National Cheng Kung University

About: National Cheng Kung University is a education organization based out in Tainan City, Taiwan. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Thin film. The organization has 49723 authors who have published 69799 publications receiving 1437420 citations. The organization is also known as: NCKU.

Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever in Infants: A Study of Clinical and Cytokine Profiles

Abstract: A prospective study of clinical and cytokine profiles of 107 infants with dengue hemorrhagic fever (DHF)/ dengue shock syndrome (DSS) was conducted. Fever petechiae on the skin and hepatomegaly were the most common clinical findings associated with DHF/DSS in infants. DSS occurred in 20.5% of the patients. Hemoconcentration and thrombocytopenia were observed in 91.5% and 92.5% of the patients respectively. Serologic testing revealed that almost all of the patients (95.3%) had primary dengue virus infections. These data demonstrate that clinical and laboratory findings of DHF/DSS in infants are compatible with the World Health Organization’s clinical diagnostic criteria for pediatric DHF. The present study is the first to report evidence of production of cytokines in infants with DHF/DSS and to describe the difference between the cytokine profile of infants with primary dengue virus infections and children with secondary infections. Overproduction of both proinflammatory cytokines (interferon-t and tumor necrosis factor–a) and anti-inflammatory cytokines (interleukin-10 and -6) may play a role in the pathogenesis of DHF/DSS in infants. (authors)

Novel High Step-Up DC–DC Converter With Coupled-Inductor and Switched-Capacitor Techniques

Abstract: A novel high step-up dc-dc converter with coupled-inductor and switched-capacitor techniques is proposed in this paper. The capacitors are charged in parallel and are discharged in series by the coupled inductor, stacking on the output capacitor. Thus, the proposed converter can achieve high step-up voltage gain with appropriate duty ratio. Besides, the voltage spike on the main switch can be clamped. Therefore, low on-state resistance RDS(ON) of the main switch can be adopted to reduce the conduction loss. The efficiency can be improved. The operating principle and steady-state analyses are discussed in detail. Finally, a prototype circuit with 24-V input voltage, 400-V output voltage, and 200-W output power is implemented in the laboratory. Experiment results confirm the analysis and advantages of the proposed converter.

Semantic trajectory mining for location prediction

Abstract: Research on predicting movements of mobile users has attracted a lot of attentions in recent years. Many of those prediction techniques are developed based only on geographic features of mobile users' trajectories. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for predicting the next location of a user's movement based on both the geographic and semantic features of users' trajectories. The core idea of our prediction model is based on a novel cluster-based prediction strategy which evaluates the next location of a mobile user based on the frequent behaviors of similar users in the same cluster determined by analyzing users' common behavior in semantic trajectories. Through a comprehensive evaluation by experiments, our proposal is shown to deliver excellent performance.