• Parasites, Hosts and Diseases
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• v.52 no.6
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• pp.631-637
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• 2014

Genetic characteristics of Plasmodium falciparum may play a role in the treatment outcome of malaria infection. We have studied the association between diversity at the merozoite surface protein-1 (msp-1), msp-2, and glutamate-rich protein (glurp) loci and the treatment outcome of uncomplicated falciparum malaria patients along the Thai-Myanmar border who were treated with artemisinin derivatives combination therapy. P. falciparum isolates were collected prior to treatment from 3 groups of patients; 50 cases of treatment failures, 50 recrudescences, and 56 successful treatments. Genotyping of the 3 polymorphic markers was analyzed by nested PCR. The distribution of msp-1 alleles was significantly different among the 3 groups of patients but not the msp-2 and glurp alleles. The allelic frequencies of K1 and MAD20 alleles of msp1 gene were higher while RO33 allele was significantly lower in the successful treatment group. Treatment failure samples had a higher median number of alleles as compared to the successful treatment group. Specific genotypes of msp-1, msp-2, and glurp were significantly associated with the treatment outcomes. Three allelic size variants were significantly higher among the isolates from the treatment failure groups, i.e., $K1_{270-290}$, $3D7_{610-630}$, $G_{650-690}$, while 2 variants, $K1_{150-170}$, and $3D7_{670-690}$ were significantly lower. In conclusion, the present study reports the differences in multiplicity of infection and distribution of specific alleles of msp-1, msp-2, and glurp genes in P. falciparum isolates obtained from treatment failure and successful treatment patients following artemisinin derivatives combination therapy.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.47 no.1
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• pp.79-85
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• 2010

In video standards such as H.264/AVC, motion estimation (ME) / compensation (MC) is regarded as a vital component in a video coder as it consumes a large amount of computation resources. The full search technique, which is used in general video codecs, gives the highest visual quality but also has the problem of significant computational load. To solve this problem, many fast algorithm has benn proposed. Among them, NPDS show that can maintain its video quality very close to the full search technique while achieving computation reduction by using a halfway-stop technique in the calculation of block distortion measure. In this paper, we proposed algorithm by determining minimum distortion measure with predictive motion vector and using the new search order. As the result, we can check that the proposed algorithm reduces the computational load 95% in average compared to the full search, respectively with the PSNR lost about 0.04dB.

• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.375-381
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• 2016

Recently, a foreground-background segmentation using codebook model has been researched actively. The codebook is created one for each pixel in the image. The codewords are vector-quantized representative values of same positional training samples from the input image sequences. The training is necessary for a long time in the most of codebook-based algorithms. In this paper, the initial codebook model is generated simply using median operation with several image frames. The initial codebook is updated to adapt the dynamic changes of backgrounds based on the frequencies of codewords that matched to input pixel during the detection process. We implemented the proposed algorithm in the environment of visual c++ with opencv 3.0, and tested to some of the public video sequences from PETS2009. The test sequences contain the various scenarios including quasi-periodic motion images, loitering objects in the local area for a short time, etc. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has good performance compared to the GMM algorithm and standard codebook algorithm.

• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• v.21 no.7
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• pp.719-727
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• 2011

Botulism is a neuroparalytic disease caused by Clostridium botulinum, which produces seven (A-G) antigenically diverse neurotoxins (BoNTs). BoNTs are the most poisonous substances known to humans, with a median lethal dose ($LD_{50}$) of approximately 1 ng/kg of body weight. Owing to their extreme potency and lethality, they have the potential to be used as a bioterrorism agent. The mouse bioassay is the gold standard for the detection of botulinum neurotoxins; however, it requires at least 3-4 days for completion. Attempts have been made to develop an ELISA-based detection system, which is potentially an easier and more rapid method of botulinum neurotoxin detection. The present study was designed using a synthetic gene approach. The synthetic gene encoding the catalytic domain of BoNT serotype B from amino acids 1-450 was constructed with PCR overlapping primers (BoNT/B LC), cloned in a pQE30 UA vector, and expressed in an E. coli M15 host system. Recombinant protein production was optimized at 0.5 mM IPTG final concentration, 4 h post induction, resulting in a maximum yield of recombinant proteins. The immunogenic nature of the recombinant BoNT/B LC protein was evaluated by ELISA. Antibodies were raised in BALB/c mice using various adjuvants. A significant rise in antibody titer (p<0.05) was observed in the Alum group, followed by the Titermax Classic group, Freund's adjuvant, and the Titermax Gold group. These developed high-titer antibodies may prove useful for the detection of botulinum neurotoxins in food and clinical samples.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.355-363
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• 2011

Recently, as one of several methods to improve the performance of DVC(Distributed Video Coding) system, many research works are focusing on the iterative refinement of side information. Most of the conventional techniques are mainly based on the relationship between the reconstruction level and side information, or the vector median filtering of motion vectors, but, their performance improvements are restricted. In order to overcome the performance limit of the conventional schemes, in this paper, a side information generation scheme is designed by measuring the block-cost estimation. Then, by adaptively selecting the compensation mode using the received bit-plane information, we propose a block-adaptive iterative refinement which is efficient for non-symmetric moving objects. Computer simulations show that, by using the proposed refinement method, the performance can be improved up to 0.2 dB in rate-distortion.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.57 no.3
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• pp.181-193
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• 2024

The increasing atmospheric imbalance caused by climate change leads to an elevation in precipitation, resulting in a heightened frequency of flooding. Consequently, there is a growing need for technology to detect and monitor these occurrences, especially as the frequency of flooding events rises. To minimize flood damage, continuous monitoring is essential, and flood areas can be detected by the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery, which is not affected by climate conditions. The observed data undergoes a preprocessing step, utilizing a median filter to reduce noise. Classification techniques were employed to classify water bodies and non-water bodies, with the aim of evaluating the effectiveness of each method in flood detection. In this study, the Otsu method and Support Vector Machine (SVM) technique were utilized for the classification of water bodies and non-water bodies. The overall performance of the models was assessed using a Confusion Matrix. The suitability of flood detection was evaluated by comparing the Otsu method, an optimal threshold-based classifier, with SVM, a machine learning technique that minimizes misclassifications through training. The Otsu method demonstrated suitability in delineating boundaries between water and non-water bodies but exhibited a higher rate of misclassifications due to the influence of mixed substances. Conversely, the use of SVM resulted in a lower false positive rate and proved less sensitive to mixed substances. Consequently, SVM exhibited higher accuracy under conditions excluding flooding. While the Otsu method showed slightly higher accuracy in flood conditions compared to SVM, the difference in accuracy was less than 5% (Otsu: 0.93, SVM: 0.90). However, in pre-flooding and post-flooding conditions, the accuracy difference was more than 15%, indicating that SVM is more suitable for water body and flood detection (Otsu: 0.77, SVM: 0.92). Based on the findings of this study, it is anticipated that more accurate detection of water bodies and floods could contribute to minimizing flood-related damages and losses.

• Korean Journal of Environmental Biology
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.64-68
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• 2010

The mosquito, Aedes albopictus is important vector of humen phatogen such as dengue fever. And Aedes albopictus has widly distribution in oriental regions. This study was conducted to investigate the biological effects of cooper on the development of the Asian tiger mosquitoes, Aedes albopictus (Skuse). Aedes albopictus was affected with pupation ratios, mortalities, and wing lengths of the 3th and 4th instars by exposure to different concentration $CuCl_2$ (0.0, 2.5, 25.0 and 50.0 ppm) for 24 h and 48 h depending on dose and exposure period. The lowest $LC_{50}$ (median lethal concentration) value of $CuCl_2$ was 18.1 ppm at the 3rd instars for 48 h exposure. The pupation ratio of the larvae exposed at 50.0 ppm for 48 h was 14% which was much lower than those exposed to other treatment groups Changes of adult wing length showed significant decreased by Cu treatment. In conclusion, the most prominent effects of high concentration and longer exposure period were to reduce in the survival and pupation rates of larvae and wing length of Ae. albopictus.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.49 no.11
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• pp.183-190
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• 2012

Conventional physical activity monitoring systems, which use accelerometers, global positioning system (GPS), heartbeats, or body temperature information, showed limited performances due to their own restrictions on measurement environment and measurable activity types. To overcome these limitations, we developed a portable exercise analysis system that can analyze aerobic exercises as well as isotonic exercises. For bioelectric signal acquisition during exercise, waist belt with two body contact electrodes was used. For exercise analysis, the measured signals were firstly divided into two signal groups with different frequency ranges which can represent respiration related signal and muscular motion related signal, respectively. After then, power values, differential of power values, and median frequency values were selected for feature values. Selected features were used as inputs of support vector machine (SVM) to classify the exercise types. For verification of statistical significance, ANOVA and multiple comparison test were performed. The experimental results showed 100% accuracy for classification of aerobic exercise and isotonic resistance exercise. Also, classification of aerobic exercise, isotonic resistance exercise, and hybrid types of exercise revealed 92.7% of accuracy.

• IMMUNE NETWORK
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.24.1-24.12
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• 2022

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccination in immunocompromised, especially transplant recipients, may induce a weaker immune response. But there are limited data on the immune response after COVID-19 vaccination in liver transplant (LT) recipients, especially on the comparison of Ab responses after different vaccine platforms between mRNA and adenoviral vector vaccines. Thus, we conducted a prospective study on LT recipients who received two doses of the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 (ChAdOx1), mRNA-1273, or BNT162b2 vaccines compared with healthy healthcare workers (HCWs). SARS-CoV-2 S1-specific IgG Ab titers were measured using ELISA. Overall, 89 LT recipients (ChAdOx1, n=16 [18%]) or mRNA vaccines (mRNA-1273 vaccine, n=23 [26%]; BNT162b2 vaccine, n=50 [56%]) received 3 different vaccines. Of them, 16 (18%) had a positive Ab response after one dose of COVID-19 vaccine and 62 (73%) after 2 doses. However, the median Ab titer after two doses of mRNA vaccines was significantly higher (44.6 IU/ml) than after two doses of ChAdOx1 (19.2 IU/ml, p=0.04). The longer time interval from transplantation was significantly associated with high Ab titers after two doses of vaccine (p=0.003). However, mycophenolic acid use was not associated with Ab titers (p=0.53). In conclusion, about 3-quarters of LT recipients had a positive Ab response after 2 doses of vaccine, and the mRNA vaccines induced higher Ab responses than the ChAdOx1 vaccine.