Glucose homeostasis is a fundamental aspect of life and its dysregulation is associated with important diseases, such as cancer and diabetes. Traditionally, glucose radioisotopes have been used to monitor glucose utilization in biological systems. Fluorescent-tagged glucose analogues were initially developed in the 1980s, but it is only in the past decade that their use as a glucose sensor has increased significantly. These analogues were developed for monitoring glucose uptake in blood cells, but their recent applications include tracking glucose uptake by tumor cells and imaging brain cell metabolism. This review outlines the development of fluorescent-tagged glucose analogues, describes their recent structural modifications and discusses their increasingly diverse biological applications.

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Bilateral patellar tendon rupture is rare and there are only a few case reports that are associated with osteogenesis imperfecta.1) In addition, it has never been report in this country. We report a case of bilateral simultaneous patellar tendon rupture in a 55-year-old female with underlying osteogenesis imperfecta. This is a congenital disorder that results from a mutation of the genes that codes for type I collagen and expresses itself clinically by bone fragility, and similar manifestations result in tissue weakness in the tissues which has type I collagen as the principal matrix protein (bone, dentin, sclerae, tendon, and ligaments). CASE REPORTA 55-year-old female admitted to our hospital due to bilateral knee pain. The pain occurred during working without obvious trauma episode. She had no history of anterior knee pain prior to this event.She had notable bruises and swelling on both knees, and was unable to raise thigh on both legs. Plain radiographs revealed patella alta and fracture of patellar inferior pole on both sides (Fig. 1).Computed tomography scan was taken on both knees and magnetic resonance imaging was also performed on the right knee (Fig. 2).The radiologic finding suggests the identical avulsion fracture of patellar at the inferior pole on both knees with accompanying patellar tendon rupture on the right knee. Decision was made to repair the patellar tendon on both knee and the operation was performed on the day of the visit. Total rupture of the patellar tendon rupture was confirmed in the operation and the repair was done on both sides using Ethibond suture for patellar tendon rupture with additional wire loop to fixate fragile patellar bone (Fig. 3). At 10 months follow-up, the patient was able to flex the knees up to 100 degrees and was able to perform straight legs raise on both knees (Fig. 4). Bilateral patella tendon rupture is rare, particulary when associated with osteogenesis imperfecta. Brittleness of the bone in osteogenenesis imperfect patients may cause this rupture. We report on this rare case and suggest the direct repair with the additional wire loop as a proper treatment option for patients with the substantial rupture of patella tendon.Key words: osteogenesis imperfecta, patellar ligament, bilateral, wire loop Figure 1. Plain radiographs showed patella alta and fracture of the patellar inferior pole on both sides.

Boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT) has been attracting interest as a new radiation modality for cancer therapy because it can selectively destroy cancer cells while maintaining the healthy state of surrounding normal cells. Many experimental trials have demonstrated significant BNCT treatment efficacy using neutron beams from research reactors. However, nuclear reactor technology cannot be scaled to sites in hospitals delivering patient treatment. Therefore, compact accelerator-based neutron sources that could be installed in many hospitals are under development or have even been commissioned at many facilities around the world. In Korea, a radio-frequency (RF) linac-based BNCT (A-BNCT) facility is under development by DawonMedax (DM). It provides the highly efficient production of an epithermal neutron beam with an optimized neutron energy spectrum range of 0.1~10 keV. With a 2-mA 10-MeV proton beam from the accelerator, the irradiation port epithermal neutron flux is higher than 1 × 109 n/cm2⋅s. Comprehensive verification and validation of the system have been conducted with the measurement of both proton and neutron beam characteristics. Significant therapeutic effects from BNCT have been confirmed by DM in both in vitro and in vivo non-clinical trials. Further, during exposure to epithermal neutrons, all other unintended radiation is controlled to levels meeting International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) recommendations. Recently, the Korean FDA has accepted an investigational new drug (IND) and the first-in-human clinical trial of BNCT is now being prepared. This paper introduces the principles of BNCT and accelerator-based neutron sources for BNCT and reports the recent advances of DM A-BNCT facility which is the main part of this paper.

The purpose of noise filtering is to preserve features such as edge or corners, and to reduce noise. However, it is difficult to preserve them after noise filtering, because most of noise filtering algorithms have the characteristic of low pass filter, which results in the loss of signal components with high frequencies like edge or corners. Noise filtering methods using diffusion equation try to solve this problem, and improve it to some extent. Edge detector has been used in filtering methods with diffusion equation to determine the speed of diffusion term, so the performance of them depends on the edge detection algorithm to some extent. Previous noise filtering approaches of diffusion equation use a simple gradient edge detector to determine the speed of diffusion. Also, each channel of color images are filtered separately, which result in the filtered image with distortion or blurring. In this paper, we propose a new noise filtering method for color images using diffusion equation and edge map estimated with K-means clustering algorithm together.