• 대한예방의학회:학술대회논문집
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• 1994.02b
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• pp.169-179
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• 1994

B-mode ultrasound is being used to assess carotid atherosclerosis in epidemiological studies and clinical trials. Recently the interpretation of measurements made from ultrasound images has been questioned. This study examines the anatomical correlates of B-mode ultrasound of carotid arteries in vitro and in situ in cadavers. Twenty-seven segments of human carotid artery were collected at autopsy. pressure perfusion fixed in buffered 2.5% gluteraldehyde and 4% paraformaldehyde and imaged using an ATL UM-8 (10 MHz single crystal mechanical probe). Each artery was then frozen, sectioned and stained with van Gieson or elastin van Gieson. The thickness of the intima. media and adventitia were measured 'to an accuracy of 0.01 mm from histological sections using a calibrated eye graticule on a light microscope. Shrinkage artifact induced by histological preparation was determined to be 7.8%. Digitised ultra sound images of the artery wall were analysed off-line. The distance from the leading edge of the first interface ($LE_{1}$) to the leading edge of the second interface ($LE_2$) was measured using a dedicated programme. $LE_{1}$-$LE_{2}$ measurements were correlated against histological measurements corrected for shrinkage. Mean values for the far wall were: ultra sound $LE_{1}$-$LE_{2}$ (0.97 mm, S.D. 0.26), total wall thickness (1.05 mm, S.D. 0.37), adventitia (0.35 mm, S.D. 0.16), media (0.61 mm, S.D. 0.18). intima (0.09 mm, S.D. 0.13). Ultrasound measurements corresponded best with total wall thickness, rather than elastin or the intima-media complex. Excision of part of the intima plus media or removal of the adventitia resulted in a corresponding decrease in the $LE_{1}$-$LE_{2}$ distance of the B-mode image. Furthermore. increased wall thickness due to intimal atherosclerotic thickening correlated well with $LE_{1}$-$LE_{2}$ distance of the B-mode images. B-mode images obtained from the carotid arteries in situ in four cadavers also corresponded best with total wall thickness measured from histological sections and not with the thickness of the intima plus media. In conclusion, the $LE_{1}$-$LE_{2}$ distance measured on B-mode images of the carotid artery best represents total wall thickness of intima plus media plus adventitia and not intima plus media alone.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.41 no.1
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• pp.48-54
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• 2020

In this paper, we deal with a liver fibrosis classification problem using ultrasound B-mode images. Commonly representative methods for classifying the stages of liver fibrosis include liver biopsy and diagnosis based on ultrasound images. The overall liver shape and the smoothness and roughness of speckle pattern represented in ultrasound images are used for determining the fibrosis stages. Although the ultrasound image based classification is used frequently as an alternative or complementary method of the invasive biopsy, it also has the limitations that liver fibrosis stage decision depends on the image quality and the doctor's experience. With the rapid development of deep learning algorithms, several studies using deep learning methods have been carried out for automated liver fibrosis classification and showed superior performance of high accuracy. The performance of those deep learning methods depends closely on the amount of datasets. We propose an enhanced U-net architecture to maximize the classification accuracy with limited small amount of image datasets. U-net is well known as a neural network for fast and precise segmentation of medical images. We design it newly for the purpose of classifying liver fibrosis stages. In order to assess the performance of the proposed architecture, numerical experiments are conducted on a total of 118 ultrasound B-mode images acquired from 78 patients with liver fibrosis symptoms of F0~F4 stages. The experimental results support that the performance of the proposed architecture is much better compared to the transfer learning using the pre-trained model of VGGNet.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.141-149
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• 2003

This paper proposes a method of measuring and imaging the stiffness of human soft tissue to diagnose cancers or tumors which have been difficult to detect in ultrasound B-mode imaging systems. To measure the soft tissue stiffness, sinusoidal vibrations are applied to it, and the magnitude of its mechanical vibration is determined by estimating the temporal variation of speckle pattern brightness in ultrasound B-mode images. It is verified by simulation and experiment that the proposed method can estimate the relative tissue stiffness from B-mode images with a relatively small amount of computation.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.15 no.24
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• pp.10739-10743
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• 2015

The present study aimed at evaluating and comparing the diagnostic performance of B-mode ultrasound (US), elastography score (ES), and strain ratio (SR) for the differentiation of breast lesions. This retrospective study enrolled 431 lesions from 417 in-hospital patients. All patients were examined with both conventional ultrasound and elastography. Two experienced radiologists reviewed ultrasound and elasticity images. The histopathologic result obtained from ultrasound-guided core biopsy or operation excisions were used as the reference standard. Pathologic examination revealed 276 malignant lesions (64%) and 155 benign lesions (36%). A cut-off point of 4.15 (area under the curve, 0.891) allowed significant differentiation of malignant and benign lesions. ROC (receiver-operating characteristic) curves showed a higher value for combination of B-mode ultrasound and elastography for the diagnosis of breast lesions. Conventional ultrasound combined elastography showed high sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy for group II lesions (10mm${\leq}20mm$). Elastography combined with conventional ultrasound show high specificity and accuracy for differentiation of benign and malignant breast lesions. Elastography is particularly important for the diagnosis of BI-RADS 4 and small breast lesions.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.37 no.4
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• pp.140-146
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• 2016

The ultrasound imaging in medical diagnosis has become a popular modality because of its safe, noninvasive, portable, relatively inexpensive, and provides a real-time image formation. However, usefulness of ultrasound imaging is at times limited due to the presence of signal-dependent noise like as speckle. Therefore, noise reduction is very important, as various types of noise generated limits the effectiveness of medical image diagnosis. This paper introduces a speckle noise reduce algorithm using total variation denoising (TVD) in Laplacian pyramid. With this method, speckle is removed by TVD of bandpass ultrasound images in Laplacian pyramid domain. For TVD in each pyramid layer, a ${\lambda}$ is selected by trial-and-error method. The visual comparison of despeckled 'in vivo' ultrasound images from pancreas shows that the proposed method could effectively preserve edges and detailed structures while thoroughly suppressing speckle. For a Simulated B-mode image, contrast-to-noise-ratio (CNR) and signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) were obtained like 4.65 dB and 14.11 dB, respectively. The results show that the proposed method can conduct better than some of the existing methods in terms of the CNR and the SNR.

• Journal of radiological science and technology
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• v.38 no.4
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• pp.443-449
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• 2015

An ultrasound probe has a big impact on Doppler images even though it has very high risk of frequent function-breakdowns occurring in medical ultrasound scanners. This study experimentally analyses the impacts of an ultrasonic probe's defected elements on power & color Doppler images. The results show that, the bigger the size of defected probe elements is, and the closer a group of action elements is to the center, the more the brightness of images and the velocity of Doppler diminish. When elements' defects increase in color & power Doppler images, false images are formed to be mistaken for blood-vessel plaque in neighboring regions. Accordingly, whenever element defects are suspected, we need check-up process in B-mode. From this respective, it is advisable to have primary interest in a probe and carry out continuous probe QA for ultrasonography.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.122-131
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• 2008

For B-mode ultrasound images, we propose an image enhancement algorithm based on a multi-resolution approach, which consists of edge enhancing and noise reducing procedures. Edge enhancement processing is applied sequentially to coarse-to-fine resolution images obtained from wavelet-transformed data. In each resolution, the structural features of each pixel are examined through eigen analysis. Then, if a pixel belongs to an edge region, we perform two-step filtering: that is, directional smoothing is conducted along the tangential direction of the edge to improve continuity and directional sharpening is conducted along the normal direction to enhance the contrast. In addition, speckle noise is alleviated by proper attenuation of the wavelet coefficients of the homogeneous regions at each band. This region-based speckle-reduction scheme is differentiated from other methods that are based on the magnitude statistics of the wavelet coefficients. The proposed algorithm enhances edges regardless of changes in the resolution of an image, and the algorithm efficiently reduces speckle noise without affecting the sharpness of the edge. Hence, compared with existing algorithms, the proposed algorithm considerably improves the subjective image quality without providing any noticeable artifacts.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.33 no.1
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• pp.32-38
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• 2012

Recently, several ultrasound imaging techniques for tissue characterization have been developed. Among them, ultrasound elastography is regarded as the most promising modality and has been rapidly developed. One of ultrasound elastography techniques is shear modulus imaging. Normal and cancerous tissues show big difference of shear moduli and they have good image contrast. However shear wave elastography requires more complicated hardware and more computations for image reconstruction algorithm. Therefore new efficient techniques are being developed. In this paper, we have developed a very flexible ultrasound system for elastography experiments. The developed system has capabilities to acquire ultrasound RF data of all channels and generate arbitrary ultrasound pulse sequences. It has a huge amount of memories for RF data acquisition and a simple and flexible pulse generator. We have verified the performance of the system showing conventional B-mode images and preliminary results of elastography. The developed system will be used to verify our own reconstruction algorithm and to develop more efficient elastography techniques.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.29 no.8
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• pp.476-482
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• 2010

The ultrasonic transient fields and B-mode images of a point target which were simulated for a medical ultrasonic probe with a few defective piezo-elements were compared with those for a normal probe. The present study considered a 3.5 MHz linear array probe whose acoustic beam was formed by the 64 active elements of total 192 elements. The results showed that the maximum amplitude and -3 dB width of the acoustic fields by main-lobes decreased linearly as the defective element number increased from one to four. However, the depths of foci remained almost unchanged, and the pressure differences between main-lobes and side-lobes tended to decrease due to rise in pressures in side-lobes. Such changes in ultrasonic fields affected the B-mode images of point targets. So the artifacts were formed in the right and left side of the target, and the lateral spatial resolutions were decreased while the axial resolution was almost the same.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.30 no.3
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• pp.233-240
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• 2009

Using a spatial compound imaging technique in a medical ultrasound imaging system, the average speed of sound in a medium of interest is measured, and imaging of its distribution is implemented. When the brightness reaches the highest level in an ultrasonic image obtained as the speed of sound used in focusing is varied, it turns out that the focusing has been accomplished satisfactorily and that the speed of sound which has been adopted becomes the sought-after average speed of sound. Because spatial compound imaging provides many different views of the same object, the adverse effect of erroneous speed-of-sound estimation tends to be more severe in compound imaging than in plain B-mode imaging. Thus, in compound imaging, the average speed of sound even in the case of speckled images can be accurately estimated by observing the brightness change due to different speeds of sound employed. Using this new method that offers spatial diversity, we can construct an image of the speed of sound distribution in a phantom embedded with a 10-mm diameter plastic cylinder whose speed of sound is different from that of the background. The speed of sound in the cylinder is found to be different from that of the surrounding medium.