Young-geun Choi

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to compare clinical and radiological outcomes of percutaneous endoscopic lumbar discectomy (PELD) and open lumbar microdiscectomy (OLM) for recurrent disc herniation. METHODS: Fifty-four patients, who underwent surgery, either PELD (25 patients) or repeated OLM (29 patients), due to recurrent disc herniation at L4-5 level, were divided into two groups according to the surgical methods. Excluded were patients with sequestrated disc, calcified disc, severe

OBJECT: An anterior approach for debridement and fusion with autologous bone graft has been recommended as the gold standard for surgical treatment of pyogenic spondylodiscitis. The use of anterior foreign body implants at the site of active infection is still a challenging procedure for spine surgeons. Several authors have recently introduced anterior grafting with titanium mesh cages instead of autologous bone strut in the treatment of spondylodiscitis. The authors present their experience of

The mini-ALIF group demonstrated key radiographic advantages compared with the mini-TLIF group for adult low-grade isthmic spondylolisthesis. However, clinical and functional outcomes did not demonstrate significant differences between groups.

OBJECT: C-reactive protein (CRP) is a well-known sensitive laboratory parameter that shows an increase within 6 hours after the onset of bacterial infection. In relation to surgery, a normal CRP response is a rapid increase followed by a gradual reduction, eventually returning to the normal range. The goal of this study was to determine the diagnostic significance of CRP as a detector for early onset surgical site infection in spinal surgery and to discuss effective medical treatment through cli

Risk perception research, targeting the general public, necessitates the study of the multi-faceted aspects of perceived risk through a holistic approach. This study aimed to investigate the association between the two dimensions of risk perception of COVID-19, i.e., risk as a feeling and analysis, trust in the current government, political ideologies, and socio-demographic factors in South Korea. This study used a year-long repeated cross-sectional design, in which a national sample (n = 23,018

Pre-hospitalization statin use is not detrimental and may be beneficial amongst hypertensive COVID-19 patients. Further investigation into statin is needed for more conclusive effects of statins for treatment of COVID-19.

We compare the performance of recently developed regularized covariance matrix estimators for Markowitz's portfolio optimization and of the minimum variance portfolio (MVP) problem in particular. We focus on seven estimators that are applied to the MVP problem in the literature; three regularize the eigenvalues of the sample covariance matrix, and the other four assume the sparsity of the true covariance matrix or its inverse. Comparisons are made with two sets of long-term S&P 500 stock return

Electronic health records (EHRs) have become a platform for data-driven granular-level surveillance in recent years. In this paper, we make use of EHRs for early prevention of childhood obesity. The proposed method simultaneously provides smooth disease mapping and outlier information for obesity prevalence that are useful for raising public awareness and facilitating targeted intervention. More precisely, we consider a penalized multilevel generalized linear model. We decompose regional contrib

Immunosuppressant use was associated with worse outcomes among COVID-19 patients. These findings support the latest guidelines from the CDC that people on immunosuppressants are at high risk of severe COVID-19 and that immunocompromised people may benefit from booster COVID-19 vaccinations.

Mixed data refers to a mixture of continuous and categorical variables. The clustering problem with mixed data is a long-standing statistical problem. The latent Gaussian mixture model, a model-based approach for such a problem, has received attention owing to its simplicity and interpretability. However, these approaches are prone to dimensionality problems. Specifically, parameters must be estimated for each group, and the number of covariance parameters is quadratic in the number of variables

Pre-admission anticoagulants were not determined to have a protective role against severe COVID-19 outcomes.