor fasciae latae muscle activity was lower during the SKB test with non-elastic taping than during the conventional SKB test (p < 0.05). Conclusion: The findings suggest that the non-elastic taping method for controlling internal hip joint rotation effectively activates the hip's external rotator muscles and minimizes unwanted internal rotator muscle use during the SKB test. Therefore, the non-elastic taping method for controlling internal hip joint rotation could be an effective intervention for those who cannot control the internal rotation of their hips.

• Journal of Yeungnam Medical Science
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.286-296
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• 1998

Different techniques for culturing respiratory epithelial cells have been developed to overcome the limitations of studies on in vivo and on bioptic material. Traditionally, culture systems are divided into organ cultures, explant cultures and dissociated cell cultures. The first two contain both epithelial and non-epithelial cells. However, in monolayer cultures of dissociated cells only epithelial cells are present, the effects observed are caused by a pure epithelial responses. The purpose of this study is to establish primary culture method of human nasal epithelium (HNEC) by monolayer culture of dissociated cells to evaluate the role of the epithelial cells in the allergic and non-allergic nasal inflammatory reactions. HNEC was prepared by primary culture method of monolayer culture of dissociated cells from human inferior nasal turbinate mucosa of septal deviation patients. Primary cultured cells were characterized by indirect immunofluorescence assay and transmission electron microscopy. The immunoreactivities of cytokeratin-pan and cytokeratin No. 8 were observed in cultured HNEC. However, the immnoreactivities of vimentin and von Willebrand factor were not observed in cultured HNEC. The tonofilaments and desmosome were observed in cultured HNEC. The cultured epithelial cells were identified to be pure nasal epithelial cells. The monolayer culture of dissociated cells could successfully be employed for further study to investigate the role of the epithelial cells in allergic or non-allergic nasal inflammatory diseases.

• Parasites, Hosts and Diseases
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• v.53 no.4
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• pp.395-402
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• 2015

Non-human primates (NHPs) are confirmed as reservoirs of Cryptosporidium spp., Giardia intestinalis, and Enterocytozoon bieneusi. In this study, 197 fresh fecal samples from 8 NHP species in Qinling Mountains, northwestern China, were collected and examined using multilocus sequence typing (MLST) method. The results showed that 35 (17.8%) samples were positive for tested parasites, including Cryptosporidium spp. (3.0%), G. intestinalis (2.0%), and E. bieneusi (12.7%). Cryptosporidium spp. were detected in 6 fecal samples of Macaca mulatta, and were identified as C. parvum (n=1) and C. andersoni (n=5). Subtyping analysis showed Cryptosporidium spp. belonged to the C. andersoni MLST subtype (A4, A4, A4, and A1) and C. parvum 60 kDa glycoprotein (gp60) subtype IId A15G2R1. G. intestinalis assemblage E was detected in 3 M. mulatta and 1 Saimiri sciureus. Intra-variations were observed at the triose phosphate isomerase (tpi), beta giardin (bg), and glutamate dehydrogenase (gdh) loci, with 3, 1, and 2 new subtypes found in respective locus. E. bieneusi was found in Cercopithecus neglectus (25.0%), Papio hamadrayas (16.7%), M. mulatta (16.3%), S. sciureus (10%), and Rhinopithecus roxellana (9.5%), with 5 ribosomal internal transcribed spacer (ITS) genotypes: 2 known genotypes (D and BEB6) and 3 novel genotypes (MH, XH, and BSH). These findings indicated the presence of zoonotic potential of Cryptosporidium spp. and E. bieneusi in NHPs in Qinling Mountains. This is the first report of C. andersoni in NHPs. The present study provided basic information for control of cryptosporidiosis, giardiasis, and microsporidiosis in human and animals in this area.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.62 no.6
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• pp.803-810
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• 2013

The purpose of this research is to analyze the effect of shape of the inductive textile electrode on the non-contact heart activity sensing, based on the magnetic-induced conductivity principle. Four types of the inductive textile electrodes were determined according to the combinations of the two shape features. A fiber-metal hybrid-typed conductive thread was developed and applied to materialization of the textile electrodes by embroidery method. The heart activity was extracted through the textile electrode sewn on a T-shirt. The experiments were implemented to constantly measure the heart activity for 20 seconds, in each case of 5 healthy male subjects. The heart activity signals acquired in each type of the inductive textile electrode were analyzed, 1)by drawing a comparison of morphology with those of ECG signal (LeadII), and 2)by calculation of the normalized mean and standard deviation of magnitude of the heart activity signals. The analysis resulted that the relatively better quality of signals were acquired in the 'square' types in the matter of whole shape, while the better results were obtained in 'donut' types in the matter of center hole. Accordingly, the relatively best quality of signals was obtained in the case of 'Square-Donut' type of the inductive textile electrode.

• Journal of Periodontal and Implant Science
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• v.30 no.1
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• pp.145-157
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• 2000

Cytotoxic substances in dental calculus and root cementum of periodontally diseased teeth inhibit new attachment and regeneration. The purpose of scaling and root planing is to remove pathologic structures harboring these cytotoxic substances in order to create a biologically acceptable root surface. However, these procedures inevitably leave a non-biocompatible smear layer. Conventionally, the smear layer has been removed with low pH etching agents such as citric acid, phosphoric acid and tetracycline hydrochloride(TC). Lately, a supersaturated neutral pH etching solution of ethylene diamine tetraacetic acid(EDTA) has been found to be as effective as low pH etchants with respect to smear removal and to be superior in exposing root surfaceassociated collagen. The aim of the present study was to determine the effect of root surface treatment using EDTA on the initial attachment of human gingival fibroblasts. 27 human teeth, extracted due to severe periodontitis, were cut into dentin slices after root planing. The specimens were divided into TC group(treated with $50㎎/m{\ell}$ tetracycline-HCl, pH 1.52), EDTA group(treated with 17% EDTA, pH 7.4), and non-treated control group. After sterilization, 5th subcultured human gingival fibroblasts were seeded in each culture well containing a prepared root slice and incubated for 15 min., 60 min., and 4 hours in 5% $CO_2$ incubator at $37^{\circ}C$. At each incubation time, the number of attached fibroblasts were counted on the microphotographs taken at a magnification of x100. The difference of the number of attached cells between groups was statistically analyzed by the ANOVA followed by Duncan test in SPSS/PC＋programs. The results were as follows : 1. After incubation for 15 min, the attached cells were significantly more in EDTA group and TC group than non-treated control group(p<0.05), but there was no significance in the difference between EDTA group and TC group(p>0.1). 2. After incubation for 60 min and 4 hours, there was no significant difference in the number of attached cells between all groups(p>0.1). 3. In both EDTA group and TC group, there was no significant difference in the number of attached cells between different incubation(p>0.1). But in control group, the number of attached cells was significantly increased after incubation for 60 min, compared with incubation for 15 min(p<0.05). The above results suggest that root surface treatment using EDTA could enhance the initial attachment of gingival fibroblasts to root surface as effective as tetracycline-HCl.

• Journal of the Mineralogical Society of Korea
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• v.28 no.4
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• pp.309-323
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• 2015

This study was initiated to propose the method for human risk assessment suitable to metal mine area. Using a variety of exposure parameters extracted from the investigation of abandoned metal mines, the proposed method was applied to assess the risk of As and heavy metal contamination for inhabitants (male and female adults and child) within an abandoned mine area. Based on the results of risk assessment, in addition, target remediation concentrations of each media (soil, groundwater, and surface water) were estimated. The results indicate that total carcinogenic risk (TCR) and hazard index (HI) representing carcinogenic and non-carcinogenic risks, respectively, were calculated to exceed the tolerable levels (1.00E-6 and 1) with regard to two exposure pathways (groundwater and crop intakes) and As. Thus, the human risk of study area was evaluated to be significant. Based on the target risk (TR) for carcinogens, the remediation concentrations of soil were computed to be 6.83~6.85 mg/kg and 18.41~18.46 mg/kg for As and Pb, respectively. In terms of target hazard index (THI) for non-carcinogens, the remediation concentrations of soil were calculated to be 17.38 mg/kg for Cu and 9.13 mg/kg for As.