• Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences
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• v.16 no.7
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• pp.962-967
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• 2003

The purpose of the study were to characterize the proteins secreted by elongating caprine conceptus, to identify a group of low molecular weight proteins as retinol-binding protein (RBP), to identify RBP cell-specific localization in conceptus tissue, and to demonstrate that the conceptuses secreted continuously RBP during the time period maternal recognition of pregnancy. Caprine conceptuses were removed from the uterus between days 16 and 22 of pregnancy, the time period maternal recognition of pregnancy. Isolated conceptuses were cultured in a modified minimum essential medium in the presence of radiolabeled amino acids. Proteins synthesized and secreted into medium were analyzed by fluorography of two-dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis and fluorography. At least five proteins showed consistently a grouping of spots with characteristic location on two-dimensional gels. A major low molecular weight protein consisted of two major isoforms (pI 5.3-6.0) of similar molecular mass (21 kDa) was identified as RBP by using antiserum against RBP. Presence of RBP in conceptus culture medium and uterine flushings between days 16 and 22 of pregnancy were determined by immunoprecipitation and Western blotting using anti-RBP serum. In immunocytochemical study, strong immunostaining for RBP was localized in trophectoderm and endoderm of conceptus. These results clearly demonstrated that the caprine conceptus was active in protein synthesis as early as day 16 of pregnancy. Secretion of RBP by caprine conceptuses (days 16-22) coincident with the rapid transformation of the conceptus from a spherical blastocyst to a filamentous structure. Production of RBP by the elongating conceptuses may be indicative of an important role for conceptus RBP in the transport, availability and metabolism of retinol during maternal recognition of pregnancy.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.16 no.14
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• pp.5749-5754
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• 2015

Cervical carcinoma is the main cause of cancer-related mortality in women and is correlated with more than 15 risk cofactors, including infection of cervical cells with high-risk types of HPV (hrHPV). Indeed, both aberrant methylation of the RASSF1A promoter and hrHPV infection are often observed in cervical carcinomas. The purpose of our meta-analysis was to evaluate the role of RASSF1A promoter methylation and hrHPV infection in cervical cancer. Our meta-analysis involved 895 cervical cancer patients and 454 control patients from 15 studies. Our results suggested that RASSF1A promoter hypermethylation increased the risk of cervical cancer (OR=9.77, 95%CI=[3.06, 31.26], P=0.0001, $I^2=78%$). By grouping cases according to cancer subtypes, we found that HPV infection was higher in cervical squamous cell carcinomas (SCCs) than in cervical adenocarcinomas/adenosquamous cancers (ACs/ASCs) (OR=4.00, 95%CI=[1.41, 11.30], P=0.009, $I^2=55%$). Interestingly, HPV infection tended to occur in cervical cancers with relatively low levels of RASSF1A promoter methylation (OR=0.59, 95%CI=[0.36, 0.99], P=0.05, I2=0%). Our study provides evidence of a possible interaction between HPV infection and RASSF1A promoter methylation in the development of cervical cancers.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.16 no.10
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• pp.4387-4392
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• 2015

Background: Tight junctions (TJs) organise paracellular permeability and they have an important role in epithelial and endothelial cell polarity and permanence of barrier function. It has been demonstrated that the Claudin family constitutes an important component of them. In this study, we assessed expression patterns of of Claudin1, 4 and 7 and whether they have any relation with prognosis in patients with pancreatic cancer. Materials and Methods: Expression patterns of Claudin 1,4 and 7 were examined by immunohistochemistry in 25 patients with a histopathological diagnosis of pancreatic cancer using a semiquantitative scoring of the extent and intensity of staining. After grouping the staining scores as low (final score 0-2) and high (final score 3-9) the relation between expression of Claudin 1,4 and 7 and survival was evaluated. Results: There was no significant relation between expression of Claudin 1,4 and 7 and gender and stage. No statistically significant relation was found between Claudin 1 and 4 expression and survival whereas a statistically significant relation was found between decrease in Claudin 7 expression and decrease in survival. Conclusions: Claudins have important functions other than their popular function known as adhesion. Supporting this hypothesis, we found a statistically significant relationship between increased Claudin 7 expression and increased survival time, and this suggests that Claudin 7 may exert different tumorigenic effects in pancreatic cancer other than its well-known adhesion effect.

• Journal of Korean Society for Geospatial Information Science
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.51-60
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• 2010

In 2008, the Development Impact Fee Zoning has been newly amended and added to the existing National Territory Planning Act. Since the beginning of 2009, many local governments nationwide started to adopt the law as a powerful tool to prepare the prescirbed masterplans for the installment of adequate infrastructure and to procure the financial resources to realize the plan. The study, in this context, tried to build gridded population data and analyzed the population cells that exceed the legal criteria of population increase rate required by the law over the case area of Sooyoung-Ri in Hwasung City. The study further probed to group the selected population cells in five specified increasing steps on which the alternative impact fee zones are built. Throughout the process, the study could properly set a reasonable impact fee zone and suggested a practical examples of the final zone specification applicable by the localities.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.33 no.8
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• pp.681-691
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• 2006

Clustering is one of widely used methods for grouping thousands of genes by their similarities of expression levels, so that it helps to analyze gene expression profiles. This method has been used for identifying the functions of genes. Fuzzy clustering method, which is one category of clustering, assigns one sample to multiple groups according to their degrees of membership. This method is more appropriate for analyzing gene expression profiles because single gene might involve multiple genetic functions. Clustering methods, however, have the problems that they are sensitive to initialization and can be trapped into local optima. To solve these problems, this paper proposes an evolutionary fuzzy clustering method, where adaptive a-cut based evaluation is used for the fitness evaluation to apply different criteria considering the characteristics of datasets to overcome the limitation of Bayesian validation method that applies the same criterion to all datasets. We have conducted experiments with SRBCT and yeast cell-cycle datasets and analyzed the results to confirm the usefulness of the proposed method.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.25 no.8B
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• pp.1371-1382
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• 2000

IMT-2000 system is the third generation mobile communication system which aims at mobile multimedia services with global roaming. Like 2nd generation system, the IMT-2000 system is also under strong influence of interferences among active subscribers in the multiple access environment. That is, in multiple access environment, signals from one subscriber could interfere with others in the same cell or in the neighboring cells. The interference control in the IMT-2000 systems is much more difficult then the interference control in the 2ndgeneration CDMA cellular systems, since the transmitted power of a subcriber might be different that of others in the IMT-2000 system. In this paper, a parallel interference cancellation with traffic discrimination is proposed which can effectively cancel interferences by grouping the subscribers into several equi-power classes. As a conclusion, simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms the conventional partial PIC scheme in several aspects.

• Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.167-176
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• 2008

Galectins are a group of animal lectins consisting of galectin-type carbohydrate recognition domains (CRD) with relatively minor domains. The biological properties of galectins include the regulation of inflammation, intercellular adhesion, cell differentiation and cell death. The diverse kinds of galectin suggest variety in their biological roles. Galectin-1 is released during adipocyte differentiation and is associated with fat which is one of the important factors for meat quality. To verify expression level, a 0.5 kb clone of galectin-1 was obtained from cDNA prepared from back fat tissue of a Sancheong Berkshire pig with good quality meat, and the galectin-1 gene identified. The deduced amino acid sequence of the galectin-1 gene was compared with those obtained from other species. By using RT-PCR and Real time-PCR, an attempt was made to determine the expression level of galectin-1 and to compare with various tissues (tenderloin and back fat) taken from pigs in different groups. Grouping of pigs was based on growth-stage (weighing 60, 80, and 110 kg) and the sub-speciation (Yorkshire and Sancheong Berkshire pigs). We attempted to determine influences of pig species, growth stages and tissue variations on the expression level of the galectin-l gene and it was revealed that the expression pattern of the galectin-1 gene was significantly different (p<0.01 or p<0.05). Galectin-1 genes were expressed more highly in the back fat tissues of pigs weighing 110 kg than in those weighing 60 kg or 80 kg. However, the lowest expression was seen in the tenderloin tissues of pigs weighing 110 kg. Sancheong Berkshire pigs showed higher expression of the galectin-1 gene compared to Yorkshire pigs. Accordingly, it is considered that the expression pattern of the galectin-1 gene influences the growth of back fat tissues and the pig speciation relationship. Previous studies suggested that different expression of galectin-1 genes represents variety among the breeds and is closely related to fat tissue growth, conjugation and catabolism. Further, this study suggests that the expression of galectin-1 at a specific growth stage and tissue contributes significantly to the overall meat quality of Sancheong Berkshire pigs.

• Journal of the Korea Computer Graphics Society
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.1-8
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• 2014

We propose a method to compose a foreground object into a background image, where the foreground object is a part (or a region) of an image taken by a front-facing camera and the background image is a whole image taken by a back-facing camera in a smart phone at the same time. Recent high-end cell-phones have two cameras and provide users with preview video before taking photos. We extract the foreground object that is moving along with the front-facing camera using the optical flow during the preview. We compose the extracted foreground object into a background image using a simple image composition technique. For better-looking result in the composed image, we apply a border smoothing technique using a weighted-border mask to blend transparency from background to foreground. Since constructing and grouping pixel-level dense optical flow are quite slow even in high-end cell-phones, we compute a mask to extract the foreground object in low-resolution image, which reduces the computational cost greatly. Experimental result shows the effectiveness of our extraction and composition techniques, with much less computational time in extracting the foreground object and better composition quality compared with Poisson image editing technique which is widely used in image composition. The proposed method can improve limitedly the color bleeding artifacts observed in Poisson image editing using weighted-border blending.

• Applied Microscopy
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• v.35 no.1
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• pp.31-39
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• 2005

Synapses are contact points where one neuron communicates with another. The morphological change of synapses under various physiological or pathological conditions has long been hypothesized to modify their functional properties. 3-dimensional (3-D) reconstruction of synapses with serial ultrathin sections has contributed to the understanding of ultrastructural dimensions and compositions of synapses. The 3-D reconstruction procedures, however, require a great amount of expertise as well as include prohibitively timeconsuming processes. Here, we introduce efficient 3-D reconstruction technique using high-voltage electron microscopy (HVEM). Primarily, we established an optimal section thickness and staining condition to observe synaptic structures in detail under HVEM. The result showed that synaptic profiles were preserved at the section thickness of 250 nm without the overlapping of synaptic ultrastructures. An increase in the reaction time of en bloc staining was most efficient to enhance contrast than the extension of postembedding staining or the addition of uranyl acetate during dehydration. Then, 3-D reconstruction of parallel fiber-Purkinje cell synapses in the rat cerebellum was carried out with serial HVEM images and reconstruction software. The images were aligned and the contours of synapses were outlined on each section. 3-D synapses were finally extracted from the section files by grouping all the synaptic contours. The reconstructed synapse model clearly demonstrated the configuration of pre and postsynaptic components. These results suggest that 3-D reconstruction of synapses using HVEM is much efficient and suitable for massive quantitative studies on synaptic connectivity than conventional TEM approach using numerous ultrathin sections.

• Journal of Chest Surgery
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• v.32 no.7
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• pp.653-659
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• 1999

Background: Despite the recent promising efforts to improve survival in patients with esophageal carcinoma, the long term survival results of patients with esophageal cancer have seldom been reported in Korea. To establish standard control for future studies, we re trospectively analyzed the surgical treatment results of the esophageal cancer patients managed in our department at Seoul National University Hospital. Material and Method: From January 1984 to December 1996, 734 patients were diagnosed with esophageal cancer. Among them, 253 patients underwent surgery in our department. We retrospectively analyzed the operative results and long term survival rates of these patients. Result: The majority of patients(237) had squamous cell histology and only 6 patients had adenocarcinoma. The final TNM stage grouping for these patients was based on the 1988 revised American Joint Commitee on Cancer classification. Twenty one patients were surgically classified as stage I, 109 as stage II, and 107 as stage III. C respiratory failure in 8, sepsis in 1, hepatic failure in 1, bleeding in 1 and unknown etiology in the remaining 3. The actuarial survival of 222 patients in whom the curative resection was accomplished at 1-, 2-, 3- and 5 years was 74.7${\pm}$3.1%, 46.5${\pm}$3.7%, 32.3${\pm}$3.7%, and 19.9${\pm}$3.3%, respectively. CONCLUSION: The poor long term survival rates suggest that an alternative treatment method such as intensive combined modality therapy should be developed for the management of esophageal cancer.