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Korean rheumatoid arthritis patients may be more likely to have the gene HLA-DR4 than other ethnic groups. Researchers analyzed the presence of HLA-DR blood antigens in 95 Korean patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and in 118 Koreans without RA. The gene fragment DRB1*0405 correlated significantly with RA, a finding that has previously been found among Japanese, Singaporean Chinese, and southern Chinese RA patients. The prevalence pattern of HLA-DR4 gene fragments in Korean patients with RA differed from the pattern found among Caucasian patients. Korean patients also had the amino acid sequence QRRAA on DRB1 gene fragment molecules, which may be associated with a predisposition to RA.

The article discusses a study involving 146 burn patients with hypertrophic scars aimed at assessing burn rehabilitation massage therapy as an option for relief. Topics discussed include the participation of patients admitted to the researchers' hospital for hypertrophic scarring rehabilitation after critical burn treatments and the conclusion that burn rehabilitation massage therapy is an option to manage post-burn hypertrophic scar characteristics.

We propose a fuzzy method to control the bit rate in the discrete cosine transform (DCT) domain. The method consists of a bit-rate allocation with fuzzy measures and a least-distortion bit-rate reduction. Fuzzy measures are calculated from the code length, the discontinuity ambiguity, and the neighborhood momentum in each DCT block. These measures are summed with weights and form a reduction fuzziness to indicate the degree of preferable reduction. Using the reduction fuzziness, each DCT block is filtered by the least-distortion reduction method to adjust the bit rate for the target bandwidth. In an experiment, we show that the video quality transcoded by the method is better and the bandwidth is more regular than with existing methods, both visually and quantitatively.