• Clinical and Experimental Reproductive Medicine
• /
• v.26 no.2
• /
• pp.171-178
• /
• 1999

The follicular fluid (FF) of ovary contains various biological active products which affected on the growth of follicles and the fertilization of oocyte in physiological reproductive process of mammals. This study was designed to determine the effects of human FF on fertilization of oocyte and embryonal development in vitro culture. The FF was prepared as clear without blood contamination by needle aspiration from mature follicles of human at the time of oocytes retrieval for in vitro fertilization (IVF). As the medium for culture in vitro of embryonal cells, human tubal fluid (HTF) supplemented with follicular fluids at concentrations of 10%, 40% and pure FF were used. These effects were compared to control group of cultured embryos in HTF supplemented with 0.4% BSA (bovine serum albumin). For IVF, 64 eggs in control group, 67 eggs in 10% FF, 57 eggs in 40% FF and 64 eggs in pure FF were respectively allocated. And the rates of fertilization were almost similar in all groups as resulting 82.81% in control, 85.07% in 10% FF, 87.71% in 40% FF and 81.25% in pure FF. On the examination for embryonal cleavage from fertilized eggs, the rates of developing to 4 cell stage was similar in all groups, as results 98.11% in control, 98.27% in 10% FF and 98% in 40% FF but 78.84% in pure FF. And the rates of developing to 8-16 cell stage were significantly reduced as 44% in 40% FF and 44.23% in pure FF (p<0.05) compare to 71.69% in control media. As likewise, the rates of developing to morular stage were also significantly reduced to 36% (p<0.05) and 21.15% (p<0.01) respectively in 40% FF and pure FF. And the rates to blastocystic stage of embryo was lowest as 7.69% in pure FF (Table 1). The quality of embryonal cells on cleavage to the 8-16 cell stage was poorer, higher concentrations of FF. The rates of grade 1 in pure FF, as 23.07%, was lowest compare to those of other groups, in which the rates of grade 1 in control, 10% FF and 40% FF were 58.49%, 47.36% and 34% respectively. And on the contrary, the rate of grade 4 in pure FF was highest as 23.07%, while those were 5.66% in control, 8.77% in 10% FF and 20% in 40% FF (Table 2). On the viability of embryos, the rate of embryonal cell death was more rise, at the higher concentrations as well as longer exposure in the follicular fluid. At 48 hours after in vitro culture of embryos, the rate of survival embryos in pure FF was markedly lowered as 44.23%, compare to that of control (p<0.05). But there was not significant difference between the rates of survival embryos in each group beside the pure FF, which the rates were 77.35% in control, 70.17% in 10% FF and 60% in 40% FF respectively. And at 72 hours after in vitro culture, the rates of survival embryos were also significantly dropped to 21.15% in pure and 36% in 40% at concentration of FF compare to 62.26% in control (p<0.05, p<0.01). Finally, the rate of embryonal death at 96 hours after in vitro culture was highest as 82.69% in pure FF among all groups which those were 35.84 in control, 56.14% in 10% FF and 64% in 40% FF respectively (Fig. 1, 2, 3). In conclusion, this study suggests that the FF has no effects, in particular, to the in vitro fertilization of oocytes but exerted a bad effect to the cleavage, quality and viability of the embryonal cells during in vitro culture. However, the FF is harmful on embryonal development at conditions in higher concentration and especially on the embryos after $8{\sim}16$ cell stage.

• Clinical and Experimental Reproductive Medicine
• /
• v.37 no.1
• /
• pp.41-48
• /
• 2010

Objectives: The aim of this study was to assess appropriate time to convert intramuscular progesterone support to oral administration for luteal phase support in in vitro fertilization (IVF). Methods: Seventy-six cycles of IVF in which fetal heart beat was identified after treatment were included. Patients underwent controlled ovarian hyperstimulation with GnRH agonist long protocol (n=7) or GnRH antagonist protocol (n=66). Cryopreserved embryo transfer was performed in three cycles. Luteal support was initiated by daily intramuscular injection of progesterone, and after confirmation of fetal heart beat, converted to oral micronized progesterone (Utrogestan, Laboratoires Besins International, France) 300 mg daily before or after 8 gestational weeks. The oral progesterone was continued for 11 weeks. Results: Overall clinical abortion rate was 3.9% (3/76) and mean time to conversion was $8^{+4}$ gestational weeks ($46{\pm}5.8$ days after oocytes retrieval). The abortion rate was 5.6% (1/17) and 3.4% (2/59) in patients with conversion before 7 weeks and after 8 weeks, respectively, which were not statistically significant (p=0.678). The miscarriages were occurred at $9^{+4}$ weeks, $11^{+3}$ weeks and $11^{+4}$ weeks. Conclusion: Sequential luteal support using intramuscular and oral progesterone yields a relatively low clinical abortion rate. If fetal heart beat confirmed, sequential regimen appears to be safe and convenient method to reduce patients' discomfort induced by multiple injections.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
• /
• v.46 no.6
• /
• pp.6-15
• /
• 2009

In this paper, a new 4-way search window is designed for the high-performance 2D PE architecture in H.264 Motion Estimation(ME) to improve the memory bandwidth. While existing 2D PE architectures reuse the overlapped data of adjacent search windows scanned in 1 or 3-way, the new window utilizes the overlapped data of adjacent search windows as well as adjacent multiple scanning (window) paths to enhance the reusage of retrieved search window data. In order to scan adjacent windows and multiple paths instead of single raster and zigzag scanning of adjacent windows, bidirectional row and column window scanning results in the 4-way(up. down, left, right) search window. The proposed 4-way search window could improve the reuse of overlapped window data to reduce the redundancy access factor by 3.1, though the 1/3-way search window redundantly requires $7.7{\sim}11$ times of data retrieval. Thus, the new 4-way search window scheme enhances the memory bandwidth by $70{\sim}58%$ compared with 1/3-way search window. The 2D PE architecture in H.264 ME for 4-way search window consists of $16{\times}16$ pe array. computing the absolute difference between current and reference frames, and $5{\times}16$ reusage array, storing the overlapped data of adjacent search windows and multiple scanning paths. The reference data could be loaded upward and downward into the new 2D PE depending on scanning direction, and the reusage array is combined with the pe array rotating left as well as right to utilize the overlapped data of adjacent multiple scan paths. In experiments, the new implementation of 4-way search window on Magnachip 0.18um could deal with the HD($1280{\times}720$) video of 1 reference frame, $48{\times}48$ search area and $16{\times}16$ macroblock by 30fps at 149.25MHz.

• Management & Information Systems Review
• /
• v.22
• /
• pp.137-165
• /
• 2007

It seems high time to increase productivity by adopting e-business to overcome challenges posed by both external factors including the appreciation of Korean won, oil hikes and fierce global competition and domestic issues represented by disparities between large corporations and small and medium enterprises (SMEs), Seoul metropolitan and local cities, and export and domestic demand all of which weaken future growth engines in the Korean economy. The demands of the globalization era are for innovative changes in businessprocess and industrial structure aiming for creating new values. To this end, e-business is expected to play a core role in the sophistication of the Korean economy through new values and innovation. In order to examine business performance in e-business-adopting industries, this study analyzed the home shopping industry by closely looking into the financial ratios including the ratio of net profit to sales, the ratio of operation income to sales, the ratio of gross cost to sales cost, the ratio of gross cost to selling, general and administrative (SG&A) expense, and return of investment (ROI). This study, for best outcome, referred to corporate financial statements as a main resource to calculate financial ratios by utilizing Data Analysis, Retrieval and Transfer System (DART) of the Financial Supervisory Service, one of the Korea's financial supervisory authorities. First of all, the result of the trend analysis on the ratio of net profit to sales is as following. CJ Home Shopping has registered a remarkable increase in its ratio of net profit rate to sales since 2002 while its competitors find it hard to catch up with CJ's stunning performances. This is partly due to the efficient management compared to CJ's value of capital. Such significance, if the current trend continues, will make the front-runner assume the largest market share. On the other hand, GS Home Shopping, despite its best organized system and largest value of capital among others, lacks efficiency in management. Second of all, the result of the trend analysis on the ratio of operation income to sales is as following. Both CJ Home Shopping and GS Home Shopping have, until 2004, recorded similar growth trend. However, while CJ Home Shopping's operating income continued to increase in 2005, GS Home Shopping observed its operating income declining which resulted in the increasing income gap with CJ Home Shopping. While CJ Home Shopping with the largest market share in home shopping industryis engaged in aggressive marketing, GS Home Shopping due to its stability-driven management strategies falls behind CJ again in the ratio of operation income to sales in spite of its favorable management environment including its large capital. Companies in the Group B were established in the same year of 2001. NS Home Shopping was the first in the Group B to shift its loss to profit. Woori Home Shopping has continued to post operating loss for three consecutive years and finally was sold to Lotte Group in 2007, but since then, has registered a continuing increase in net income on sales. Third of all, the result of the trend analysis on the ratio of gross cost to sales cost is as following. Since home shopping falls into sales business, its cost of sales is much lower than that of other types of business such as manufacturing industry. Since 2002 in gross costs including cost of sales, SG&A expense, and non-operating expense, cost of sales turned out to have remarkably decreased. Group B has also posted a notable decline in the same sector since 2002. Fourth of all, the result of the trend analysis on the ratio of gross cost to SG&A expense is as following. Due to its unique characteristics, the home shopping industry usually posts ahigh ratio of SG&A expense. However, more than 80% of SG&A expense means the result of lax management and at the same time, a sharp lower net income on sales than other industries. Last but not least, the result of the trend analysis on ROI is as following. As for CJ Home Shopping, the curve of ROI looks similar to that of its investment on fixed assets. As it turned out, the company's ratio of fixed assets to operating income skyrocketed in 2004 and 2005. As far as GS Home Shopping is concerned, its fixed assets are not as much as that of CJ Home Shopping. Consequently, competition in the home shopping industry, at the moment, is among CJ, GS, Hyundai, NS and Woori Home Shoppings, and all of them need to more thoroughly manage their costs. In order for the late-comers of Group B and other home shopping companies to advance further, the current lax management should be reformed particularly on their SG&A expense sector. Provided that the total sales volume in the Internet shopping sector is projected to grow over 20 trillion won by the year 2010, it is concluded that all the participants in the home shopping industry should put strategies on efficient management on costs and expenses as their top priority rather than increase revenues, if they hope to grow even further after 2007.

• Cartoon and Animation Studies
• /
• s.36
• /
• pp.469-491
• /
• 2014

Webtoon has developed the method that makes it possible to express sound visually. Also we can also hear sound in webtoon through the development of web technology. It is natural that we analyze the sound that we can hear, but we can also analyze the sound that we can not hear. This study is based on 'dual code' in cognitive psychology. Cartoonists can make visual expression on the basis of auditive impression and memory, and readers can recall the sound through the process of memory and memory-retrieval. This study analyzes both audible sound and inaudable sound. Concise analysis owes the method to film sound theory. Three main factor, Volume, pitch, and tone are recognized by frequency in acoustics. On the other hand they are expressed by the thickness and site of line and image of sound source. The visual expression of in screen sound and off screen sound is related to the frame of comics. Generally the outside of frame means off sound, but some off sound is in the frame. In addition, horror comics use much sound for the effect of genre like horror film. When analyzing comics sound using this kinds of the method film sound analysis, we can find that webtoon has developed creative expression method comparing with simple ones of early comics. Especially arranging frames and expressing sound following and vertical moving are new ones in webtoon. Also types and arrangement of frame has been varied. BGM is the first in using audible sound and recently BGM composed mixing sound effect is being used. In addition, the program which makes it possible for readers to hear sound according to scroll moving. Especially horror genre raise the genre effects using this technology. Various methods of visualizing sound are being created, and the change shows that webtoon could be the model of convergence in contents.

• Korean Journal of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology
• /
• v.11 no.4
• /
• pp.162-173
• /
• 2009

Information on the expected geographical shift of suitable zones for growing crops under future climate is a starting point of adaptation planning in agriculture and is attracting much concern from policy makers as well as researchers. Few practical schemes have been developed, however, because of the difficulty in implementing the site-selection concept at an analytical level. In this study, we suggest site-selection criteria for quality Fuji apple production and integrate geospatial data and information available in public domains (e.g., digital elevation model, digital soil maps, digital climate maps, and predictive models for agroclimate and fruit quality) to implement this concept on a GIS platform. Primary criterion for selecting sites suitable for Fuji apple production includes land cover, topography, and soil texture. When the primary criterion is satisfied, climatic conditions such as the length of frost free season, freezing risk during the overwintering period, and the late frost risk in spring are tested as the secondary criterion. Finally, the third criterion checks for fruit quality such as color and shape. Land attributes related to these factors in each criterion were implemented in ArcGIS environment as relevant raster layers for spatial analysis, and retrieval procedures were automated by writing programs compatible with ArcGIS. This scheme was applied to the A1B projected climates for South Korea in the future normal years (2011-2040, 2041-2070, and 2071-2100) as well as the current climate condition observed in 1971-2000 for selecting the sites suitable for quality Fuji apple production in each period. Results showed that this scheme can figure out the geographical shift of suitable zones at landscape scales as well as the latitudinal shift of northern limit for cultivation at national or regional scales.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.21 no.1
• /
• pp.65-82
• /
• 2015

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in finding core issues and analyzing emerging trends for the future. This represents efforts to devise national strategies and policies based on the selection of promising areas that can create economic and social added value. The existing studies, including those dedicated to the discovery of future promising fields, have mostly been dependent on qualitative research methods such as literature review and expert judgement. Deriving results from large amounts of information under this approach is both costly and time consuming. Efforts have been made to make up for the weaknesses of the conventional qualitative analysis approach designed to select key promising areas through discovery of future core issues and emerging trend analysis in various areas of academic research. There needs to be a paradigm shift in toward implementing qualitative research methods along with quantitative research methods like text mining in a mutually complementary manner. The change is to ensure objective and practical emerging trend analysis results based on large amounts of data. However, even such studies have had shortcoming related to their dependence on simple keywords for analysis, which makes it difficult to derive meaning from data. Besides, no study has been carried out so far to develop core issues and analyze emerging trends in special domains like the aviation industry. The change used to implement recent studies is being witnessed in various areas such as the steel industry, the information and communications technology industry, the construction industry in architectural engineering and so on. This study focused on retrieving aviation-related core issues and emerging trends from overall research papers pertaining to aviation through text mining, which is one of the big data analysis techniques. In this manner, the promising future areas for the air transport industry are selected based on objective data from aviation-related research papers. In order to compensate for the difficulties in grasping the meaning of single words in emerging trend analysis at keyword levels, this study will adopt topic analysis, which is a technique used to find out general themes latent in text document sets. The analysis will lead to the extraction of topics, which represent keyword sets, thereby discovering core issues and conducting emerging trend analysis. Based on the issues, it identified aviation-related research trends and selected the promising areas for the future. Research on core issue retrieval and emerging trend analysis for the aviation industry based on big data analysis is still in its incipient stages. So, the analysis targets for this study are restricted to data from aviation-related research papers. However, it has significance in that it prepared a quantitative analysis model for continuously monitoring the derived core issues and presenting directions regarding the areas with good prospects for the future. In the future, the scope is slated to expand to cover relevant domestic or international news articles and bidding information as well, thus increasing the reliability of analysis results. On the basis of the topic analysis results, core issues for the aviation industry will be determined. Then, emerging trend analysis for the issues will be implemented by year in order to identify the changes they undergo in time series. Through these procedures, this study aims to prepare a system for developing key promising areas for the future aviation industry as well as for ensuring rapid response. Additionally, the promising areas selected based on the aforementioned results and the analysis of pertinent policy research reports will be compared with the areas in which the actual government investments are made. The results from this comparative analysis are expected to make useful reference materials for future policy development and budget establishment.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.21 no.1
• /
• pp.143-159
• /
• 2015

Predicting IT trends has been a long and important subject for information systems research. IT trend prediction makes it possible to acknowledge emerging eras of innovation and allocate budgets to prepare against rapidly changing technological trends. Towards the end of each year, various domestic and global organizations predict and announce IT trends for the following year. For example, Gartner Predicts 10 top IT trend during the next year, and these predictions affect IT and industry leaders and organization's basic assumptions about technology and the future of IT, but the accuracy of these reports are difficult to verify. Social media data can be useful tool to verify the accuracy. As social media services have gained in popularity, it is used in a variety of ways, from posting about personal daily life to keeping up to date with news and trends. In the recent years, rates of social media activity in Korea have reached unprecedented levels. Hundreds of millions of users now participate in online social networks and communicate with colleague and friends their opinions and thoughts. In particular, Twitter is currently the major micro blog service, it has an important function named 'tweets' which is to report their current thoughts and actions, comments on news and engage in discussions. For an analysis on IT trends, we chose Tweet data because not only it produces massive unstructured textual data in real time but also it serves as an influential channel for opinion leading on technology. Previous studies found that the tweet data provides useful information and detects the trend of society effectively, these studies also identifies that Twitter can track the issue faster than the other media, newspapers. Therefore, this study investigates how frequently the predicted IT trends for the following year announced by public organizations are mentioned on social network services like Twitter. IT trend predictions for 2013, announced near the end of 2012 from two domestic organizations, the National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA) and the National Information Society Agency (NIA), were used as a basis for this research. The present study analyzes the Twitter data generated from Seoul (Korea) compared with the predictions of the two organizations to analyze the differences. Thus, Twitter data analysis requires various natural language processing techniques, including the removal of stop words, and noun extraction for processing various unrefined forms of unstructured data. To overcome these challenges, we used SAS IRS (Information Retrieval Studio) developed by SAS to capture the trend in real-time processing big stream datasets of Twitter. The system offers a framework for crawling, normalizing, analyzing, indexing and searching tweet data. As a result, we have crawled the entire Twitter sphere in Seoul area and obtained 21,589 tweets in 2013 to review how frequently the IT trend topics announced by the two organizations were mentioned by the people in Seoul. The results shows that most IT trend predicted by NIPA and NIA were all frequently mentioned in Twitter except some topics such as 'new types of security threat', 'green IT', 'next generation semiconductor' since these topics non generalized compound words so they can be mentioned in Twitter with other words. To answer whether the IT trend tweets from Korea is related to the following year's IT trends in real world, we compared Twitter's trending topics with those in Nara Market, Korea's online e-Procurement system which is a nationwide web-based procurement system, dealing with whole procurement process of all public organizations in Korea. The correlation analysis show that Tweet frequencies on IT trending topics predicted by NIPA and NIA are significantly correlated with frequencies on IT topics mentioned in project announcements by Nara market in 2012 and 2013. The main contribution of our research can be found in the following aspects: i) the IT topic predictions announced by NIPA and NIA can provide an effective guideline to IT professionals and researchers in Korea who are looking for verified IT topic trends in the following topic, ii) researchers can use Twitter to get some useful ideas to detect and predict dynamic trends of technological and social issues.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.18 no.2
• /
• pp.47-60
• /
• 2012

Video data comes in the form of the unstructured and the complex structure. As the importance of efficient management and retrieval for video data increases, studies on the video parsing based on the visual features contained in the video contents are researched to reconstruct video data as the meaningful structure. The early studies on video parsing are focused on splitting video data into shots, but detecting the shot boundary defined with the physical boundary does not cosider the semantic association of video data. Recently, studies on structuralizing video shots having the semantic association to the video scene defined with the semantic boundary by utilizing clustering methods are actively progressed. Previous studies on detecting the video scene try to detect video scenes by utilizing clustering algorithms based on the similarity measure between video shots mainly depended on color features. However, the correct identification of a video shot or scene and the detection of the gradual transitions such as dissolve, fade and wipe are difficult because color features of video data contain a noise and are abruptly changed due to the intervention of an unexpected object. In this paper, to solve these problems, we propose the Scene Detector by using Color histogram, corner Edge and Object color histogram (SDCEO) that clusters similar shots organizing same event based on visual features including the color histogram, the corner edge and the object color histogram to detect video scenes. The SDCEO is worthy of notice in a sense that it uses the edge feature with the color feature, and as a result, it effectively detects the gradual transitions as well as the abrupt transitions. The SDCEO consists of the Shot Bound Identifier and the Video Scene Detector. The Shot Bound Identifier is comprised of the Color Histogram Analysis step and the Corner Edge Analysis step. In the Color Histogram Analysis step, SDCEO uses the color histogram feature to organizing shot boundaries. The color histogram, recording the percentage of each quantized color among all pixels in a frame, are chosen for their good performance, as also reported in other work of content-based image and video analysis. To organize shot boundaries, SDCEO joins associated sequential frames into shot boundaries by measuring the similarity of the color histogram between frames. In the Corner Edge Analysis step, SDCEO identifies the final shot boundaries by using the corner edge feature. SDCEO detect associated shot boundaries comparing the corner edge feature between the last frame of previous shot boundary and the first frame of next shot boundary. In the Key-frame Extraction step, SDCEO compares each frame with all frames and measures the similarity by using histogram euclidean distance, and then select the frame the most similar with all frames contained in same shot boundary as the key-frame. Video Scene Detector clusters associated shots organizing same event by utilizing the hierarchical agglomerative clustering method based on the visual features including the color histogram and the object color histogram. After detecting video scenes, SDCEO organizes final video scene by repetitive clustering until the simiarity distance between shot boundaries less than the threshold h. In this paper, we construct the prototype of SDCEO and experiments are carried out with the baseline data that are manually constructed, and the experimental results that the precision of shot boundary detection is 93.3% and the precision of video scene detection is 83.3% are satisfactory.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
• /
• v.30 no.5
• /
• pp.597-605
• /
• 2014

The continuous observations for atmospheric aerosols were conducted during 3 years (2009 to 2011) by using Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) multi-wavelength Raman lidar at Gwangju, Korea ($35.10^{\circ}N$, $126.53^{\circ}E$). The aerosol depolarization ratios calculated from lidar data were used to identify the Asian dust layer. The optical properties of Asian dust layer were different according to its vertical distribution. In order to investigate the difference between the optical properties of each individual dust layers, the transport pathway and the transport altitude of Asian dust were analyzed by Hybrid Single Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory (HYSPLIT) model. We consider that the variation of optical properties were influenced not only their transport pathway but also their transport height when it passed over anthropogenic pollution source regions in China. The lower particle depolarization ratio values of $0.12{\pm}0.01$, higher lidar ratio of $67{\pm}9sr$ and $68{\pm}9sr$ at 355 nm and 532 nm, respectively, and higher ${\AA}ngstr\ddot{o}m$ exponent of $1.05{\pm}0.57$ which are considered as the optical properties of pollution were found. In contrast with this, the higher particle depolarization ratio values of $0.21{\pm}0.09$, lower lidar ratio of $48{\pm}5sr$ and $46{\pm}4sr$ at 355 nm and 532 nm, respectively, and lower ${\AA}ngstr\ddot{o}m$ exponent of $0.57{\pm}0.24$ which are considered as the optical properties of dust were found. We found that the degree of mixing of anthropogenic pollutant aerosols in mixed Asian dust govern the variation of optical properties of Asian dust and it depends on their altitude when it passed over the polluted regions over China.