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Background Post-thyroidectomy hematoma (PH) is uncommon but may be a life-threatening complication. We explored perioperative risk factors for PH, with emphasis on perioperative hemodynamics, pain, and medications. Methods A retrospective case-control study was performed with matching for age, sex, and type of operation. Univariate and multivariate analyses were performed to identify independent risk factors. Results In 1780 thyroid surgeries, 22 cases of PH were detected (1.24%). Antithrombotic agent usage, numeric rating scale (NRS) of postoperative pain, and two or more doses of ketorolac postoperatively significantly differed between the two groups. Multiple regression analysis revealed all three variables were significant risk factors for PH (odds ratio = 55.23, 10.48, and 22.58, respectively). Perioperative hemodynamics did not affect PH. Conclusions Antithrombotic agent usage, postoperative pain, and two or more doses of ketorolac postoperatively were identified as independent risk factors for PH. Proper pain control and judicious usage of ketorolac are recommended.

Background: Sleep-related problems in Parkinson’s disease (PD) have received greater attention in recent years due to their clinical influence on morbidity, disability, and the health-related quality of life (HRQoL) of patients. This study aimed to evaluate the clinimetric properties of the Korean version of the Parkinson’s Disease Sleep Scale-2 (K-PDSS-2), and to analyze whether distinct sleep disturbance subtypes could be empirically identified in patients with PD based on the cross-culturally validated K-PDSS-2. Methods: The internal consistency, test-retest reliability, scale precision, and convergent validity of the K-PDSS-2 were assessed in a nationwide, multicenter study of 122 patients with PD. Latent class analysis (LCA) was used to derive subgroups of patients who experienced similar patterns of sleep-related problems and nocturnal disabilities. Results: The mean total K-PDSS-2 scores were 11.67 ± 9.87 (mean ± standard deviation) at baseline, and 12.61 ± 11.17 upon follow up testing. The Cronbach’s α coefficients of the total K-PDSS-2 score at baseline and at follow up testing were 0.851 and 0.880 respectively. Intraclass correlation coefficient over the 2-week period ranged from 0.672 to 0.848. The total K-PDSS-2 score was strongly correlated to HRQoL measures and other corresponding nonmotor scales. LCA indicated three distinct sleep disturbance classes in the study patients, namely “less troubled sleepers”, “PD-related nocturnal difficulties”, and “disturbed sleepers”. Conclusions: The K-PDSS-2 showed good clinimetric attributes in accordance with prior studies that were using the original version of the PDSS-2, therefore confirming the cross-cultural usefulness of the scale. Further, this study documents the first application of an LCA approach for identifying sleep disturbance subtypes in patients with PD. Keywords: Parkinson’s disease; sleep; PDSS-2; validity; reliability; Korean version; latent class analysis.

We propose a speech-emotion recognition (SER) model with an &ldquo, attention-long Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)-attention&rdquo, component to combine IS09, a commonly used feature for SER, and mel spectrogram, and we analyze the reliability problem of the interactive emotional dyadic motion capture (IEMOCAP) database. The attention mechanism of the model focuses on emotion-related elements of the IS09 and mel spectrogram feature and the emotion-related duration from the time of the feature. Thus, the model extracts emotion information from a given speech signal. The proposed model for the baseline study achieved a weighted accuracy (WA) of 68% for the improvised dataset of IEMOCAP. However, the WA of the proposed model of the main study and modified models could not achieve more than 68% in the improvised dataset. This is because of the reliability limit of the IEMOCAP dataset. A more reliable dataset is required for a more accurate evaluation of the model&rsquo, s performance. Therefore, in this study, we reconstructed a more reliable dataset based on the labeling results provided by IEMOCAP. The experimental results of the model for the more reliable dataset confirmed a WA of 73%.

Background and purpose Impulse-control disorder is an important nonmotor symptom of Parkinson's disease (PD) that can lead to financial and social problems, and be related to a poor quality of life. A nationwide multicenter prospective study was performed with the aim of validating the Korean Version of the Questionnaire for Impulsive-Compulsive Disorders in Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (K-QUIP-RS). Methods The K-QUIP-RS was constructed using forward and backward translation, and pretesting of the prefinal version. PD patients on stable medical condition were recruited from 27 movement-disorder clinics. Participants were assessed using the K-QUIP-RS and evaluated for parkinsonian motor and nonmotor statuses and for PD-related quality of life using a predefined evaluation battery. The test-retest reliability of the K-QUIP-RS was assessed over an interval of 10-14 days, and correlations between the KQUIP-RS and other clinical scales were analyzed. Results This study enrolled 136 patients. The internal consistency of the K-QUIP-RS was indicated by a Cronbach's α coefficient of 0.846, as was the test-retest reliability by a Guttman split-half coefficient of 0.808. The total K-QUIP-RS score was positively correlated with the scores for depression and motivation items on the Unified PD Rating Scale (UPDRS), Montgomery-Asberg Depression Scale, and Rapid-Eye-Movement Sleep-Behavior-Disorders Questionnaire. The total K-QUIP-RS score was also correlated with the scores on part II of the UPDRS and the PD Quality of Life-39 questionnaire, and the dopaminergic medication dose. Conclusions The K-QUIP-RS appears to be a reliable assessment tool for impulse-control and related behavioral disturbances in the Korean PD population.

Background and purpose This study aimed to determine the clinimetric properties of the Korean version of Parkinson's Disease Sleep Scale-2 (K-PDSS-2) and whether distinct subtypes of sleep disturbance can be empirically identified in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) using the cross-culturally validated K-PDSS-2. Methods The internal consistency, test-retest reliability, scale precision, and convergent validity of K-PDSS-2 were assessed in a nationwide, multicenter study of 122 patients with PD. Latent class analysis (LCA) was used to derive subgroups of patients who experienced similar patterns of sleep-related problems and nocturnal disabilities. Results The total K-PDSS-2 score was 11.67±9.87 (mean±standard deviation) at baseline and 12.61±11.17 at the retest. Cronbach's α coefficients of the total K-PDSS-2 scores at baseline and follow-up were 0.851 and 0.880, respectively. The intraclass correlation coefficients over the 2-week study period ranged from 0.672 to 0.848. The total K-PDSS-2 score was strongly correlated with health-related quality of life measures and other corresponding nonmotor scales. LCA revealed three distinct subtypes of sleep disturbance in the study patients: "less-troubled sleepers," "PD-related nocturnal difficulties," and "disturbed sleepers." Conclusions K-PDSS-2 showed good clinimetric attributes in accordance with previous studies that employed the original version of the PDSS-2, therefore confirming the cross-cultural usefulness of the scale. This study has further documented the first application of an LCA approach for identifying subtypes of sleep disturbance in patients with PD.

In image steganography, the direct trade-off between the aspects of image’s imperceptibility and payload capacity has always been a long-time challenge wherein the improvement of one aspect degrades the other. The more secret data is embedded into an image, the more it begins to look different from the original image. The more the image looks altered, the more it will be suspected of hiding something else other than the visible picture that it is displaying. This study proposes a novel image steganographic approach that produces secret-embedded images with payload capacity comparable with other late variations of spatial domain steganography techniques but with a better imperceptibility level. The nature of the approach is similar to classic LSB (Least Significant Bit) substitution steganography techniques wherein the bit information of the secret message is embedded into the image by replacing the LSB value of its pixel, except that this approach had the embedding bits undergo a series of evaluated and scored bit rotation and inversion operations prior bit replacement in its attempt to embed secret bits into an image with minimal pixel distortion as possible. This study however does not explore the security aspect of the generated image against its resistance to geometric and steganalysis attacks.

In this study, we proposed a deep learning model that consists of the bidirectional Long-Short Term Memory (bi-LSTM) and the attention mechanism to perform frame-wise Voice Activity Detection (VAD). The bi-LSTM extracts annotations of frame by summarizing information from both direction. The attention mechanism accepts the annotations to extracts such frames that are important to the voice activity judgement and aggregates the representation of those informative frames to form an attention distribution vector. It is used as features for frame classification by logistic classification approach. We constructed four comparative models to perform experiments with TIMIT corpus and noise signals. The excrement shows that the proposed model outperforms the conventional VAD with LSTM. And we showed how the attention mechanism can help VAD tasks by visualizing the attention distribution of the model.

In this study, we developed a speech data transcription tool that integrates speech segmentation, speaker classification, speech transcription, and editing processes for the purpose of shortening transcription time of audio data. The system converts the speech data into standardized transcription data that is used as an input to a spoken corpus construction system. The speech segmentation and speaker classification process was developed using deep learning technologies and the transcription process uses the Google API. It was confirmed that the experiment performed to compare with the existing ELAN and notepad tool saves half of the processing time

Background Sleep problems commonly occur in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD), and are associated with a lower quality of life. The aim of the current study was to translate the English version of the Scales for Outcomes in Parkinson's Disease-Sleep (SCOPA-S) into the Korean version of SCOPA-S (K-SCOPA-S), and to evaluate its reliability and validity for use by Korean-speaking patients with PD. Methods In total, 136 patients with PD from 27 movement disorder centres of university-affiliated hospitals in Korea were enrolled in this study. They were assessed using SCOPA, Hoehn and Yahr Scale (HYS), Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS), Parkinson's Disease Sleep Scale 2nd version (PDSS-2), Non-motor Symptoms Scale (NMSS), Montgomery Asberg Depression Scale (MADS), 39-item Parkinson's Disease Questionnaire (PDQ39), Neurogenic Orthostatic Hypotension Questionnaire (NOHQ), and Rapid Eye Movement Sleep Behaviour Disorder Questionnaire (RBDQ). The test-retest reliability was assessed over a time interval of 10–14 days. Results The internal consistency (Cronbach's α-coefficients) of K-SCOPA-S was 0.88 for nighttime sleep (NS) and 0.75 for daytime sleepiness (DS). Test-retest reliability was 0.88 and 0.85 for the NS and DS, respectively. There was a moderate correlation between the NS sub-score and PDSS-2 total score. The NS and DS sub-scores of K-SCOPA-S were correlated with motor scale such as HYS, and non-motor scales such as UPDRS I, UPDRS II, MADS, NMSS, PDQ39, and NOHQ while the DS sub-score was with RBDQ. Conclusion The K-SCOPA-S exhibited good reliability and validity for the assessment of sleep problems in the Korean patients with PD., Graphical Abstract

2 Abstract: In this paper, we developed two sets of phonetically balanced word (PBW) lists in Filipino and two sets of phoneme-level HMMs (Hidden Markov Model). Two PBW lists were based on textbooks used in public school in Philippines and used to develop speech corpus with the fifty speakers of 25 males and 25 females. In a 2-syllable word list (PBW2), an average accuracy rate of 88.95% for speaker dependent and 82.57% for speaker independent test were achieved. For 3-syllable word list (PBW3), the recognizer achieved an accuracy rate of 90.28% for speaker dependent and 83.30% for speaker independent test.

In this study, an emotional speech database called Hanbat Emotional Database (HEMO) was constructed using movie and drama scenes in which emotion is abundantly expressed by professional actors. HEMO consists of 454 speech samples classified into seven emotion categories such as anger, happiness, sadness, disgust, surprise, fear, and neutral. In order to evaluate the performance of HEMO, consistent experiments were conducted based on HMM (Hidden Markov Model) and GMM (Gaussian Mixture Model) for both HEMO and the Berlin Emotional Speech Database (EMO). HEMO showed better results than EMO with a positive recognition rate of 78.89%.

Background Although ultrasound is regarded as the first choice imaging modality for evaluating a pediatric neck mass, neck computed tomography (CT) is necessary for urgent surgical conditions such as deep neck infections. Our aim was to evaluate the diagnostic effectiveness of and proper patient selection for neck CT as a method for the initial evaluation of pediatric neck masses in the emergency department. Methods We analyzed the medical records of 105 pediatric patients who visited the emergency department with neck mass whose initial imaging work-up was a neck CT and who visited the emergency department with a neck mass. The parameters investigated included the patient’s age, sex, symptom duration, clinical impression, CT interpretation, final diagnosis, and treatment. The positive predictive value (PPV) for CT was calculated, and the parameters that correlated with an urgent surgical condition post-CT were evaluated. Results The median age was 6.5 years (1 month to 12 years), and the male-to-female ratio was 2:1. The most common initial impression was acute cervical lymphadenopathy. A comparison of the final diagnosis and CT scan demonstrated that the overall PPV was 96.2%. If the initial impression was a deep neck infection, a salivary gland infection, or tonsillitis, the PPV for CT was 100%. Fever (>38.0°C) and severe tenderness were significant between patients with and without urgent surgical conditions on CT. Conclusions Computed tomography could be considered as the first diagnostic modality when an urgent surgical condition such as a deep neck infection is highly suspected.

This research was carried out to establish a mass-production method and to develop ornamental Gramineae species as cash crops for famers as three species of ornamental grasses were used for seed treatment and plug production. Germination rates of Arundinella hirta were improved to 52.6% by soaking in 4% NaOCl for 60 min and 49.4% with 4% NaOH for 30 min. Germination rates of Panicum virgatum were 20.3% and 22.4% when treated with 4% NaOCl for 10 min and 2% NaOH for 60min treatment, respectively. Pennisetum alopecuroides showed germination rates higher than 98% with both 4% of NaOCl and NaOH for 60 min. When the same size of trays were used, Pennisetum showed faster plug formation in 21 and 30 days with 162 and 40 cell trays, respectively. Arundinella showed a similar trend with Pannicum in completing plug formation, those took 32, 41, and 44 days with the 162, 72, and 40 cell tray, respectively. Plug production was faster with smaller cells; however, total growing period was longer with larger cells in general.

This study presents a Hidden Markov Models(HMM)-based snoring recognition system over the web services environment that consists of the snoring model generation, the recognition system, and the remote device. In design phase, a set of HMM model (snoring and non-snoring) is created from the MFCC feature vectors extracted from the sound corpus consisting of snoring sounds and non-snoring sounds. The recognition system is organized to provide the web services that can be called by the remote device in different platforms with any language. In the test, this system shows that snoring and non-snoring sounds were recognized as 93% and 95.2% for speaker-independent case and 98.3% and 99% for the speaker-dependent case, respectively.

Objective The purpose of this study was to correlate the CT imaging features and histopathological findings of pleomorphic adenomas (PA), and also try to identify its clinical significance. Methods Totally 262 PAs in the parotid gland including 18 recurrent cases were retrospectively reviewed with preoperative CT and pathologic slides. Each pathologic slide was reviewed by two pathologists to calculate mean value of epithelial/mesenchymal component, and the results were correlated with features of CT scans. Results PAs showing high contrast enhancement were correlated with high proportion of epithelial components in histopathologic findings. PAs with smooth border tend to have high proportion of epithelial components. The margin on CT imaging did not consisted with pathologic margin of resected specimens. In recurrent PAs, there was a significant difference on CT contrast enhancement, not in proportion of epithelial component. Conclusion The histopathology and CT imaging features of PAs were variable, but we can find the correlation of epithelial component and CT contrast enhancement. Further large scale study would be expected to identify the clinical significance of CT imaging features and histopathologic findings of PAs.

Correct communication between main control room (MCR) operators is an important factor in the management of emergency situations in nuclear power plants (NPPs). For this reason, a standard communication protocol for the management of emergency situations in NPPs has been developed, with the basic direction of enhancing the safety of NPPs and the standardization of communication protocols. To validate the newly developed standard communication protocol, validation experiments with 10 licensed NPP MCR operator teams was performed. From the validation experiments, it was found that the use of the standard communication protocol required more time, but it can contribute to the enhancement of the safety of NPPs by an operators’ better grasp of the safety-related parameters and a more efficient and clearer communication between NPP operators, while imposing little additional workloads on the NPP MCR operators. The standard communication protocol is expected to be used to train existing NPP MCR operators without much aversion, as well as new operators.

Objectives This study was aimed to assess the relationship between the type of temporal bone area involved and conductive hearing loss. Methods We enrolled 97 patients who visited the otolaryngology clinics of Seoul National University Hospital or Boramae Medical Center, Seoul Metropolitan Government-Seoul National University with temporal bone fracture between January 2004 and January 2014. Audiometric parameters, including initial and improved air-bone (AB) conduction gap values, were reviewed in accordance with the temporal bone computed tomography (external auditory canal [EAC], middle ear [ME], mastoid [M], and ossicle [O]). Results Patients with ossicular chain involvement exhibited a larger AB gap compared to those with no ossicular chain involvement at 250, 1,000, 2,000, and 4,000 Hz. Among the groups without ossicular chain involvement, the initial AB gap was largest in patients with EAC+ME+M involvement, followed by the ME+M and M-only involvement groups. The greatest improvement in the AB gap was observed in the EAC+ME+M group followed by the ME+M and M-only groups, irrespective of ossicular chain involvement. Improvements in AB gap values were smallest at 2,000 Hz. Conclusion Conductive hearing loss pattern differed according to the temporal bone area involved. Therefore, areas such as the hematoma and hemotympanum, as well as the fracture line of the temporal bone area, must be evaluated to predict audiologic patterns with otic capsule preserving temporal bone fracture.

In this paper, a set of Filipino Phonetically Balanced Word list consisting of 250 words (FPBW250) were constructed for a phoneme-level automatic speech recognition system for the Filipino language. The Entropy Maximization Formula is used to obtain balance phonological balance in the list. Entropy of phonemes in a word is maximized, providing an optimal balance in each word’s phonological distribution using the Add-Delete Method (PBW Algorithm) and is compared to the modified PBW Algorithm implemented in a dynamic algorithm approach to obtain optimization. The Filipino PBW list was extracted from 4,000 3-syllable words out of a 12,000 word dictionary and gained an entropy score of 4.2791 for the PBW Algorithm and 4.2902 for the modified algorithm. The PBW250 was recorded by 20 male and 20 female respondents, each with 2 sets data. Recordings from 30 respondents (15 male, 15 female) were trained to produce an acoustic model using a Phoneme-Based Hidden Markov Model (HMM) that were tested using recordings from 10 respondents (5 male, 5 female) using the HMM Toolkit (HTK). The results of test gave the maximum accuracy rate of 97.77% for a speaker dependent test and 89.36% for a speaker independent test.

Si nanocrystallites of ~ 10 nm were formed in Al-added amorphous Si films by the irradiation of a focused electron-beam; the crystallite volume fraction in the films varied from ~ 35.7 to ~ 94.8 % as the in-situ temperature was raised from 200 to 400 degC. The activation energy for the nucleation of Si crystallites in the a-Al0.025Si0.975 film under the electron-beam irradiation was measured to be 0.8 plusmn 0.13 eV.

Recently, low molecular organic non-volatile memories have been developed as a next generation of non-volatile memory because of nano-meter device-feature size and nano-second access and store-time. We developed a non-volatile memory fabricated with the device structure of Al/ α-NPD/Al nano-crystals surrounded by Al2O3/α-NPD/Al, where α-NPD is N,N'-bis(1-naphthyl)-1,1'biphenyl4-4”diamine. One layer of Al nano-crystals with ∼20 nm-width ∼20 nm length was uniform produced between α-NPD layers, confirmed by 1.2MV high voltage transmission-electron-microscope. This device showed Vth of 3.0 V, Vprogram of 4.3 V, and Verase of 6.3 V. Particularly, this device exhibited an excellent non-volatile memory behavior performing the bi-stability (Iprogrm/Ierase) of >1×102, program/erase cycles of >1×105 and multi-levels. In addition, previous reports about low molecular organic non-volatile memories have showed a bad reproducible memory characteristic. However, this issue was completely solved via isolating Al nano-crystals embedded in α-NPD by O2 plasma oxidation. The uniformity of Vth, Vp, and Ve were 9.91%, 6.94% and 7.92%, respectively. Furthermore, the effect of buffer or barrier layer on non-volatile memory characteristics was investigate to examine the control ability for Vth, Vp, and Ve. The 0.5-nm LiF showed a barrier layer behavior suppressing the bi-stability of non-volatile memory. Otherwise, 15-nm CuPc exhibited a buffer layer behavior enhancing the bi-stability of nonvolatile memory.

We present systematic experimental study on the electrical response and two-phonon Raman scattering mode of graphene under small uniaxial strain. The graphene, which was initially grown by chemical vapor deposition, was transferred to a transparent-flexible-polyethylene-terephthalate substrate. It was found that the electrical resistance increases as the stain is increased after a slight decrease in very small strain regimes of