• Progress in Medical Physics
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.139-142
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• 2014

The purpose of this study was to develop a system of clinical application of reconstructed dose that includes dose reconstruction, reconstructed dose registration between fractions of treatment, and dose-volume-histogram generation and to demonstrate the system on a deformable prostate phantom. To achieve this purpose, a deformable prostate phantom was embedded into a 20 cm-deep and 40 cm-wide water phantom. The phantom was CT scanned and the anatomical models of prostate, seminal vesicles, and rectum were contoured. A coplanar 4-field intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) plan was used for this study. Organ deformation was simulated by inserting a "transrectal" balloon containing 20 ml of water. A new CT scan was obtained and the deformed structures were contoured. Dose responses in phantoms and electronic portal imaging device (EPID) were calculated by using the XVMC Monte Carlo code. The IMRT plan was delivered to the two phantoms and integrated EPID images were respectively acquired. Dose reconstruction was performed on these images using the calculated responses. The deformed phantom was registered to the original phantom using an in-house developed software based on the Demons algorithm. The transfer matrix for each voxel was obtained and used to correlate the two sets of the reconstructed dose to generate a cumulative reconstructed dose on the original phantom. Forwardly calculated planning dose in the original phantom was compared to the cumulative reconstructed dose from EPID in the original phantom. The prescribed 200 cGy isodose lines showed little difference with respect to the "prostate" and "seminal vesicles", but appreciable difference (3%) was observed at the dose level greater than 210 cGy. In the rectum, the reconstructed dose showed lower volume coverage by a few percent than the plan dose in the dose range of 150 to 200 cGy. Through this study, the system of clinical application of reconstructed dose was successfully developed and demonstrated. The organ deformation simulated in this study resulted in small but observable dose changes in the target and critical structure.

• Progress in Medical Physics
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.28-34
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• 2011

To perform the Adaptive Radiation Therapy (ART), a high degree of deformable registration accuracy is essential. The purpose of this study is to identify whether the change of MV CBCT intensity can improve registration accuracy using predefined modification level and filtering process. To obtain modification level, the cheese phantom images was acquired from both kilovoltage CT (kV CT), megavoltage cone-beam CT (MV CBCT). From the cheese phantom images, the modification level of MV CBCT was defined from the relationship between Hounsfield Units (HUs) of kV CT and MV CBCT images. 'Gaussian smoothing filter' was added to reduce the noise of the MV CBCT images. The intensity of MV CBCT image was changed to the intensity of the kV CT image to make the two images have the same intensity range as if they were obtained from the same modality. The demon deformable registration which was efficient and easy to perform the deformable registration was applied. The deformable lung phantom which was intentionally created in the laboratory to imitate the changes of the breathing period was acquired from kV CT and MV CBCT. And then the deformable lung phantom images were applied to the proposed method. As a result of deformable image registration, the similarity of the correlation coefficient was used for a quantitative evaluation of the result was increased by 6.07% in the cheese phantom, and 18% in the deformable lung phantom. For the additional evaluation of the registration of the deformable lung phantom, the centric coordinates of the mark which was inserted into the inner part of the phantom were measured to calculate the vector difference. The vector differences from the result were 2.23, 1.39 mm with/without modification of intensity of MV CBCT images, respectively. In summary, our method has quantitatively improved the accuracy of deformable registration and could be a useful solution to improve the image registration accuracy. A further study was also suggested in this paper.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.185-195
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• 2008

In this paper, PIFA(Planar Inverted F Antenna) which operates in PCS(Personal Communication System) band is designed and characteristics are investigated. Designed PIFA was installed in three types of handsets, folder, bar, slide, and the performance was evaluated. Head and hand phantom were added to make the most similar environment to real condition of mobile phone use, and influences on antenna performance were analyzed. The simulation results confirm radiation patterns are greatly changed and antenna efficiency is decreased by the effect of human body. Performance variation of the mobile handset antenna was observed as changing the angle between mobile handset and head phantom from $0^{\circ}$ to $2^{\circ},\;4^{\circ}$ to confirm the variation caused by the relative position of mobile handset and head phantom. Directivity was decreased gradually as the antenna goes away from head phantom, and showed the trend of increasing efficiency. But in the case of bar type, where the position of antenna is relatively close to head phantom, that trend didn't show. It was confirmed that the shape of handset has a great effect on the performance.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.880-890
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• 2010

The intrasvascular ultrasound (IVUS) imaging technique is used to diagnose cerebrovascular diseases such as stroke. Recently, elasticity imaging methods have been investigated to diagnose blood clots attached to blood vessel intima. However, the IVUS imaging technique is an invasive method that requires a transducer to be inserted into blood vessel. In this paper, strain images are obtained of blood clots attached to blood vessel intima with data acquired from outside the blood vessel using a linear array transducer. In order to measure the displacement of blood vessel accurately, experimental data are acquired by steering ultrasound beams so that they can intersect the blood vessel wall at right angles. The acquired rf data are demodulated to the baseband. The resulting complex baseband signals are then processed by an autocorrelation algorithm to compute the blood vessel movement and thereby produce strain image. This proposed method is verified by experiments on a plastic blood vessel mimicking phantom. The efficacy of the proposed method was verified using a home-made blood vessel mimicking phantom. The blood vessel mimicking phantom was constructed by making a 6 mm diameter hollow cylinder inside it to simulate a blood vessel and adhering 2 mm thick soft plaque to the inner wall of the hollow cylinder. The RF data were acquired using a clinical ultrasound scanner (Accuvix XQ, Medison, Seoul. Korea) with a 7.5 MHz linear array transducer by steering ultrasound beams in steps of $1^{\circ}$ from $-40^{\circ}$ to $40^{\circ}$ for a total of 81 angles. Experimental results show that the plaque region near the blood vessel wall is softer than background tissue. Although the imaging region is restricted due to the limited range of angles for which scan lines are perpendicular to the wall, the feasibility of strain imaging is demonstrated.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.525-532
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• 2018

This study is filmed by applying the axial angle variation of the X-ray tube instead of the patient's position change during the perimetric examination of the ribs. A Reference image with the rib oblique examination using a chest phantom and experimental images applied with a six-phase variation in the axial angle by increasing $5^{\circ}$ tube angle each from $5^{\circ}{\sim}30^{\circ}$ from the vertical incident direction of the chest phantom to the right horizontal axis were obtained. For the quantitative comparative evaluation of the images, SNR and CNR were calculated for regions of interest in the experimental images based on the reference image. Also, the left-right rib ratio in the reference image and the left-right rib ratio in the experimental images are measured and compared. As a result of the study, the experimental images with a tube angle of $25^{\circ}$ were best shown in the measurements of the SNR, CNR and left-right rib ratio compared to the reference image with a standard examination method. The modified rib examinations will consider useful, if it is difficult to maintain the patient's examination position.

• Journal of radiological science and technology
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• v.44 no.3
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• pp.225-229
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• 2021

The digital image such as medical X-ray and nuclear medicine field mainly contains noise distribution. The noise degree in image degrades image quality. That is why, the noise reduction algorithm is efficient for medical image field. In this study, we confirmed effectiveness of application for median modified Wiener filter (MMWF) algorithm for noise reduction in PET/MR image compared with median filter image, which is used as conventional noise redcution algorithm. The Jaszczak PET phantom was used by using 18F solution and filled with NaCl+NiSO4 fluids. In addition, the radioactivity ratio between background and six spheres in the phantom is maintained to 1:8. In order to mimic noise distribution in the image, we applied Gaussian noise using MATLAB software. To evlauate image quality, the contrast to noise ratio (CNR) and coefficient of variation (COV) were used. According to the results, compared with noise image and images with MMWF algorithm, the image with MMWF algorithm is increased approximately 33.2% for CNR result, decreased approximately 79.3% for COV result. In conclusion, we proved usefulness of MMWF algorithm in the PET/MR images.

• Journal of radiological science and technology
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• v.35 no.2
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• pp.157-164
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• 2012

The purpose of this study is to analyze the dose distribution when wedge filter is used in the various tissue electron density materials. The dose distribution was assessed that the enhanced dynamic wedge filter and physical wedge filter were used in the solid water phantom, cork phantom, and air cavity. The film dosimetry was suitable simple to measure 2D dose distribution. Therefore, the radiochromic films (Gafchromic EBT2, ISP, NJ, USA) were selected to measure and to analyze the dose distributions. A linear accelerator using 6 MV photon were irradiated to field size of $10{\times}10cm^2$ with 400 MUs. The dose distributions of EBT2 films were analyzed the in-field area and penumbra regions by using dose analysis program. In the dose distributions of wedge field, the dose from a physical wedge was higher than that from a dynamic wedge at the same electron density materials. A dose distributions of wedge type in the solid water phantom and the cork phantom were in agreements with 2%. However, the dose distribution in air cavity showed the large difference with those in the solid water phantom or cork phantom dose distributions. Dose distribution of wedge field in air cavity was not shown the wedge effect. The penumbra width, out of the field of thick and thin, was observed larger from 1 cm to 2 cm at the thick end. The penumbra of physical wedge filter was much larger average 6% than the dynamic wedge filter. If the physical wedge filter is used, the dose was increased to effect the scatter that interacted with photon and physical wedge. In the case of difference in electron like the soft tissue, lung, and air, the transmission, absorption, and scattering were changed in the medium at high energy photon. Therefore, the treatment at the difference electron density should be inhomogeneity correction in treatment planning system.

• 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.

• 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.

• Journal of radiological science and technology
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• v.45 no.2
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• pp.103-109
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• 2022

To maintain improved image quality in mammography, the quality control process is performed using the ACR (American college of radiology) phantom. In addition, many studied were performed by fabricating the customized breast phantom to provide more information in mammography. Thus, the purpose of this study was to evaluate the image quality by designing the modified ACR phantoms. The five modified acrlylic ACR phantoms were designed by considering insert position and phantom thickness. The phantoms were consisted of 4.5, 3.0, and 1.5 cm in terms of phantom thickness, and 3.0, 2.0, and 0.5 cm in terms of insert position, respectively. The acquired images were evaluated by PSNR (peak signal to noise ratio), RMSE (root mean square error), CC (correlation coefficient), CNR (contrast to noise ratio), and COV (coefficient of variation). Based on the similarity analysis, the result is suitable between conventional and new designed phantoms. In addition, the CNR and COV results in terms of insert position showed that image quality for 0.5 cm was 2.3 and 27.4% improved compared with 2 and 3 cm, respectively. According to phantom thickness results, the CNR result for 1.5 cm and COV result for 4.5 cm were 50.1 and 62.7% improved compared with that those conditions. In conclusion, we confirmed that the image quality depends on the breast size and thickness through modified ACR phantom study.