Earticle

This study was executed to identify the presence of drinking education and associated drinking knowledge and attitudes of high school students in some areas. Sample data were collected from 211 high school students in D city from March 4th to March 8th in 2013. Structured self-administered questionnaires were used as survey tool. Study results showed drinking knowledge of some high school students was the highest score in that ‘daily life is difficult when addicted to alcohol’, and showed the lowest score in that ‘alcohol does not affect the brain.’ (p <0.05). According to the presence of education, results showed high score when the students received the drinking education that ‘alcohol is prohibited to minors’ (p <0.05). Regarding drinking education place, school showed the highest percentage of 92.4%, which is much higher than that of other institutions. Regarding education methods, lecture and video watching had the highest percentage of 47.5% and regarding educators, external lecturers had the highest percentage of 53.3. In order to examine the knowledge and attitudes according to the presence of drinking education, Logistic Regression Analysis was conducted and the results showed that the knowledge was estimated to improve 0.9 times and attitudes were estimated to improve 1.22 times. These results are considered to be utilized as fundamental data for re-emphasizing the necessity of youth drinking education and for drinking education program for those young people.

Citrus peel is a useful research resource containing important physiological function materials. In this study, anti-inflammatory effects of Citrus peel extracts were identified in LPS-induced macrophage cells. After the pretreatment of lipopolysarcharide (LPS), inhibitory effects of nitric oxide (NO), inducible NO synthase (iNOS), cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) and pro-inflammatory cytokines, tumor necrotic factor-α (TNF-α), interleukin-6 (IL-6), and interleukin-1 (IL-1), production were measured according to the treatment of citrus peel extracts. Study results showed approximately 40% inhibition of NO production but no concentration-dependent effects when citrus peel extracts were treated. According to the results of inhibitory effects of pro-inflammatory cytokines production, IL-6 had about 44% inhibition of production, TNF-α had about 13% inhibition of production, and IL-1 had no inhibition of production. According to western blot results, iNOS protein’s expression was slightly decreased. Also, COX-2 protein’s expression was observed to be slightly decreased in cells treated with citrus peels as iNOS’s result.

Engineered synthetic cationic antimicrobial peptides are the potential alternative drugs to existing antibiotics. In the present study, a novel attempt for the intracellular production of engineered synthetic cationic antimicrobial peptide (escAMP) using Pichia pastoris was studied. The engineered synthetic cationic antimicrobial peptide gene was synthesized using overlapping PCR. An entirokinase and hydroxylamine hydrochloride cleavage sites are incorporated at N- and C- terminal end of escAMP respectively for easy purification. Later the gene was inserted into the MCS region of pPICZ-B vector. The synthetic peptide under the AOX1 promoter was integrated into the Pichia pastoris GS115 genome and the recombinant clones were screened by using antibiotic resistance. Expression profiles of recombinant peptide were done using glycerol and methanol based synthetic medium and analysed on 18 % Tricine-SDS-PAGE. Purification of the expressed peptide was done after cell disruption (10 cycles on time, 10 cycles off time and 10 min of total time) using 6X histidine tag followed by enzymatic cleavage. In this study, 67 gm of dry cell weight/L and 580 mg/L of purified escAMP was produced. The purified peptide is analysed for its anti microbial activity against different Gram positive and Gram negative microbes. For the first time smallest engineered synthetic cationic peptide was designed, cloned and expressed from methanol inducible Pichia pastoris GS115 and production ranges are encouraging.

CM-1,3-β-Glucan was synthesis by introducing carboxy methyl group with molar ratio of monochloroacetic acid, and cytotoxicity, antioxidant, whitening effect, anti-inflammation, and anti-wrinkle characteristics were examined It was confirmed that carboxymethyl was quantitatively introduced to β-glucan. As a result of conducting test on cell stability of human keratinocyte cell lines (HaCaT), it did not present cytoxicity at both 0.1% and 0.5% concentration compared to control group and it was revealed to have no cytotoxicity at all. Presented high cell proliferation rate compared to control group at 0.1% concentration. Although anti-inflammation effect was confirmed with the reduction of COX-2 expression in CMB-1, CMB-5, CMB-6, CMBA-1, and CMBA-3 at 0.1% concentration as a result of conducting COX-2 expression influence test against animal cells, an anti-inflammatory test, it was revealed to have no effect in other substances. As a result of conducting MMP-1 expression influence test, an anti-wrinkle test, great anti-wrinkle effect was confirmed as MMI expression reduced in CMR-1, CMB-2, CMB-3, CMB-4, CMB-6, CMBA-1, and CMBA-3 at 0.1% concentration and CMB-1, CMB-2, CMB-3, CMB-4, and CMBA-1 at 0.5% concentration.

Driven by the need to uncover the vast information and understand the dynamic behaviour of biological systems, researchers are now garnering interests in inferring gene regulatory networks (GRNs) from gene expression data which is otherwise unfeasible in the past due to technology constraint. In this regard, the dynamic Bayesian network (DBN) has been broadly utilized for the inference of GRNs, thanks to its ability to handle time-series microarray data and model feedback loops. Unfortunately, the commonly found missing values in gene expression data, and the excessive computation time owing to the large search space whereby all genes are treated as potential regulators for a target gene, often impede the effectiveness of DBN in inferring GRNs. This paper proposes a DBN-based model with missing values imputation and potential regulators selection (ISDBN) which deals with the missing values and reduces the search space by selecting potential regulators based on gene expression changes. The performance of the proposed model is assessed by using S. cerevisiae cell cycle and E. coli SOS response pathway time-series expression data. The experimental results showed reduced computation time and improved accuracy in detecting gene-gene relationships when compared to conventional DBN. The results of this study showed that ISDBN performs better than conventional DBN in terms of accuracy and computation time for GRNs inference. Moreover, we foresee the applicability of the resultant networks from ISDBN as a framework for future gene intervention experiments.

In wireless body sensor system, various multipath environments can be established because sensor nodes can be moved to many locations as it is deployed in parts of the human body. This study compared and analyzed changes of the received signal strength (RSS) in various experimental locations, such a ground site, corridor, and room, as an actual sensor device is attached to a human body. Experimental results showed that the room, which contained many multipaths, exhibited the best RSS. The ground site, which had the lowest number of multipaths, registered the worst RSS. On the basis of these findings, we conclude that the design of body sensor systems should consider the presence of multipaths in various experimental locations.

This paper investigates the calibration effect of urine biomarkers by creatinine. The biomarkers were obtained from each urine sample of 256 patients (cancer: 137, benign: 119). The logistic regression of the combinations of 2 biomarkers calibrated by creatinine concentration was compared with that of the 3 biomarkers including creatinine. The average AUC over 1000 rounds of 5-fold cross validations was employed to evaluate the performance. The logistic regression of the calibrated biomarkers showed better performance than that without calibration for the top- ranked combinations.

This paper compares the diagnostic accuracy performance of combinations of biomarkers extracted from urine and serum samples for the early diagnosis of ovarian cancer. The sample population consisted of 23and 18 patients with benign disease and cancer, respectively. The concentrationsof 15 ovarian cancer-specific biomarkers were measuredbyantibody microbead-assisted multiplexed immunoassaytechnology. To determine the optimal combination todistinguish benign disease from cancer, the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) for various marker combinations, consisting of two biomarkers and three biomarkers,was estimated. The diagnosticperformance was evaluated using logistic regression. The biomarker combination with the highest AUC value comprised threebiomarkers with values of97.14% and 91.43%, for thebiomarkers extracted from urine and serum, respectively. This result demonstrates thatcombinations of biomarkers extracted from urine have higher diagnostic accuracy performance than those of biomarkers extracted from serum.

As health problem unpredictable in this polluted environment, it is better to keep an eye on our health. If a particular patient of heart or something dangerous disease then one should avail for the patient to monitor his health. It is not always possible to monitor him with at most attention. We should have a better system that always is with patient to monitor clearly and make the record of abnormalities obtained. As mobile phones commonly present in everybody pocket as a phone, player, pager, and so as our life saver, if we are in dangerous or unconscious condition, it alerts the user or alerts doctor or relative by making a call to family doctor or the some relative, who can care about the user by using telemedicine using mobile phone system. In this article, the alert system has a sensor to monitor the body condition like in case of heart. ECG is the best technique for monitoring and knowing the condition of the heart. And this sensor sends the data to the mobile phone through the Bluetooth wireless communication to eliminate the cumbersome cables and enables the absolute mobility. The mobile phone receives the biomedical signal and analyses the received signal with the reference signal and process the signal to get different types of information’s that required to know the condition of the body. If any abnormalities like Tachycardia or Bradycardia (change of heart rate) in case of heart found in patient or users health then it will alert the patient by alarming and it make call to doctor in unconscious situations. The ECG graphical facilities are shown with help of Intel WML language.

There are many adjectives to express the taste of Korean Makgeollis. In the paper, firstly those adjectives are used to categorize the Makgeollis based on rough tolerant relation as the same way as document clustering and secondly, Makgeollis which are for domestic marketing were selected and classified according to physicochemical, microbiological analysis and sensual evaluation. We researchers had a lot of difficulties in determining the taste properties of Makgeollis which seem to reflect each regional character. The reason could be that most of Makgeollis are produced through the standardization of taste under a mass production.This paper aims to determine the taste properties of Makgeollis which are currently sold in the domestic market. To achieve this, we researchers attempted the correlational analysis of brain waves according to the sensual evaluation data and electroencephalographic data

Telemedicine is influencing surgical training, allows mentoring, proctoring and teleconferencing. In addition, telemedicine is increasingly being applied to carry out remote surgical procedures. It is anticipated that teleconsultation will bring significant value to health care delivery by increasing professional collaboration, education, and information sharing around individual patient care issues while decreasing the need for patient travel and diminishing professional isolation. This paper presents an initiation of a regional network for a surgical telemedicine education, and two examples are briefly introduced.

This paper proposes a modified bacterial foraging algorithm with a probabilistic derivative approach to detect edges in chromosome images. Chromosomal Edge Detection is fundamental for automatic karyotyping for noise reduction and getting useful messages from the edges. Subjected to staining and other imaging constraints, chromosomal banding patterns lack in resolution, contrast and suffer from noise. For this reason, chromosomal edge detection is highly preferred prior to the segmentation and classification of chromosomes. When the chromosomes occlude or overlap, edge detection becomes extremely difficult. Edge detection is highly challenging and this paper presents a Modified Bacterial Foraging Algorithm (MBFA) based on a probabilistic derivative methodology based on Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) for the detection of edges in chromosomes. Bacterium searches for the nutrients in the direction decided by a probabilistic derivative approach derived from ACO and the edge pixels are identified and traversed. The study reveals that MBFA gives the most promising results in detecting chromosomal edges, greatly reducing the computation time and memory requirements. Acceptable values of parameters for performance evaluation like Kappa (K) and Entropy (E) are achieved with the proposed algorithm in comparison to the other conventional methods of edge detection.

To compare different taste evaluating methods on Makgeolli, quality characteristics and instrumental analysis on 41 commercial Makgeolli (unheated 21, heated 20) produced in different regions of South Korea were investigated. Physicochemical characteristics including pH, total titratable acidity, amino-type nitrogen, reducing sugar, and color of Makgeolli samples were analyzed. Sensory characteristics including appearance (turbidity, color), flavor (aroma), taste (sweet, sour, bitter, thick, cool), and total acceptability were evaluated. Five tastes (umami, sour, salty, bitter, astringent) and three after tastes (umami, bitter, astringent) were evaluated by using Taste Sensing System (TS-5000Z). In correlation between analytical values of physicochemical and sensory characteristics, ‘pH, amino-type nitrogen - sourness, refreshing, balances’ was showed high correlation. In addition, analytical items between sensory characteristics and Taste Sensing System showed a strong correlation. Results indicate the analytical values of quality characteristics and Taste Sensing System on Makgeolli were highly correlated.

Recently, as biomimetics is applied to design and engineering and receive attention from the society, its artistic value also is receiving people’s interest. Data visualization is expressed regarding brain wave, iris, fingerprint, pulse, body fat, etc. Particularly, developing of convergence contents, biometric data is also influencing development of affective data. This study is focused on research on media art using biometric data, and an artwork using pulse data was created as an example based on review of relevant research. By developing the process in which the audience sees their real-time biometric data, aesthetic contemplation according to sophistication of emotional contents will be studied.

The pleasure and interaction offered by interactive media art could be fully facilitated as play tool for children, not just for its contribution to physical development but also for emotional and cognitive development as well. Media art works which stimulate five senses and induce physical exercise can overcome the side effects of digital game devices and can be useful as a play therapy that brings out sound emotion and allows cognitive development. Ingredients such as sand and bell used for such art, therefore, deserves recognition as a 'User Interface' for play therapy that stimulates five senses.

An audio stimulation experiment analyzed the ways in which frequency combinations and auditory beats affect the perception of time. Evidence of group wisdom regarding difference frequencies was derived by averaging the retrospective time estimates of groups who listened to three minutes of various sine wave combinations. A difference of 14 cycles per second in carrier frequencies corresponded to differences of 14 seconds between the average time estimates of groups who heard the two carrier frequencies. Groups thereby “perceived” the difference between two carrier frequencies when no individual heard more than one carrier frequency and no individual communicated with any other individual. This new phenomenon of group wisdom, here identified as omnaural perception, corresponded to basic patterns in EEG data from each group. Omnaural perception was evident in sets of groups even when individuals heard different rates of auditory beats. Omnaural perception also occurred for groups regardless of whether auditory beats were produced monaurally or binaurally for each individual. Indirect applications of this research involve the development of frequency combinations which can lead to an increase the perceived speed of time.

Management of chronic diseases is important to self-management for health. The IoT concept plays a significant role in self-management for health. In order to accomplish it, personal health devices need two functions such as application network protocol and intelligent service. But, most of them have only simple function such as indicating measured data and storing data temporarily. In this research, we proposed an intelligent service model for healthcare which gives an effective feedback to an individual. In order to do this, we introduced the collaboration protocol which transfers risk factors between IoT personal health devices. In addition to this, we proposed intellectualized service application algorithm which will be operated in the personal health device. Finally, based on the findings of the experiment, the effectiveness was confirmed on proposed model.

We deal with the reconstruction of the high-resolution (HR) computed tomography (CT) image from the CT projection data (Sinogram). Spatial resolution is one of the important parameters of CT images. Spatial resolution is a measure of how close to each other two objects that can still be distinguished. The spatial resolution of CT images depends on the field of view which in turn depends on the number of projections and the number of samples per projection. One way to increase the spatial resolution of the reconstructed images is to reduce the pixel size; however, this may require hardware alteration. Another way to increase the spatial resolution is to apply super-resolution (SR) technique on the low-resolution (LR) images. The conventional method for resolution enhancement is to apply SR technique as a post-process after LR CT images reconstruction. One drawback of this conventional method is that; performing two consequence steps, reconstruction and SR, requires more parameters to be tuned. Unlike the conventional method, we propose to simultaneously estimate HR image with the reconstruction step from the CT projection data, which indeed reduce the overall processing time and the required tuned parameters. On the other hand, even if the back-projection (BP) method is attractive because of its simplicity and low computational cost, it produces sub-optimal images with respect to artifacts, resolution, and noise. On contrast, iterative image reconstruction allows to easily model constraints and to incorporate prior knowledge which leads to better image quality. Therefore, in this paper, we employ the iterative reconstruction based on regularized Kaczmarz minimization algorithm, for its fast convergence, in the resolution enhancement as a post-process as well as simultaneous reconstruction and resolution enhancement methods.

In this study, we apply skin data extracted from a spectrophotometer to a rendering model. We first divide the skin layers into the epidermis and dermis layers and then obtain the absorption and scattering coefficients for the wavelengths that match each skin layer. The absorption coefficient for each wavelength reflects the hemoglobin and melanin levels. Then, we store the percentage values of the hemoglobin and melanin levels as a table in a database and find from the database the hemoglobin and melanin levels closest to the skin color of a person, as obtained with a spectrophotometer.