• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.32 no.5
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• pp.573-584
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• 2012

Breast and prostate tumors or cancers tend to be stiffer than the surrounding normal tissue. However, the difference in echogenicity between cancerous and normal tissues is not clearly distinguishable in ultrasound B-mode imaging. Thus, imaging the stiffness contrast between the two different tissue types helps to diagnose lesions quantitatively, and such a method of imaging the elasticity of human tissue is termed ultrasound elasticity imaging. Recently, elasticity imaging has become an effective complementary diagnostic modality along with ultrasound B-mode imaging. This paper presents various elasticity imaging methods that have been reported up to now and describes their characteristics and principles of operation.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.368-373
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• 2009

A human tissue mimicking phantom is constructed to assess the performance of a medical ultrasound elasticity imaging system. In a human body, the tumor or cancer is stiffer than its surrounding normal tissue. A technique fur imaging the elasticity of such a tissue is referred to as elastography. Homogeneous elasticity phantoms with differing Young's moduli are constructed using a plastic hardener and softener to simulate the mechanical characteristics of a diseased human tissue. The Young's modulus of the fabricated homogeneous phantom materials were measured from 11.1 to 79.6 kPa depending on the mixing ratio of the amount of the hardener to that of the softener. An ultrasound lesion mimicking phantom was made of these materials, and ultrasound elasticity imaging was performed on it. It is confirmed in this paper that the fabricated plastic-based elasticity phantom is useful in representing the elastic characteristics of a human tissue.

• 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.

• Proceedings of the Korea Contents Association Conference
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• 2014.11a
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• pp.433-434
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• 2014

최근 간질환 검사의 비침습적인 방법으로 탄성초음파가 각광받고 있는 추세이다. 그러나 진단결과와 탄성초음파 결과 값에 따른 표준 진단 매뉴얼이 없는 실정이다. 따라서 본 연구에서는 탄성초음파 수치에 따른 간질환의 종류와 B-mode 영상 간의 경향을 알아보고자 하였다. 그리고 환자의 우측 늑간 초음파 B-mode 영상평가 파라미터인 평균, 신호 대 잡음비, 최대신호 대 잡음비, 엔트로피로 분석하고, 동일 부위에 시행한 탄성초음파 수치와의 비교를 통해 경향을 연구하였고, 그 기준을 제시하고자 하였다.

• The Journal of Korean Orthopaedic Ultrasound Society
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.94-98
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• 2009

Acupuncture is a treatment method that originated more than 3,000 years ago in China and is practiced in most of the world. Acupuncture became the most popular complementary and alternative medicine modality. Ultrasound is useful for research and educational purposes, visualizing needle insertion at acupuncture points, especially next to vulnerable structures such as nerves or the pleura. Additionally, ultrasound is an ideal imaging method for evaluation the biomechanical effects of needle manipulation on tissue and has the distinctive advantage of yielding both images of tissue morphology and biomechanical information. Elastography take aim at quantifying a mechanical response or the mechanical property of tissues from a mechanical stimulus, generated internally or externally. Therefore, the combination of ultrasound and elastography analyses allows quantitative assessment of dynamic changes in the structure of human connective tissue.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.24 no.5
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• pp.282-293
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• 2005

Sonoelastography is an ultrasound-based technique that visualizes the elastic properties of soft tissues by measuring the tissue motion generated by an externally applied vibration. In this paper. the characteristics of wave generation in soft tissues due to an acoustic vibrator are studied. The effects of modal patterns on the detectability of lesions such as tumors in senoelastography are also investigated These are accomplished by analyzing the vibration patterns calculated using theoretical equations and finite element methods in halt space, infinite plate. and finite-sized tissue. A finite-width source generates shear waves with large amplitude Propagating in specific directions. and the generation characteristics depend both on the width and frequency of the vibrator. as well as the distance from it. It is shown in a finite-sized tissue that the lesion detection in displacement images is quit dependent on the modal patterns inside tissue. In contrast it Is also found that the lesion detectability in strain images is less dependent on the modal Patterns and is much better than that in displacement images.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.42 no.5
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• pp.403-411
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• 2023

Functional ultrasound imaging, such as elasticity imaging and micro-blood flow Doppler imaging, enhances diagnostic capability by providing useful mechanical and functional information about tissues. However, the implementation of functional ultrasound imaging poses limitations such as the storage of vast amounts of data in Radio Frequency (RF) data acquisition and processing. In this paper, we propose a sub-Nyquist approach that reduces the amount of acquired axial samples for efficient shear-wave elasticity imaging. The proposed method acquires data at a sampling rate one-third lower than the conventional Nyquist sampling rate and tracks shear-wave signals through RF signals reconstructed using band-pass filtering-based interpolation. In this approach, the RF signal is assumed to have a fractional bandwidth of 67 %. To validate the approach, we reconstruct the shear-wave velocity images using shear-wave tracking data obtained by conventional and proposed approaches, and compare the group velocity, contrast-to-noise ratio, and structural similarity index measurement. We qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate the potential of sub-Nyquist sampling-based shear-wave elasticity imaging, indicating that our approach could be practically useful in three-dimensional shear-wave elasticity imaging, where a massive amount of ultrasound data is required.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.13 no.6
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• pp.490-500
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• 1988

In recent years the acquisition, processing and interpretation of three dimensional seisimic data, for the purpose of locating gas and reservoirs, have become practical. This paper exlores one way in which the volume data can be searched and visualized, which may aid the interpreter. The illusion of looking at a three dimensional volume can be obrained by fusing a stereoscopic pair of pictures. Each picture can be made by projecting each data point of the volume into a plane from a point where the eye is placed. The data valuse along any projection line can be summed to form the picture, or only a segment along the line can be selected. By selective projection, the volume can be searched and obscuring layers removed. The stereoscopic pictures show the physical models in there ture spatial positions. Projection of the envelope function of the seismic traces is shown to give improved depth perception compared with projection of the position amplitudes.

• 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.

• Geophysics and Geophysical Exploration
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.89-95
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• 2001

The final goal of the seismic method is to verify the spatial characteristic of subsurface media. For this purpose, professional interpreters interprete the discontinuities of seismic events from seismic image. This paper introduces a method for automatic discontinuity extraction from 3D seismic image. The method consists of three steps. The first step is for estimating coherency of seismic events from seismic data. The second step is to express the potential region where discontinuities may exist in the form of binary image. The third step is to locate the discontinuities by thining the region found in the second step.