• Korean Journal of Food Science and Technology
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• v.45 no.5
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• pp.661-665
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• 2013

The aim of this study was to investigate the anti-amnesic effect of daebo (Castanea crenata) extract on trimethyltin chloride (TMT)-induced learning and memory impairment, in vivo. The inner skin of daebo was extracted using distilled water under reflux conditions. At the end of the adaptation period, ICR mice were divided into a control group, a TMT injection group (negative control), and a sample group (C5: 5 mg/kg body weight; C10: 10 mg/kg body weight; and C20: 20 mg/kg body weight), and were tested with learning and memory tests. The ethylacetate fraction of the daebo inner skin extract was found to increase TMT-induced memory deficit in the Y-maze and passive avoidance test. Brain tissue analysis showed that the ethylacetate fraction of daebo extract lowered the acetylcholine esterase (AChE) activity and malondialdehyde (MDA) content of neuronal cells, both of which are indicative of lipid peroxidation.

• Advances in Traditional Medicine
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.182-190
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• 2007

Alzheimer's disease is a neurodegenerative disorder associated with a decline in cognitive abilities. Dementia is one of the aged related mental problems and a characteristic symptom of Alzheimer's disease. Nootropic agents like piracetam and cholinesterase inhibitors like $Donepezil^{\circledR}$ are used in situations where there is organic disorder in learning abilities, but the resulting side-effects associated with these agents have limited their utility. Foeniculum (F.) vulgare Linn. is widely used in Indian traditional systems of medicines and also as a house remedy for nervous debility. The present work was undertaken to assess the potential of F. vulgare as a nootropic and anti-cholinesterase agent in mice. Exteroceptive behavioral models such as Elevated plus maze and Passive avoidance paradigm were employed to assess short term and long term memory in mice. To delineate the possible mechanism through which F. vulgare elicits the anti-amnesic effects, its influence on central cholinergic activity was studied by estimating the whole brain acetylcholinesterase activity. Pretreatment of methanolic extract of fruits of F. vulgare Linn. for 8 successive days, ameliorated the amnesic effect of scopolamine (0.4 mg/kg) and aging induced memory deficits in mice. F. vulgare extract significantly decreased transfer latencies of young mice and aged mice, increased step down latency and exhibited significant anti-acetyl cholinesterase effects, when compared to piracetam, scopolamine and control groups of mice. F. vulgare might prove to be a useful memory restorative agent in the treatment of dementia seen in the elderly.

• Korean Journal of Pharmacognosy
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• v.48 no.2
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• pp.119-124
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• 2017

Taraxacum platycarpum H. Dahl. (Compositae) has been used as an anti-inflammatory or anti-cancer agent in the clinic. Although its antidepressant effect has been reported, however, its cognitive function is not investigated until yet. In the present study, we investigated whether the water extract of T. platycarpum (WETP) could improve cognitive function in cholinergic blockade-induced amnesia mouse model using the passive avoidance or Y-maze task. WETP (12.5, 25 or 50 mg/kg) significantly ameliorated the scopolamine-induced cognitive impairment both in the passive avoidance test and the Y-maze test. In addition, WETP significantly inhibited acetylcholinesterase (AChE) activity measured by an ex vivo study using the mouse whole brain. These results suggest that WETP alleviates the cognitive dysfunction caused by the cholinergic blockade, in part, via AChE inhibition, and that it may be a useful for treating cognitive dysfunction.

• Journal of Korean Neurosurgical Society
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• v.46 no.1
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• pp.1-4
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• 2009

Objective: To report an unsuspected adaptive plasticity of single upper motor neurons and of primary motor cortex found after microsurgical connection of the spinal cord with peripheral nerve via grafts in paraplegics and focussed discussion of the reviewed literature. Methods: The research aimed at making paraplegics walk again, after 20 years of experimental surgery in animals. Amongst other things, animal experiments demonstrated the alteration of the motor endplates receptors from cholinergic to glutamatergic induced by connection with upper motor neurons. The same paradigm was successfully performed in paraplegic humans. The nerve grafts were put into the ventral-lateral spinal tract randomly, with out possibility of choosing the axons coming from different areas of the motor cortex. Results: The patient became able to selectively activate the re-innervated muscles she wanted without concurrent activities of other muscles connected with the same cortical areas. Conclusion: Authors believe that unlike in nerve or tendon transfers, where the whole cortical area corresponding to the transfer changes its function a phenomenon that we call "brain plasticity by areas". in our paradigm due to the direct connection of upper motor neurons with different peripheral nerves and muscles via nerve grafts motor learning occurs based on adaptive neuronal plasticity so that simultaneous contractions of other muscles are prevented. We propose to call it adaptive functional "plasticity by single neurons". We speculate that this phenomenon is due to the simultaneous activation of neurons spread in different cortical areas for a given specific movement, whilst the other neurons of the same areas connected with peripheral nerves of different muscles are not activated at the same time. Why different neurons of the same area fire at different times according to different voluntary demands remains to be discovered. We are committed to solve this enigma hereafter.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.59-64
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• 2015

In this paper, we found the usefulness of the deep belief network (DBN) in the fields of brain-computer interface (BCI), especially in relation to imagined speech. In recent years, the growth of interest in the BCI field has led to the development of a number of useful applications, such as robot control, game interfaces, exoskeleton limbs, and so on. However, while imagined speech, which could be used for communication or military purpose devices, is one of the most exciting BCI applications, there are some problems in implementing the system. In the previous paper, we already handled some of the issues of imagined speech when using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), although it required complementation for multi class classification problems. In view of this point, this paper could provide a suitable solution for vowel classification for imagined speech. We used the DBN algorithm, which is known as a deep learning algorithm for multi-class vowel classification, and selected four vowel pronunciations:, /a/, /i/, /o/, /u/ from IPA. For the experiment, we obtained the required 32 channel raw electroencephalogram (EEG) data from three male subjects, and electrodes were placed on the scalp of the frontal lobe and both temporal lobes which are related to thinking and verbal function. Eigenvalues of the covariance matrix of the EEG data were used as the feature vector of each vowel. In the analysis, we provided the classification results of the back propagation artificial neural network (BP-ANN) for making a comparison with DBN. As a result, the classification results from the BP-ANN were 52.04%, and the DBN was 87.96%. This means the DBN showed 35.92% better classification results in multi class imagined speech classification. In addition, the DBN spent much less time in whole computation time. In conclusion, the DBN algorithm is efficient in BCI system implementation.

• Korean Journal of Radiology
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.226-236
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• 2022

Objective: This study aimed to explore the myelin volume change in patients with mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) with post-concussion syndrome (PCS) using a multidynamic multiecho (MDME) sequence and automatic whole-brain segmentation. Materials and Methods: Forty-one consecutive mTBI patients with PCS and 29 controls, who had undergone MRI including the MDME sequence between October 2016 and April 2018, were included. Myelin volume fraction (MVF) maps were derived from the MDME sequence. After three dimensional T1-based brain segmentation, the average MVF was analyzed at the bilateral cerebral white matter (WM), bilateral cerebral gray matter (GM), corpus callosum, and brainstem. The Mann-Whitney U-test was performed to compare MVF and myelin volume between patients with mTBI and controls. Myelin volume was correlated with neuropsychological test scores using the Spearman rank correlation test. Results: The average MVF at the bilateral cerebral WM was lower in mTBI patients with PCS (median [interquartile range], 25.2% [22.6%-26.4%]) than that in controls (26.8% [25.6%-27.8%]) (p = 0.004). The region-of-interest myelin volume was lower in mTBI patients with PCS than that in controls at the corpus callosum (1.87 cm³ [1.70-2.05 cm³] vs. 2.21 cm³ [1.86-3.46 cm³]; p = 0.003) and brainstem (9.98 cm³ [9.45-11.00 cm³] vs. 11.05 cm³ [10.10-11.53 cm³]; p = 0.015). The total myelin volume was lower in mTBI patients with PCS than that in controls at the corpus callosum (0.45 cm³ [0.39-0.48 cm³] vs. 0.48 cm³ [0.45-0.54 cm³]; p = 0.004) and brainstem (1.45 cm³ [1.28-1.59 cm³] vs. 1.54 cm³ [1.42-1.67 cm³]; p = 0.042). No significant correlation was observed between myelin volume parameters and neuropsychological test scores, except for the total myelin volume at the bilateral cerebral WM and verbal learning test (delayed recall) (r = 0.425; p = 0.048). Conclusion: MVF quantified from the MDME sequence was decreased at the bilateral cerebral WM in mTBI patients with PCS. The total myelin volumes at the corpus callosum and brainstem were decreased in mTBI patients with PCS due to atrophic changes.

• Journal of Korean Home Economics Education Association
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• v.32 no.2
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• pp.77-97
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• 2020

The purpose of this study was to develop and evaluate the sustainable housing teaching-learning process plan aimed to achieve the global SDGs through home economics class in middle school that is based on the ADDIE model. The overall objective of the plan was to contribute to cultivating students' sustainable housing values and to creating sustainable lifestyle through everyday practice. The plan consisting of 4 lessons contained various activity and visual resources(4 individual and 4 team activity sheets, 4 reading texts, 1 homework sheet and 1 evaluation sheet, and 7 videos) for students and (4 sets of ppt and 4 reading texts) for teachers. The theme and team activities of each lesson were related to 2~7 targets of 2~3 SDGs, in total 11 targets of 5 SDGs. The plan was implemented to 4 classes of 127 senior students at Y middle school in Cheongju city during the period from the 29^th of August to the 18^th of September, 2019. The results showed that students were very positive and highly satisfied with not only practical contents but also adequacy of resources and activities of the whole 4-lessons, so that they actively participated in the lessons more than usual and looked forward to learning more about it. They thoroughly enjoyed various team activities such as brain writing, mandal art, visual thinking, making UCC, and planning the sustainable village as well as writing a short reflective journal at the end of each lesson. Students also reported that they highly accomplished the goal of each lesson and the overall objective. It could be concluded that the teaching-learning process plan of 4-lessons could contribute to cultivating students' sustainable housing values and to creating sustainable lifestyle through practicing everyday life. It indicates that home economics is one of the major subjects to contribute to the attainment of global issue of SDGs for OECD education 2030 and to educate the practically acting global citizen.