• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.377-385
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• 2002

Ultrasonic tests employing non-ionizing radiation are preferred in nondestructive examinations since they are safe and simple in use. The same principles of the techniques have been taken as valuable tools in medical area for the diagnoses of diseases, in other words, defects of the human body. The paper overviews the principles of the medical diagnosis based on nondestructive ultrasonic tests, and then evaluates experimentally the clinical potential of C scan images not popular in medicine, for detecting the micro fractures of the cortical bone. In the experiment the micro bone fractures were created on the femurs of porks by loading three point bending forces (2-4kN) with the speed of 1 mm/min. As the extent of the fracture was altered, not only X ray images but also ultrasonic C scan images using a focused ultrasonic probe resonated at 25 MHz were obtained. The results showed that ultrasonic C scan images were capable of detecting the micro bone fractures which were not possible to identify by conventional X ray images.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.101-111
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• 2008

Strain imaging in a medical ultrasound imaging system can differentiate the cancer or tumor in a lesion that is stiffer than the surrounding tissue. In this paper, a strain imaging technique using quasistatic compression is implemented that estimates the displacement between pre- and postcompression ultrasound echoes and obtains strain by differentiating it in the spatial direction. Displacements are computed from the phase difference of complex baseband signals obtained using their autocorrelation, and errors associated with converting the phase difference into time or distance are compensated for by taking into the center frequency variation. Also, to reduce the effect of operator's hand motion, the displacements of all scanlines are normalized with the result that satisfactory strain image quality has been obtained. These techniques have been incorporated into implementing a medical ultrasound strain imaging system that operates in real time.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.31 no.3
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• pp.151-160
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• 2012

In medical ultrasound imaging, elasticity imaging helps to diagnose tumors such as cancer. This paper is concerned with the application of acoustic radiation force to soft tissue of interest to implement elasticity imaging. In order to reduce the data acquisition time, instead of relying on transmit focusing, a plane wave of burst type is transmitted to apply the acoustic radiation force simultaneously to an entire imaging region to be observed. A homogeneous phantom experiment confirms that increasing the transmit excitation duration instead of employing transmit focusing generates a high enough acoustic radiation force to obtain elasticity images. It is found, however, that a different displacement versus time characteristic is observed unlike the case of using a conventional focused acoustic radiation force. Experimental results obtained through the use of an ultrasound phantom and a bovine liver show that lesions can be correctly differentiated.

• 전기의세계
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• v.38 no.8
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• pp.19-25
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• 1989

현재 전세계적으로 퍼져있는 NMR-CT 시스템의 수를 살펴보면 약 370여기가 설치.운영되고 있으며 앞으로 계속 늘어날 전망이다. 국내에서는 1988 한국과학기술원과 금성통신에 의해 자체 개발된 2.0 Tesla 강자장 시스템이 최초로 서울대학병원에 설치 가동된 이래 여러병원에서 시스템들이 설치중에 있다. 첨단의로 진단장치로서의 핵자기 공명 영상법은 그 영상을 통하여 기존의 진단 장치보다 우월함을 증명하고 있으며 초음파 검사나 동위원소 검사 및 X선 전산화 단층 촬영술들을 장점을 두루 지니면서 그 영상법의 다양성 때문에 앞으로의 연구 및 발전에 대한 전망은 아주 밝다고 할 수 있다. 따라서 앞으로의 종합 영상 의료 진단 장치는 이 NMR-CT가 중심이 되어 발전할 것이라고 단언해도 무리한 생각은 아닐 것이다.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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• 2012.11a
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• pp.369-372
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• 2012

조영증강 의료 초음파 영상에서 조영제의 확산효과에 대한 분석은 간질환과 연관된 각종 병변을 검출하고 분석하는 과정에서 매우 유용한 정보를 제공한다. 본 연구에서는 초음파 영상에서 조영제의 확산 패턴을 분석하고 이를 영상화하는 방법을 제안한다. 이 과정에서 부수적으로 호흡에 의한 흔들림 현상을 보정하고 노이즈의 영향을 극복할 수 있는 방법론을 고찰한다. 호흡주기에 따른 모멘텀 요소를 고려한 ROI 추적 기법은 측정과정에서의 흔들림과 노이즈에 의한 오류를 최소화 할 수 있게 한다. 조영제의 확산 단계에 따라 서로 다른 노이즈 비율을 고려하여 동적 가중치를 할당하는 방법으로써 흔들림을 보정하였으며, 조영제의 전이 시간과 패턴을 분석하고 그 특성을 분류함으로써 간 병변 분석을 위한 효과적인 영상화기법을 구현하였다. 또한 생성된 영상에서 노이즈를 제거하고 영상을 개선하는 방법으로서 MRF 기반의 최적화 알고리즘을 적용하는 영상 개선 기법을 제시한다.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.338-343
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• 2009

Tomography is the imaging method of cross sectional area using multi beam signals and is mainly applied to the medical diagnosis to acquire the image of the inside human body. This method is pretty meaningful in nondestructive evaluation field since the imaging of the inspection region can enhance the comprehension of the inspector. Recently, much attention has been paid to the guided wave for the diagnosis of platelike structures. So, in this work, a study on the imaging of the damage location in a plate was carried out on the basis of computer aided analysis of guided waves and tomographic imaging. To this end, boundary element method was employed to analyze the effect of the damage in plate on the propagation of the guided waves and the analytic results were applied to the tomographic imaging method to identify the damage location. Consequently, it was shown that the number of sensors heavily affect the inspection performance of the damage location.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.29 no.8
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• pp.504-508
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• 2010

In conventional diagnostic ultrasound strain imaging, when displaying strain image on a monitor, human visual characteristics are utilized such that hard regions are displayed as dark and soft regions are displayed as bright. Thus, hard regions representing tumor or cancer are displayed as dark, decreasing the contrast inside the lesion. Because the lesion area is stiff and thus displayed as dark, a method of inverting the image brightness and thereby increasing the contrast in the lesion for better diagnostic purposes is proposed wherein a postcompression signal is extended in the time domain by a factor corresponding to the reciprocal of the amount of the applied compression using a technique termed globally uniform stretching. Experiments were carried out to verify the proposed method on an ultrasound elasticity phantom with radio-frequency data acquired from a diagnostic ultrasound clinical scanner. It is found that the new method improves the contrast-to-noise ratio by a factor of up to about 1.8 compared to a conventional strain imaging method that employs a reversed gray color map without globally uniform stretching.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.30 no.5
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• pp.239-248
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• 2011

In order to improve the quality of strain images in medical ultrasound imaging, displacements need to be accurately estimated. In this paper, in order to apply one-dimensional displacement estimation methods to two-dimensional motion estimation, the axial and lateral displacements are separately estimated. In order to estimate lateral displacements, one-dimensional signals aligned in the lateral direction are converted to analytic signals, which are then crosscorrelated. Strain images are produced by first compensating two-dimensional displacements for lateral motion with lateral motion displacement estimates obtained from the proposed lateral displacement estimation algorithm and then estimating axial displacements. Both phantom and human data experiments show that the proposed method provides better signal-to-noise ratio and contrast-to-noise ratio characteristics than a conventional strain imaging method that utilizes axial displacement estimates only.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.33 no.4
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• pp.418-426
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• 2006

This paper proposes a robust and efficient segmentation method for a cardiac ultrasound image taken from a probe inserted into the heart in surgery. The method consists of three steps: initial boundary extraction, whole boundary modification using confidence competition, and local boundary modification using the rolling spoke method. Firstly, the initial boundary is extracted with threshold regions along the global spokes emitted from the center of an ultrasound probe. Secondly, high confidence boundary edges are detected along the global spokes by competing among initial boundary candidate and new candidates achieved by edge and appearance information. finally, the boundary is modified by rolling local spokes along concave regions that are difficult to extract using the global spokes. The proposed method produces promising segmentation results for the ultrasound cardiac images acquired during surgery.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.42 no.5
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• pp.460-468
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• 2023

Developmental Dysplasia of the Hip (DDH) is a pathological condition commonly occurring during the growth phase of infants. It acts as one of the factors that can disrupt an infant's growth and trigger potential complications. Therefore, it is critically important to detect and treat this condition early. The traditional diagnostic methods for DDH involve palpation techniques and diagnosis methods based on the detection of keypoints in the hip joint using X-ray or ultrasound imaging. However, there exist limitations in objectivity and productivity during keypoint detection in the hip joint. This study proposes a deep learning model-based keypoint detection method using X-ray and ultrasound imaging and analyzes the performance of keypoint detection using various deep learning models. Additionally, the study introduces and evaluates various data augmentation techniques to compensate the lack of medical data. This research demonstrated the highest keypoint detection performance when applying the residual network 152 (ResNet152) model with simple & complex augmentation techniques, with average Object Keypoint Similarity (OKS) of approximately 95.33 % and 81.21 % in X-ray and ultrasound images, respectively. These results demonstrate that the application of deep learning models to ultrasound and X-ray images to detect the keypoints in the hip joint could enhance the objectivity and productivity in DDH diagnosis.