Professionals’ experiences and attitudes toward use of Traditional Chinese Medicine in hospice palliative inpatient care units: A multicenter survey in Taiwan

Yu-Jia Lin,Hsiao-Ting Chang,Ming-Hwai Lin,Ru-Yih Chen,Ping-Jen Chen,Wen-Yuan Lin,Jyh-Gang Hsieh,Ying-Wei Wang,Chung-Chieh Hu,Yi-Sheng Liou,Tai-Yuan Chiu,Chun-Yi Tu,Yi-Jen Wang,Bo-Ren Cheng,Tzeng-Ji Ch 한국한의학연구원 2021 Integrative Medicine Research Vol.10 No.2

Background: Medical staff may have difficulties in using conventional medicine to manage symptoms among terminally ill patients, including adverse effects of the treatment. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is regarded as a complementary or alternative medicine, and has been increasingly used in the field of palliative medicine in recent years. This study aimed to investigate the experiences of and attitudes toward using TCM among palliative care professionals, and to provide preliminary information about its use in palliative care. Methods: This was a cross-sectional survey study conducted in eight inpatient hospice wards in Taiwan between December 2014 and February 2016. The questionnaire was self-administered, and was analyzed with descriptive statistics including Pearson’s Chi-square test and Fisher’s exact test. Results: A total of 251 palliative care professionals responded to the questionnaire, of whom 89.7% and 88.9% believed that the use of TCM could improve the physical symptoms and quality of life in terminally ill patients, respectively. Overall, 59.8%, of respondents suggested that TCM had rare side effects, and 58.2% were worried that TCM could affect the liver and kidney function of patients. In total, 89.7% and 88.0% of professionals agreed there were no suitable clinical practice guidelines and educational programs, respectively, for TCM use in palliative care. Conclusions: Most of the respondents agreed there was insufficient knowledge, skills-training, and continuing education on the use of TCM in terminally ill patients in Taiwan. These results show that to address patient safety considerations, guidelines about use of TCM in palliative care should be established.

The Structure of Polysemy: A study of multi-sense words based on WordNet

( Jen Yi Lin ),( Chang Hua Yang ),( Shu Chuan Tseng ),( Chu Ren Huang ) 한국언어정보학회 2002 국제 워크샵 Vol.2002 No.-

The issues in polysemy with respect to the verbs in WordNet will be discussed in this paper. The hypernymy/hyponymy structure of the multiple senses is observed when we try to build a bilingual network for Chinese and English. There are several types of polysemic patterns and a co-hypernym may have the same word form as its subordinates. Fellbaum (2000) dubbed autotroponymy that the verbs linked by manner relation share the same verb form. However, her syntactic criteria seem not compatible to the hierarchies in WN. Either the criteria or the network should be reconducted. For most verbs in WN 1.7, polysemous relations are unlikely to extend over 3 levels of IS-A relation. Highly polysemous verbs are more complicated and may be involved in certain semantic structures. Semi-automatic sense grouping may be helpful for multimlinguital information retrieveal.

Characterization of Protein Arginine Methyltransferases in Porcine Brain

( Chien Jen Hung ),( Da Huang Chen ),( Yi Ting Shen ),( Yi Chen Li ),( Yi Wei Lin ),( Mingli Hsieh ),( Chuan Li ) 생화학분자생물학회 2007 BMB Reports Vol.40 No.5

Taurine Attenuates Hepatic Inflammation in Chronic Alcohol-Fed Rats Through Inhibition of TLR4/MyD88 Signaling

Chao-Jen Lin,Chun-Ching Chiu,Yi-Chen Chen,Mu-Lin Chen,Tsai-Ching Hsu,Bor-Show Tzang 한국식품영양과학회 2015 Journal of medicinal food Vol.18 No.12

Accumulating evidence indicates that overconsumption of ethanol contributes in many ways to the pathogenesis of hepatic injury. Although studies indicate that taurine decreases lipogenesis, oxidative stress, and inflammatory cytokines, the protective effect of taurine against alcohol-induced liver injury is still unclear. To clarify the precise signaling involved in the beneficial effect of taurine on alcohol-induced liver injury, rats were randomly divided into four treatment groups: (1) control (Ctl), (2) alcohol (Alc), (3) Alc + taurine (Tau), and (4) Alc + silymarin (Sil). The Tau and Sil groups had lower lymphocyte infiltration and significantly lower TLR-4/MyD88 and IκB/NFκB compared to the Alc group. The inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS), C-reactive protein (CRP), tumor necrosis factors (TNF)-α, interleukin (IL)-6, and IL-1β were also significantly lower in the Tau and Sil groups than in the Alc group. The experimental results indicated that hepatoprotection against alcohol-induced inflammation may be mediated by decreased TLR-4/MyD88 signaling.

Characterization of Protein Arginine Methyltransferases in Porcine Brain

Hung, Chien-Jen,Chen, Da-Huang,Shen, Yi-Ting,Li, Yi-Chen,Lin, Yi-Wei,Hsieh, Mingli,Li, Chuan Korean Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biol 2007 Journal of biochemistry and molecular biology Vol.40 No.5

Protein arginine methylation is a posttranslational modification involved in various cellular functions including cell signaling, protein subcellular localization and transcriptional regulation. We analyze the protein arginine methyltransferases (PRMTs) that catalyze the formation of methylarginines in porcine brain. We fractionated the brain extracts and determined the PRMT activities as well as the distribution of different PRMT proteins in subcellular fractions of porcine brain. The majority of the type I methyltransferase activities that catalyze the formation of asymmetric dimethylarginines was in the cytosolic S3 fraction. High specific activity of the methyltransferase was detected in the S4 fraction (high-salt stripping of the ultracentrifugation precipitant P3 fraction), indicating that part of the PRMT was peripherally associated with membrane and ribosomal fractions. The amount and distribution of PRMT1 are consistent with the catalytic activity. The elution patterns from gel filtration and anion exchange chromatography also indicate that the type I activity in S3 and S4 are mostly from PRMT1. Our results suggest that part of the type I arginine methyltransferases in brains, mainly PRMT1, are sequestered in an inactive form as they associated with membranes or large subcellular complexes. Our biochemical analyses confirmed the complex distribution of different PRMTs and implicate their regulation and catalytic activities in brain.

Safety and Efficacy of Adalimumab for Patients With Moderate to Severe Crohn`s Disease: The Taiwan Society of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (TSIBD) Study

( Chen Wang Chang ),( Shu Chen Wei ),( Jen Wei Chou ),( Tzu Chi Hsu ),( Chiao Hsiung Chuang ),( Ching Pin Lin ),( Wen Hung Hsu ),( Hsu Heng Yen ),( Jen Kou Lin ),( Yi Jen Fang ),( Horng Yuan Wang ),( 대한장연구학회 2014 Intestinal Research Vol.12 No.4

Background/Aims: Only moderate to severe Crohn`s Disease (CD) patients without a satisfactory conventional therapy effect are eligible to get reimbursement from the National Health Insurance of Taiwan for using adalimumab. These are more stringent criteria than in many Western countries and Japan and Korea. We aim to explore the efficacy of using adalimumab in CD patients under such stringent criteria. Methods: A retrospective analysis was conducted in nine medical centers in Taiwan and we collected the results of CD patients receiving adalimumab from Sep 2009 to Mar 2014. The clinical characteristics, response measured by CDAI (Crohn`s Disease Activity Index), adverse events and survival status were recorded and analyzed. CR-70, CR-100, and CR-150 were defined as attaining a CDAI decrease of 70, 100 or 150 points compared with baseline. Results: A total of 103 CD patient records were used in this study. Sixty percent of these patients received combination therapy of adalimumab together with immunomodulators. CR-70 was 68.7%, 74.5% and 88.4% after week 4, 8 and 12 of treatment, respectively. The steroid-free rate, complications and survival were 47.6%, 9.7% and 99% of patients, respectively. In considering the mucosal healing, only 25% patients achieve mucosal healing after treatment for 6 to12 months. Surgery was still needed in 16.5% of patients. Combination treatment of adalimumab with immunomodulators further decreased the level of CDAI at week 8 when compared with the monotherapy. Conclusions: Even under the stringent criteria for using adalimumab, the response rate was comparable to those without stringent criteria. (Intest Res 2014;12:287-292)

Novel Deadlock Control for Smartphone Manufacturing Systems Using Petri Nets

Yi-Nan Lin,Sheng-Kuan Wang,Gwo-Jen Chiou,Cheng-Ying Yang,Victor R. L. Shen,Tony Tong-Ying Juang,Ting-Jui Huang 제어·로봇·시스템학회 2022 International Journal of Control, Automation, and Vol.20 No.3

Currently, the marketing strategy in the manufacturing industry is becoming more and more competitive. Thus, the production efficiency becomes the main developing trend, which many people are now pursuing. However, the automatic production might cause resource conflicts and system deadlocks. In this study, Petri net models and analysis were used to effectively avoid deadlocks and to achieve the goal of lean production. The iPhone XS device developed by Apple is now a popular product. Consequently, this paper aims to describe its manufacturing system by using Petri net models. Meanwhile, the siphon property of Petri nets can be used to detect the deadlock in the manufacturing processes and to avoid it from occurring. Two simulation software tools, WoPeD and PIPE, were applied to conduct the experiments. The experimental results have indicated that our proposed approach is more feasible and acceptable than other existing ones.

Adaptive MMSE Rake-Equalizer Receiver Design with Channel Estimation for DS-UWB System

Yi-Jen Chiu,Szu-Lin Su 대한전자공학회 2007 ITC-CSCC :International Technical Conference on Ci Vol.2007 No.7

The UWB systems have a fine path resolution by transmitting information with ultra short pulses. The Rake receiver is known to be a technique that can effectively combine paths with different delays and obtain the path diversity gain. However, the UWB multipath channel is spread over dozens of symbols in the case of ultra high-speed communications of several hundreds Mbps, which results in a strong frequency selective channel. Consequently, the Rake receiver needs a large number of fingers and the computational complexity of the Rake receiver becomes high. The conventional Rake receiver employs the weight vector to perform the maximal ratio combining (MRC) which maximizes the output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) when the interference is modeled as additive white Gaussian noise. But for its complexity and cost to remain low, the number of fingers that can be afforded is too small to capture the ample energy provided by the UWB channel, which entails a large number of paths (often>50). In this paper, we introduce a robust receiver design incorporating a channel estimation scheme for DS-UWB over a realistic indoor multipath channel in Fig. 1. The proposed receiver reduces intense multi-path destruction and severe ISI by using a combined adaptive Rake and equalizer structure referred to as the adaptive MMSE Rake-equalizer receiver in Fig. 2. Relevant receiver parameters are estimated using the MMSE algorithm. This has motivated studies of multipath combining receivers that process only a subset of the available Lp resolved multipath components. We obtain more robust signal detection at the receiver side by the adaptive channel estimation in order to extract more accurate channel state information. The channel characteristics are first estimated using the LMS adaptive algorithm on the training sequence of the preamble. The proposed receiver is able to employ the energy of a few paths and obtain better performance by the proposed receiver design. Simulation results show that channel estimation is necessary and that increasing the number of Rake fingers is effective in improving system performance. We also show that DS-UWB with adaptive MMSE Rake-equalizer has better BER performance than DS-UWB with MRC Rake receiver, especially when the number of fingers is large. In particular it is shown that the performance of an adaptive MMSE Rake-equalizer receiver of number of Rake fingers equal to 5 (L=5) outperforms an MRC Rake receiver of number of Rake fingers equal to 10 (L=10) over CM4 channels. Finally, the LMS algorithm does give a satisfactory performance with fast convergence in Fig. 3 and Fig. 4. The proposed adaptive MMSE Rake-equalizer receiver is able to employ the energy of a few paths and obtain better performance by the suitable receiver design. It shows that the adaptive algorithm gives a satisfactory performance.

Iterative Receiver with Joint Rake-Equalizer and Channel Estimation for DS-UWB System

Yi-Jen Chiu,Szu-Lin Su 대한전자공학회 2006 ITC-CSCC :International Technical Conference on Ci Vol.2006 No.2

A Robust Estimation/Compensation Scheme of IQ Imbalance with Frequency Offset in Communication Receivers

Yi-Jen Chiu,Szu-Lin Su,Shao-Ping Hung 대한전자공학회 2007 ITC-CSCC :International Technical Conference on Ci Vol.2007 No.7

Direct conversion receiver is widely utilized in today’s communication system. However, it usually faces a common problem of front-end distortions such as IQ imbalance and frequency offset. When treated separately, effective algorithms exist for estimating and compensating for IQ imbalance as well as frequency offset. With both effects present, such algorithms do not lead to useful estimates of the related parameters. OFDM is sensitive to nonidealities in the receiver front-end. This leads either to stringent front-end specifications and, thus, an expensive device, or large performance degradations. A good summary, Guanbin [1] discusses the transmitter calibration briefly and proposes an estimation technique for calculating the imbalance parameters. For the IEEE 802.11a OFDM standard, Tubbax observe that additional effects from OFDM channel estimation and correction can affect the IQ correction circuits and proposes a smoothing procedure to compensate. The above procedure is not effective when the CFO is too small. This paper extends the previous results mentioned above by developing a simple and adaptive least-square (LS) algorithm to estimate and compensate for IQ imbalance assuming the IQ imbalance compensation is not affected by the CFO, then the CFO is estimated using any of several conventional algorithms. With the additional requirement of a known periodic training sequence (see Su and Chiu ) this process extends the results of to practical cases when CFO is small. Our compensation scheme eliminates the IQ imbalance based on one OFDM symbol and performs well in the presence of CFO. The compensation scheme has fast convergence and small residual degradations. The solution is implemented with an adaptive filter to adjust the parameters of estimation and is computationally relatively inexpensive. With the proposed method as shown in Fig. 1, we can estimate the effect of IQ imbalance without knowing CFO exactly by means of an repetitive training sequence as depicted in Fig.2. Two set of I/Q mismatch parameters, (εr=1.5㏈, ?φr=1.5˚) and (εr=3㏈, ?φr=3˚), are used in the simulations. Fig. 3 shows the performance comparison between the systems with and without I/Q imbalance compensation. It shows that the proposed algorithm can give a satisfactory performance for CFO > 5㎑. To reduce the drawback of high sensitivity under low CFO channel, we modify the adaptive scheme and the fine IQ estimation method to solve the problem of performance degradation when CFO is small. Therefore, our IQ imbalance estimation/compensation scheme potentially leads to low-cost and low-complexity receivers. The simulation results show that the modified scheme can achieve much better performance as shown in Fig. 4.