• Radiation Oncology Journal
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.264-273
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• 2002

Purpose : Three-dimensional radiation dosimetry using magnetic resonance imaging of polymer gel was recently introduced. This dosimetry system is based on radiation induced chain polymerization of acrylic monomers in a muscle equivalent gel and provide accurate 3 dimensional dose distribution. We planned this study to evaluate the clinical value of this 3-dimensional dosimetry. Materials and Methods: The polymer gel poured into a cylindrical glass flask and a spherical glass flask. The cylindrical test tubes were for dose response evaluation and the spherical flasks, which is comparable to the human head, were for isodose curves. T2 maps from MR images were calculated using software, IDL. Dose distributions have been displayed for dosimetry. The same spherical flask of gel and the same irradiation technique was used for film and TLD dosimetry and compared with each other. Results : The R2 of the gel respond linearly with radiation doses in the range of 2 to 15 Gy. The repeated dosimetry of spherical gel showed the same isodose curves. These isodose curves were identical to dose distributions from treatment planning system especially high dose range. In addition, the gel dosimetry system showed comparable or superior results with the film and TLD dosimetry. Conclusion : The 3-dimensional dosimetry for conformal radiation therapy using MRI of polymer gal showed stable and accurate results. Although more studies are needed for convenient clinical application, it appears to be a useful tool for conformal radiation therapy.

• Progress in Medical Physics
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.159-168
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• 1999

Cardiac disease is one of the leading causes of death in Korea. In quantitative analysis of cardiac function and morphological information by three-dimensional reconstruction of magnetic resonance images, left ventricle provides an important role functionally and physiologically. However, existing procedures mostly rely on the extensive human interaction and are seldom evaluated on clinical applications. In this study, we developed a system which could perform automatic extraction of enpicardial and endocardial contour and analysis of cardiac function to evaluate reliability and stability of each system comparing with the result of ARGUS system offered 1.5T Siemens MRI system and manual method performed by clinicians. For various aspects, we investigated reliability of each system by compared with left ventricular contour, end-diastolic volume (EDV), end-systolic volume (ESV), stock volume (SV), ejection fraction (EF), cardiac output (CO) and wall thickness (WT). When comparing with manual method, extracted results of developed process using minimum error threshold (MET) method that automatically extracts contour from cardiac MR images and ARGUS system were demonstrated as successful rate 90% of the contour extraction. When calculating cardiac function parameters using MET and comparing with using correlation coefficients analysis method, the process extracts endocardial and epicardial contour using MET, values from automatic and ARGUS method agreed with manual values within :t 3% average error. It was successfully demonstrated that automatic method using threshold technique could provide high potential for assessing of each parameters with relatively high reliability compared with manual method. In this study, the method developed in this study could reduce processing time compared with ARGUS and manual method due to a simple threshold technique. This method is useful for diagnosis of cardiac disease, simulating physiological function and amount of blood flow of left ventricle. In addition, this method could be valuable in developing automatic systems in order to apply to other deformable image models.

• Investigative Magnetic Resonance Imaging
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.164-171
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• 2021

Purpose: Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a prodromal stage of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Brain atrophy in this disease spectrum begins in the medial temporal lobe structure, which can be recognized by magnetic resonance imaging. To overcome the unsatisfactory inter-observer reliability of visual evaluation, quantitative brain volumetry has been developed and widely investigated for the diagnosis of MCI and AD. The aim of this study was to assess the prediction accuracy of quantitative brain volumetry using a fully automated segmentation software package, NeuroQuant^®, for the diagnosis of MCI. Materials and Methods: A total of 418 subjects from the Korean Brain Aging Study for Early Diagnosis and Prediction of Alzheimer's Disease cohort were included in our study. Each participant was allocated to either a cognitively normal old group (n = 285) or an MCI group (n = 133). Brain volumetric data were obtained from T1-weighted images using the NeuroQuant software package. Logistic regression and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analyses were performed to investigate relevant brain regions and their prediction accuracies. Results: Multivariate logistic regression analysis revealed that normative percentiles of the hippocampus (P < 0.001), amygdala (P = 0.003), frontal lobe (P = 0.049), medial parietal lobe (P = 0.023), and third ventricle (P = 0.012) were independent predictive factors for MCI. In ROC analysis, normative percentiles of the hippocampus and amygdala showed fair accuracies in the diagnosis of MCI (area under the curve: 0.739 and 0.727, respectively). Conclusion: Normative percentiles of the hippocampus and amygdala provided by the fully automated segmentation software could be used for screening MCI with a reasonable post-processing time. This information might help us interpret structural MRI in patients with cognitive impairment.