• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.27 no.5
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• pp.426-431
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• 2007

When a high-energy ultrasound propagates through a solid body that contains a crack or a delamination, the two faces of the defect do not ordinarily vibrate in unison, and dissipative phenomena such as friction, rubbing and clapping between the faces will convert some of the vibrational energy to heat. By combining this heating effect with infrared imaging, one can detect a subsurface defect in material in real time. In this paper a realtime detection of the brazing defect of thin Inconel plates using the UIR (ultrasonic infrared imaging) technology is described. A low frequency (23 kHz) ultrasonic transducer was used to infuse the welded Inconel plates with a short pulse of sound for 280 ms. The ultrasonic source has a maximum power of 2 kW. The surface temperature of the area under inspection is imaged by an infrared camera that is coupled to a fast frame grabber in a computer. The hot spots, which are a small area around the bound between the two faces of the Inconel plates near the defective brazing point and heated up highly, are observed. And the weak thermal signal is observed at the defect position of brazed plate also. Using the image processing technology such as background subtraction average and image enhancement using histogram equalization, the position of defective brazing regions in the thin Inconel plates can be located certainly.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.41 no.5
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• pp.534-544
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• 2022

Medical ultrasound system has been widely used to visualize the lesion for diagnostics in most medical service site including hospitals and clinics thanks to its advantages such as real time operation, ease of use, safety. Among many signal processing blocks of the system, one of the most important part that governs the image quality is the beamformer, and technologies for this part has been continuously developed in long time. The synthetic aperture imaging method, that is one of the major technologies of beamforming, was introduced to maximize utilizing the information delivered from the patient's body through the probe, and contributed to breakthrough of the image quality since it was introduced in around 1990's, and evolved continuously in decades. This paper reviews and surveys the process of development of this technology and expects future evolution.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2021.05a
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• pp.59-62
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• 2021

본 논문에서는 사다리꼴 형태의 소속 함수를 적용하여 스트레칭 하는 과정에서 상한과 하한을 FCM 기반 양자화 기법을 적용하여 동적으로 조정하는 퍼지 스트레칭 기법을 제안한다. 제안된 퍼지 스트레칭 기법은 FCM 기반 양자화 기법을 적용하여 각 클러스터를 생성하고 생성된 각 클러스터의 중심에 해당되는 명암도를 이용하여 사다리꼴 형태의 소속 함수의 구간을 설정한다. 그리고 설정한 구간 정보를 이용하여 스트레칭을 위한 상한과 하한을 구하여 영상을 스트레칭 한다. 제안된 FCM 양자화 기반 퍼지 스트레칭 기법의 성능을 분석하기 위해서 명암도 분포가 좁고 명암 대비가 낮은 결절종 초음파 영상과 컨테이너 영상을 대상으로 실험하였다. 실험 결과에서도 알 수 있듯이 기존의 히스토그램 스트레칭 기법과 삼각형 형태의 소속 함수를 적용한 퍼지 스트레칭 기법보다 명암 대비가 향상되었다. 결절종 초음파 영상에서는 결절종 영역과 그 외의 영역 간의 명암 대비가 뚜렷하게 나타나서 결절종 추출에 효과적인 것을 확인하였고 컨테이너 영상에서는 컨테이너 데미지를 추출하는데 필요한 컨테이너 굴곡선 등과 같은 특징이 다른 기법들에 비해 선명하게 나타났다.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.21 no.9
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• pp.25-31
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• 2020

In this study, for the safe use of a portable ultrasonic skin-beauty device, an android app was developed to show the irradiation locations of focused ultrasound to a user through augmented reality (AR) and enable stable self-surgery. The utility of the app was assessed through testing. While the user is making a facial treatment with the beauty device, the user's face and the ultrasonic irradiation location on the face are detected in real-time with a smart-phone camera. The irradiation location is then indicated on the face image and shown to the user so that excessive ultrasound is not irradiated to the same area during treatment. To this end, ML-Kit is used to detect the user's face landmarks in real-time, and they are compared with a reference face model to estimate the pose of the face, such as rotation and movement. After mounting a LED on the ultrasonic irradiation part of the device and operating the LED during irradiation, the LED light was searched to find the position of the ultrasonic irradiation on the smart-phone screen, and the irradiation position was registered and displayed on the face image based on the estimated face pose. Each task performed in the app was implemented through the thread and the timer, and all tasks were executed within 75 ms. The test results showed that the time taken to register and display 120 ultrasound irradiation positions was less than 25ms, and the display accuracy was within 20mm when the face did not rotate significantly.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.38 no.4
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• pp.476-484
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• 2019

Photoacoustic imaging is a hybrid real-time imaging technique that combines high optical contrast and ultrasonic resolution. It has primarily been utilized in pre-clinical research and has evolved into clinical practice. In this paper, we review photoacosutic imaging for detection of primary canccer and metastatis and its limitation in translation from pre-clinical to clinical application.

• Investigative Magnetic Resonance Imaging
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.323-331
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• 2014

Purpose : To assess the usefulness of rectal filling using ultrasonographic gel in patients with lower rectal cancer. Materials and Methods: Twenty five patients with lower rectal cancer were enrolled. High resolution pelvic MR was performed twice before and after gel filling. Independently and retrospectively, two radiologists reviewed each set of MR images using five-grade scales for sphincter involvement, CRM (circumferential resection margin) involvement and depiction of the tumor. Same two radiologists retrospectively performed consensus review of each set of MR images for tumor distance from the anal verge and T&N staging. Results: Tumor depiction scores from MR with gel filling were significantly higher than those of MR without distention (p<0.001). Compared to MR without distension, MR with gel filling had no significant differences in prediction of CRM or sphincter involvement (p>0.05). Distance from the anal verge was significantly different between MR with gel filling and rigid endoscopy ($6.8{\pm}1.6cm$ vs. $5.8{\pm}1.6cm$, p=0.001). There were no significant differences between pathological staging and MR staging with or without gel filling. Conclusion: MR with gel filling improved tumor depiction. And also MR with gel filling revealed same ability for the predictions of CRM or sphincter invasion in patients with lower rectal cancer, comparing with MR without gel filling.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.81 no.5
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• pp.1164-1174
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• 2020

Purpose To evaluate a deep learning model to predict recurrence of thyroid tumor using preoperative ultrasonography (US). Materials and Methods We included representative images from 229 US-based patients (male:female = 42:187; mean age, 49.6 years) who had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer on preoperative US and subsequently underwent thyroid surgery. After selecting each representative transverse or longitudinal US image, we created a data set from the resulting database of 898 images after augmentation. The Python 2.7.6 and Keras 2.1.5 framework for neural networks were used for deep learning with a convolutional neural network. We compared the clinical and histological features between patients with and without recurrence. The predictive performance of the deep learning model between groups was evaluated using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis, and the area under the ROC curve served as a summary of the prognostic performance of the deep learning model to predict recurrent thyroid cancer. Results Tumor recurrence was noted in 49 (21.4%) among the 229 patients. Tumor size and multifocality varied significantly between the groups with and without recurrence (p < 0.05). The overall mean area under the curve (AUC) value of the deep learning model for prediction of recurrent thyroid cancer was 0.9 ± 0.06. The mean AUC value was 0.87 ± 0.03 in macrocarcinoma and 0.79 ± 0.16 in microcarcinoma. Conclusion A deep learning model for analysis of US images of thyroid cancer showed the possibility of predicting recurrence of thyroid cancer.

• Journal of Korea Game Society
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.159-168
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• 2015

This paper introduces effective noise removal method for medical ultrasound volume data. Ultrasound volume data need to be filtered because it has a lot of noise. Conventional 2d filtering methods ignore information of adjacent layers and conventional 3d filtering methods are slow or have simple filter that are not efficient for removing noise and also don't equally operate filtering because that don't take into account ultrasound' sampling character. To solve this problem, we introduce method that fast perform in parallel bilateral filtering that is known as good for noise removal and adjust proportionally window size depending on that's position. Experiments compare noise removal and loss of original data among average filtered or biliteral filtered or adaptive biliteral filtered ultrasound volume rendering images. In this way, we can more efficiently and correctly remove noise of ultrasound volume data.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.23 no.5
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• pp.351-364
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• 2002

Conventional 3D ultrasound imaging using mechanical ID arrays suffers from poor elevation resolution due to the limited depth-of-focus (DOF). On the other hand, 3D imaging systems using 2D phased arrays have a large number of active channels and hence require a very expensive and bulky beamforming hardware. To overcome these limitations, a new real-time volumetric imaging method using curved 2-D arrays is presented, in which a small subaperture, consisting of 256 elements, moves across the array surface to scan a volume of interest. For this purpose, a 2-D curved array is designed which consists of 90$\times$46 elements with 1.5λ inter-element spacing and has the same view angles along both the lateral and elevation directions as those of a commercial mechanical 1-D array. In the proposed method, transmit and receive subapertures are constructed by cutting the four corners of a rectangular aperture to obtain a required image qualify with a small number of active channels. In addition the receive subaperture size is increased by using a sparse array scheme that uses every other elements in both directions. To suppress the grating lobes elevated due to the increase in clement spacing, fold-over array scheme is adopted in transmit, which doubles the effective size of a transmit aperture in each direction. Computer simulation results show that the proposed method can provide almost the same and greatly improved resolutions in the lateral and elevation directions, respectively compared with the conventional 3D imaging with a mechanical 1-D array.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.20 no.6
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• pp.538-544
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• 2000

A phased array ultrasonic nondestructive inspection system is being developed to obtain images of the interior of steel structures by modifying a medical ultrasound imaging system. The medical system consists of 64 individual transceiver channels that can drive 128 array elements. Several modifications of the system were required mainly due to the change of sound speed. It was necessary to fabricate array transducers for steel structure and to obtain A-scan signal that is necessary for the nondestructive testing. Boundary diffraction wave model was used for the prediction of radiation beam field from array transducers, which provided guidelines to design array transducers. And a RF data acquisition board was fabricated for the A-scan signal acquisition along a selected un line within an image. For the proper beam forming in the transmission and reception for steel structure, delay time was controlled. To demonstrate the performance of the developed system and fabricated transducers, images of artificial specimens and A-scan signals for selected scan lines were obtained in a real time fashion.