• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.25 no.6
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• pp.431-438
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• 2004

Medical ultrasonic imaging is a useful imaging facility known to be most safe and easy. It enables physicians to observe the inside structures of the bodies, blood flow, and motions of internal organs. Some physical properties of biologic tissues can also be estimated from backscattered sounds. However, the ultrasonic pulses interrogating the living organisms leave their footprints in the returning signals during imaging. Some significant details are buried in the footprints and their overlaps from adjacent particles. These distortions also decrease the quality of the images. Many research efforts have been made to enhance the image quality and to recover the acoustic information in various ways. In this study, a new interrogation method based on the wavelet and subband filter bank is proposed. It adopts the subband wavelet filters satisfying the perfect-reconstruction (PR) conditions as the interrogating pulses to restore the details useful in tissue characterization and to enhance the image quality. The proposed method was applied to two types of simulations of ultrasonic imaging. The results showed its ability to restore the detailsin the simulated interrogation of biologic tissues, and verified the improved image quality in the simulated imaging of general ultrasonic phantom compared with the conventional method.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.243-251
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• 1997

In this paper, we have reported two interesting flow effects arising in the TRFGE sequence using water flow phantom. First, we have shown that the TRFGE sequence is indeed not affected by "in-flow" effect from the unsaturated spins flowing into the imaging slice. Second, the enhancement of "in-plane flow" signal in the readout gradient direction was observed when the TRFGE sequence was used without flow compensation. These two results have many interesting applications in MR imaging other than fMRI. Results obtained were also compared with the results obtained by the conventional gradient echo(CGE) imaging. Experiments were performed at 4.7T MRI/S animal system (Biospec, BRUKER, Switzerland). A cylindrical phantom was made using acryl and a vinyl tube was inserted at the center(Fig. 1). The whole cylinder was filled with water doped with $MnCl_2$ and the center tube was filled with saline which flows in parallel to the main magnetic field along the tube. Tailored RF pulse was designed to have quadratic ($z^2$) phase distribution in slice direction(z). Imaging parameters were TR/TE = 55~85/10msec, flip angle = $30^{\circ}$, slice thickness = 2mm, matrix size = 256${\times}$256, and FOV= 10cm. In-flow effect : Axial images were obtained with and without flow using the CGE and TRFGE sequences, respectively. The flow direction was perpendicular to the image slice. In-plane flow : Sagittal images were obtained with and without flow using the TRGE sequence. The readout gradient was applied in parallel to the flow direction. We have observed that the "in-flow" effect did not affect the TRFGE image, while "in-plane flow" running along the readout gradient direction enhanced the signal in the TRFGE sequence when flow compensation gradient scheme was not used.

• Korean Journal of Environmental Agriculture
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• v.34 no.3
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• pp.186-191
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• 2015

BACKGROUND: Carotenoids which are a major source of vitamin A are contributed to have great potential role in anti-carcinogenic effects and eyesight. Carotenoids which can not synthesize in human body are required for food supply. The objectives of this study are to investigate compositions and contents of pumpkin (Cucurbita spp.) germplasms based on their pulp color. METHODS AND RESULTS: Carotenoids were extracted with 0.2% ascorbic acid in ethanol and saponified with 80% potassium hydroxide. Insoluble compounds were extracted into hexane. A total of nine carotenoids (three xanthophylls and six carotenes) were identified from pumpkin germplasms using HPLC equipped with photodiode array detector (450 nm). Especially, lutein and ${\beta}$-carotenes were major compound in germplasms. Among isomers of ${\beta}$-carotene, all-trans-${\beta}$-carotene (16-27% of total carotenoids) was predominant compositions. The mean of total carotenoid contents was showed as brown (286.1 mg/100 g dw) > dark green (217.0) > orange (153.4) > primrose (85.8) > dark yellow (80.3). On the basis of carotenoid information, PLS-DA score plots showed different patterns by cluster in pumpkin germplasms. It was considered that these differences of phenotype were relative closely to genotype. CONCLUSION: This study indicated that dark color of pumpkin pulp was presented in high-level of biological pigments. It may contribute to develop potentially beneficial functional food ingredients.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.119-128
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• 1998

This paper describes a filtering algorithm which employs apriori information of SPECT lesion detectability potential for the filtering of degraded projection images prior to the backprojection reconstruction. In this algorithm, we determined m minimum detectable lesion sized(MDLSs) by assuming m object contrasts uniformly-chosen in the range of 0.0-1.0, based on a signal/noise model which provides the capability potential of SPECT in terms of physical factors. A best estimate of given projection image is attempted as a weighted combination of the subimages from m optimal filters whose design is focused on maximizing the local S/N ratios for the MDLS-lesions. These subimages show relatively larger resolution recovery effect and relatively smaller noise reduction effect with the decreased MDLS, and the weighting on each subimage was controlled by the difference between the subimage and the maximum-resolution-recovered projection image. The proposed filtering algoritym was tested on SPECT image reconstruction problems, and produced good results. Especially, this algorithm showed the adaptive effect that approximately averages the filter outputs in homogeneous areas and sensitively depends on each filter strength on contrast preserving/enhancing in textured lesion areas of the reconstructed image.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.32-39
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• 2008

This paper reports on a realtime OS based master-slave configuration robot control system for laparoscopic surgery robot which enables telesurgery and overcomes shortcomings with conventional laparoscopic surgery. Surgery robot system requires control system that can process large volume information such as medical image data and video signal from endoscope in real-time manner, as well as precisely control the robot with high reliability. To meet the complex requirements, the use of high-level real-time OS (Operating System) in surgery robot controller is a must, which is as common as in many of modem robot controllers that adopt real-time OS as a base system software on which specific functional modules are implemened for more reliable and stable system. The control system consists of joint controllers, host controllers, and user interface units. The robot features a compact slave robot with 5 DOF (Degree-Of-Freedom) expanding the workspace of each tool and increasing the number of tools operating simultaneously. Each master, slave and Gill (Graphical User Interface) host runs a dedicated RTOS (Real-time OS), RTLinux-Pro (FSMLabs Inc., U.S.A.) on which functional modules such as motion control, communication, video signal integration and etc, are implemented, and all the hosts are in a gigabit Ethernet network for inter-host communication. Each master and slave controller set has a dedicated CAN (Controller Area Network) channel for control and monitoring signal communication with the joint controllers. Total 4 pairs of the master/slave manipulators as current are controlled by one host controller. The system showed satisfactory performance in both position control precision and master-slave motion synchronization in both bench test and animal experiment, and is now under further development for better safety and control fidelity for clinically applicable prototype.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.35 no.5
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• pp.160-168
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• 2014

Continuous body temperature monitoring is useful and essential in diverse medical procedures such as infection onset detection, therapeutic hypothermia, circadian rhythm monitoring, sleep disorder assessment, and gynecological research. However, the existing thermometers are too invasive or intrusive to be applied to long-term body temperature monitoring. In our previous study, we invented the bi-medium deep body thermometer which can noninvasively and continuously monitor deep tissue temperature. And the ratio of thermal resistances expressed as K-value should be obtained to estimate body temperature with the thermometer and it can be different under various measurement environments. Although the device was proven to be useful through preliminary simulation test and small group of human study, the experimental environment was restrictive in our previous approach. In this study, a finite element simulation was executed to obtain the K-value and evaluate the accuracy of bi-medium thermometer under various measurement environments. In addition, K-value estimation equation was developed by analyzing the influence of 5 measurement environmental factors (medium length, medium height, tissue depth, blood perfusion rate, and ambient temperature) on K-value. The results revealed that the estimation accuracy of bi-medium deep body thermometer based on computer simulation was very high (RMSE < $0.003^{\circ}C$) in various measurement environments. Also, bi-medium deep body thermometer based on K-value estimation equation showed relatively accurate results (RMSE < $0.3^{\circ}C$) except for one case. Although the K-value estimation technology should be improved for more accurate body temperature estimation, the results of finite element simulation showed that bi-medium deep body thermometer could accurately measure various tissue temperatures under diverse environments.

• Journal of KIISE:Databases
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• v.31 no.6
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• pp.641-649
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• 2004

The relationship between chemical structures and biological activities is researched briskly in the area of 'Medicinal Chemistry' At the base of these structure-based drug design tries, medicinal chemists search the existing drugs of similar chemical structure to target drug for the development of a new drug. Therefore, it is such necessary that an automatic system selects drug files that have a set of chemical moieties matching a user-defined query moiety. Substructure searching is the process of identifying a set of chemical moieties that match a specific query moiety. Testing for substructure searching was developed in the late 1950s. In graph theoretical terms, this problem corresponds to determining which graphs in a set are subgraph isomorphic to a specified query moiety. Testing for subgraph isomorphism has been proved, in the general case, to be an NP- complete problem. For the purpose of overcoming this difficulty, there were computational approaches. On the 1990s, a US patent has been granted on an atom-centered indexing scheme, used by the RS3 system; this has the virtue that the indexes generated can be searched by direct text comparison. This system is commercially used(http://www.acelrys.com/rs3). We define the RS3 system's drawback and present a new indexing scheme. The RS3 system treats substructure searching with substring matching by means of expressing chemical structure aspredefined strings. However, it has insufficient 'rerall' and 'precision‘ because it is impossible to index structures uniquely for same atom and same bond. To resolve this problem, we make the minimum-cost- spanning tree for one centered atom and describe a structure with paths per levels. Expressing 2D chemical structure into 1D a string has limit. Therefore, we break 2D chemical structure into 1D structure fragments. We present in this paper a new index technique to improve recall and precision surprisingly.

• Journal of Soil and Groundwater Environment
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.75-80
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• 2003

Understanding the seawater infiltration into tidal flat sediments is very important, because it is significantly correlated with the supply of dissolved oxygen, nutrients and organic matter to benthic organisms for survival. However oil blocks interstitial spaces of sediments, reduces seawater infiltration and results in the decrease in oxygen, nutrients and other food supply to benthic communities. The penetration depth of the stranded oil into the sediments is one of the most significant information to know the effect of spilled oil on biological communities and to set up a cleaning method. So we initiated this study to quantify the penetration behavior of spilled oil and to evaluate the influence of the penetrated oil on seawater infiltration in tidal flat environment and its ecological implications. The penetration depth of the crude oil into the tidal flat sediments was two times deeper than that of the fuel oil C, and the depth was significantly affected by stranded oil volume. However, the penetration depth of stranded oil was abruptly dropped at first falling tide but not significantly fluctuated after that. Moreover, hydrocarbon concentration showed the highest within the upper 2 cm. Seawater infiltration was decreased in proportion to the stranded oil volume. The seawater infiltration was more affected by the penetrated fuel oil C about 1.7 times than the crude oil, because the interstitial spaces of the top of sediments were more cleared by the fuel oil C. Therefore, quick cleaning actions for penetrated oil will be necessary for recovery of seawater infiltration because the seawater contains oxygen and nutrients necessary for the survival of benthic organisms in tidal flat.

• Research in Plant Disease
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.66-71
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• 2005

The effect of medium components such as wheat bran, rice bran, oat meal, and soybean meal as basic ingredients and KH2PO4, glucose, and molasses as additives on mass production and anti-potato common scab activ ity of a streptomycete A020645 strain as a biocontrol agent (BCA) candidate was investigated. Of basicingredients, oat meal was the best one for mass poduction and enhancement of anti-potato common scabactivity. The biomass production of the active strain was more enhanced when 0.1-0.01.% glucose or molassesas additive were added into the basic medium. These information may have important implications in applying for effective formulation of BCA.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2013.08a
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• pp.91-91
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• 2013

Imagine a world where we could biomanufacture hybrid nanomaterials having atomic-scale resolution over functionality and architecture. Toward this vision, a fundamental challenge in materials science is how to design and synthesize protein-like material that can be fully self-assembled and exhibit information-specific process. In an ongoing effort to extend the fundamental understanding of protein structure to non-natural systems, we have designed a class of short peptides to fold like proteins and assemble into defined nanostructures. In this talk, I will talk about new strategies to drive the self-assembled structures designing sequence of peptide. I will also discuss about the specific interaction between proteins and inorganics that can be used for the development of new hybrid solar energy devices. Splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen is one of the promising pathways for solar to energy convertsion and storage system. The oxygen evolution reaction (OER) has been regarded as a major bottleneck in the overall water splitting process due to the slow transfer rate of four electrons and the high activation energy barrier for O-O bond formation. In nature, there is a water oxidation complex (WOC) in photosystem II (PSII) comprised of the earthabundant elements Mn and Ca. The WOC in photosystem II, in the form of a cubical CaMn4O5 cluster, efficiently catalyzes water oxidation under neutral conditions with extremely low overpotential (~160 mV) and a high TOF number. The cluster is stabilized by a surrounding redox-active peptide ligand, and undergo successive changes in oxidation state by PCET (proton-coupled electron transfer) reaction with the peptide ligand. It is fundamental challenge to achieve a level of structural complexity and functionality that rivals that seen in the cubane Mn4CaO5 cluster and surrounding peptide in nature. In this presentation, I will present a new strategy to mimic the natural photosystem. The approach is based on the atomically defined assembly based on the short redox-active peptide sequences. Additionally, I will show a newly identified manganese based compound that is very close to manganese clusters in photosystem II.