Publications by authors named "Hee J Kang"

Background: Predicting the length of stay in advance will not only benefit the hospitals both clinically and financially but enable healthcare providers to better decision-making for improved quality of care. More importantly, understanding the length of stay of severe patients who require general anesthesia is key to enhancing health outcomes.

Objective: Here, we aim to discover how machine learning can support resource allocation management and decision-making resulting from the length of stay prediction.

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  • Preoperative imaging, specifically MRI and CT scans, is essential for distinguishing between benign and malignant parotid gland tumors, while the effectiveness of Ultrasound-Guided Fine Needle Aspiration (FNA) for diagnosis is still debated.
  • A study of 347 patients who underwent FNA and imaging showed that while 92% were initially diagnosed with benign tumors by FNA, the final histopathological results indicated that only 87% were benign, resulting in a 10.6% false-negative rate for FNA.
  • Factors like irregular shape and invasion in tumors were found to strongly suggest malignancy, even for those with initially benign FNA results, with significant odds ratios for these characteristics.
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  • Decreasing blood donation rates have created a need for alternative sources, leading to the exploration of genetically engineered pig red blood cells (pRBCs), particularly triple-gene knockout (TKO) versions, for human transfusion compatibility.
  • In a study involving nonhuman primates, both wild-type (WT) and TKO-pRBC transfusions significantly improved red blood cell counts initially, but triggered the body's immune response, leading to rapid antibody production and liver function impairment.
  • While initial hematological improvements were noted on the first day post-transfusion, both pRBC types showed diminished circulation benefits and increased adverse reactions upon subsequent transfusions, raising concerns about their long-term efficacy in humans.
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Background: Despite extensive findings on the hazardous impacts of environmental heat exposure, little is known about the effect on people with disabilities. This study aimed to estimate the association between environmental heat exposure and emergency department admissions for people with disabilities compared with people without disabilities.

Methods: In this nationwide, case-crossover study, we linked data on emergency department admissions (cases) for any cause in the warm season in South Korea from the Korean National Health Insurance Service (NHIS)-National Sample Cohort database (a nationally representative database of 1 million systematically sampled beneficiaries covering all ages) from Jan 1, 2002, to Dec 31, 2019, and short-term daily mean temperature exposure (measured via Google Earth Engine at a 9 km spatial grid, aggregated to district).

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Background & Objective: Aging is a global trend, and Korea is also entering an aging society, which threatens the mental health of the elderly due to isolation, etc. In line with the growing domestic and international interest in elderly issues, this study aimed to identify the effects of depression, stress and self-esteem on the lives of the elderly in South Korea and to provide basic data for welfare measures.

Methods: Depression, stress, self-esteem, and quality of life were measured in 104 South Korean seniors (32 men, 72 women, average age 72.

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Background And Objective: Although interest in predicting drug-drug interactions is growing, many predictions are not verified by real-world data. This study aimed to confirm whether predicted polypharmacy side effects using public data also occur in data from actual patients.

Methods: We utilized a deep learning-based polypharmacy side effects prediction model to identify cefpodoxime-chlorpheniramine-lung edema combination with a high prediction score and a significant patient population.

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Introduction: The global shortage of human blood for medical use has prompted the development of alternative blood sources. Nonhuman primates (NHPs) are commonly used owing to their physiological similarities to humans. The objective of the current study was to establish a controlled-blood-loss model in NHPs to explore their clinical and biological responses.

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Because there is a shortage of donor kidneys, researchers are exploring the possibility of using genetically modified pig kidneys for transplantation. Approaches involving knockout of carbohydrate genes or knockin of protective proteins have been attempted to determine the best gene modifications. In this study, we utilized ; and ; pigs for transplantation in nonhuman primates (NHPs).

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As warfarin has a narrow therapeutic window and obvious response variability among individuals, it is difficult to rapidly determine personalized warfarin dosage. Adverse drug events(ADE) resulting from warfarin overdose can be critical, so that typically physicians adjust the warfarin dosage through the INR monitoring twice a week when starting warfarin. Our study aimed to develop machine learning (ML) models that predicts the discharge dosage of warfarin as the initial warfarin dosage using clinical data derived from electronic medical records within 2 days of hospitalization.

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The decline in blood donation rates and the ongoing shortage of blood products pose significant challenges to medical societies. One potential solution is to use porcine red blood cells (pRBCs) from genetically modified pigs as an alternative to human red blood cells (hRBCs). However, adverse immunological reactions remain a significant obstacle to their use.

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Electronic medical records(EMR) have considerable potential to advance healthcare technologies, including medical AI. Nevertheless, due to the privacy issues associated with the sharing of patient's personal information, it is difficult to sufficiently utilize them. Generative models based on deep learning can solve this problem by creating synthetic data similar to real patient data.

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  • - This study addresses the problem of overcrowded emergency departments by creating a cost-effective tool that uses machine learning to predict patient hospitalizations and wait times based on electronic medical records.
  • - The researchers found that their best-performing model, using text data, significantly outperformed existing models, achieving high accuracy in predicting patient admission likelihood and wait times.
  • - The model classifies patients into Low, Medium, or High probability groups for admission within 24 hours and provides insights for physicians on an electronic dashboard, ultimately aiming to improve decision-making and reduce overcrowding in emergency departments.
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Cardiac xenotransplantation is the potential treatment for end-stage heart failure, but the allogenic organ supply needs to catch up to clinical demand. Therefore, genetically-modified porcine heart xenotransplantation could be a potential alternative. So far, pig-to-monkey heart xenografts have been studied using multi-transgenic pigs, indicating various survival periods.

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Background: Accurately predicting the demand for blood transfusions is crucial for blood banks. Given the potential for emergency situations, it is imperative that blood banks maintain a sufficient inventory of blood products. In this study, we examined the use of perioperative transfusions in patients undergoing elective kidney transplants.

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  • The study examines the graft survival rates of full-thickness versus lamellar corneal xenotransplantation (XTP) using genetically engineered pigs in monkey recipients.
  • Results showed that lamellar XTP had significantly longer graft survival times compared to full-thickness XTP, with survival times of over 463 days versus 21 days, though not as high as previous lamellar studies.
  • The findings suggest that lamellar XTP avoids certain surgical complications associated with full-thickness XTP, but further research is needed to enhance graft survival rates and explore the impacts of different transgenic types.
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The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak affected the utilization and management of blood products in hospitals. Blood shortages occurred owing to social distancing policies and reduction in blood donors. However, only a few studies examined whether these changes affected blood usage and transfusion patterns.

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Background: We established reference intervals for research parameters of complete blood cell count and examined their usefulness for diagnosing certain diseases.

Methods: Reference intervals for 26 basic and 38 research parameters were established for 3,457 and 1,325 men and 2,742 and 830 women aged 20 - 59 and ≥ 60 years, respectively. Research parameter values for patients with iron deficiency anemia (IDA), appendicitis, sepsis, and myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) were compared against gender- and age-matched reference values.

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Objectives: To determine whether the concentration of pepsin in the saliva sample changes according to the storage period of the sample.

Methods: Forty eight patients with suspected laryngopharyngeal reflux were included in this study. Saliva samples were collected from each patient and each sample divided into six and stored for different period of time.

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Graph representation learning is a method for introducing how to effectively construct and learn patient embeddings using electronic medical records. Adapting the integration will support and advance the previous methods to predict the prognosis of patients in network models. This study aims to address the challenge of implementing a complex and highly heterogeneous dataset, including the following: (1) demonstrating how to build a multi-attributed and multi-relational graph model (2) and applying a downstream disease prediction task of a patient's prognosis using the HinSAGE algorithm.

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Objective: We aimed to evaluate associations between abdominal fat distribution (AFD) parameters and incisional hernia (IH) in patients who underwent transumbilical single-port laparoscopic surgery (SPLS) for gynecological disease.

Methods: Medical records of 2116 patients who underwent SPLS for gynecological disease at Daejeon St. Mary's Hospital between March 2014 and February 2021 were reviewed.

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Background: Multimodal treatment approaches are often considered for patients with Lennox-Gastaut syndrome (LGS). Creating an algorithm that can guide healthcare providers in selecting treatment options for patients with LGS remains a challenge. Herein, we assessed the long-term seizure-free and neurodevelopmental outcomes of stepwise multimodal treatment in patients with LGS.

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Background And Objective: With the advent of bioinformatics, biological databases have been constructed to computerize data. Biological systems can be described as interactions and relationships between elements constituting the systems, and they are organized in various biomedical open databases. These open databases have been used in approaches to predict functional interactions such as protein-protein interactions (PPI), drug-drug interactions (DDI) and disease-disease relationships (DDR).

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Depletion of ovarian reserve during menopausal transition raises follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) markedly and menopause is related to an increased risk for metabolic syndrome (MetS). This study examined the relationship between FSH and MetS in postmenopausal women.We evaluated the anthropometric values, lipid profiles, high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP) level, Homeostasis model assessment for insulin resistance (HOMA-IR), and serum adipokines levels in 219 postmenopausal women.

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Background: Triple knockout (TKO) donor pigs lacking alpha-1,3-galactose (Gal), -glycolylneuraminic acid (Neu5Gc), and Sd(a) expressions were developed to improve the clinical success of xenotransplantation. Neu5Gc, a sialic acid expressed on cell surfaces, recruits factor H to protect cells from attack by the complement system. Lack of Neu5Gc expression may cause unwanted complement activation, abrogating the potential benefit of gene-modified donor pigs.

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