• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.29 no.3E
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• pp.107-110
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• 2010

In this paper, the rationale and contents of the special issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea regarding comprehensive reviews on past, present and future of biomedical ultrasound are described. Brief descriptions of invited articles are given, and efforts by all contributing authors are gratefully acknowledged.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.39 no.4
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• pp.153-160
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• 2018

3D ultrasound bladder scanners are getting popular in hospitals for the patients with bladder dysfunction. A current bladder scanner adopts a mechanical scan to acquire 3D images and requires two motors and complicated mechanical devices. In this paper, we propose a new ultrasound bladder scanner using hand-motion scan. Instead of two motors and mechanical devices, it has a motion sensor to record transducer positions during hand-motion scan. The experiments with a bladder phantom and volunteers showed similar measurement accuracy to a conventional 3D ultrasound bladder scanner. We expect that the proposed method will reduce the cost and size of the bladder scanner.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.37 no.1
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• pp.31-38
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• 2016

For the patients with bladder dysfunction, measurement of urine volume inside the bladder is very critical to avoid bladder failure. In measuring urine volume inside a bladder, low-resolution 3D ultrasound images are widely used. However, urine volume estimation from 3D ultrasound images is prone to big errors and inconsistency because of low spatial resolution and low signal-to-noise ratio of ultrasound images. We developed a new robust volume estimation algorithm which is not computationally expensive. We tested the algorithm on a lab-built ultrasound bladder phantom and volunteers. The average error rate of the human bladder volume estimation was 5.9% which was better than the commercial machine.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.40-45
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• 2008

Therapeutic ultrasound which is developed for rehabilitation therapy have already been used for healing joint contracture, synechia, acute and chronic inflammatory diseases. Medical devices for pain-relief and healing using therapeutic ultrasound are actively being developed. This study measured the change of PTT with the transmitted ultrasound through the human body to find out the increase of compliance of blood vessels. Measurement method of PTT in this study is employed as useful ways to acquire physiological information of patients in the clinical case in order to measure the change of mechanical characteristics of blood vessels. This study confirmed the PTT change of rehabilitation patients through the thermal effects of ultrasound by using PTT and also found that it is possible to increase PTT by adjusting the warm water and ultrasound. The increase of PTT means the decrease of the pulse wave velocity from the cardiovascular system to the peripheral arteries. The physiological effects occurred using the warm water and ultrasound.

• 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.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.36 no.5
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• pp.162-168
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• 2015

In this study, we suggested the performance and safety testing guideline for low intensity pulsed ultrasound (LIPUS) represented by the ultrasound fracture treatment device and cartilage treatment device and low intensity focused ultrasound (LIFU) represented by ultrasonic face lifting device. For these study, the international standards and management regulations of Korea, Japan and United State were analyzed. And the usefulness and applicability were evaluated by testing with commercial equipment and reflecting the views of the industry and experts. As a result of this study, the safety and performance test guidelines for low intensity therapeutic ultrasound device were proposed by presenting the 10 items for LIPUS and 12 items for LIFU. The suggested guidelines are considered a high utilization in the domestic testing and approval authorities. And they are also thought to be useful to new technology development.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.34 no.4
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• pp.177-181
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• 2013

It is known that ultrasound affects action potentials in neurons, but the underlying principles of ultrasonic neural stimulation are not clearly elucidated yet. In this study, we measured the action potentials of rat hippocampal neurons cultured on multi-electrode arrays during ultrasound stimulation. From most of electrodes, it was observed that the ultrasound stimulation increased the frequencies of action potentials (i.e., spikes) during ultrasound stimulation.

• Journal of the Optical Society of Korea
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.55-59
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• 2014

Sarcopenia, or reduced muscle mass and volume, is due to various factors such as senile change, neuronal degeneration, drug, malignancy, and sepsis. Sarcopenia with the aging process has been evidenced by the decline in muscle mass by 0.5 to 1% per year with 3-5% reduction in muscle strength for 10 years between the ages of 40 and 50, and a 1-2% of decline of mass every year in people aged 60-70. Therefore, early diagnosis and understanding the mechanism of sarcopenia are crucial in the prevention of muscle loss. However, it is still difficult to image changes of muscle microstructure due to a lack of techniques. In this study, we developed an animal model using denervated rats to induce a rapid atrophy in the tibialis anterior (TA) and imaged its structural changes using optical coherence tomography (OCT) along with histologic and ultrasound analyses. Ultrasound showed changes of overall muscle size. Histology revealed that the atrophic TA muscle displayed an increased size variability of muscle fiber and inflammatory changes. Three dimensional OCT imaged the changes of perimysial grid and muscle fiber structure in real time without sacrifice. These observed advantages of multimodal imaging using OCT and ultrasound would provide clinical benefits in the diagnosis of sarcopenia.

• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.28-34
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• 2014

Recently, ultrasound therapy has become a new and effective treatment for many brain diseases. Therefore, skull-mimicking phantoms have been developed to simulate the skull and brain tissue of a human and allow further research into ultrasound therapy. In this study, the suitability of various skull-mimicking materials(HDPE, POM C, Acrylic) for studies of brain-tumor treatments was evaluated using focused ultrasound. The acoustic properties of three synthetic resins were measured. The skull-mimicking materials were then combined with an egg white phantom to observe the differences in the ultrasound beam distortion according to the type of material. High-intensity polyethylene was found to be suitable as a skull-mimicking phantom because it had acoustic properties and a denatured-area shape that was close to those of the skull,. In this study, a skull-mimicking phantom with a multi-layer structure was produced after evaluating several skull-mimicking materials. This made it possible to predict the denaturation in a skull in relation to focused ultrasound. The development of a therapeutic protocol for a range of brain diseases will be useful in the future.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.43 no.4
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• pp.271-279
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• 2022

Functional cosmetics containing various ingredients that improve skin health are currently being developed. In addition, technologies that help increase the absorption rate of such cosmetics have recently gained significant attention. Sonophoresis is a method to increase the transdermal absorption of cosmetics using ultrasound. A skin-mimicking phantom was fabricated using polydimethylsiloxane, Strat-M^TM membrane, and thermochromic pigments. Gel-type cosmetics used in skin mask packs and epidermal-growth-factor-based nano-cosmetics were tested for their absorption rates at ultrasound frequencies of 1, 3, and 10 MHz in the single frequency mode, and 1/3 and 3/10 MHz in the dual frequency mode. The gel-type cosmetics and epidermal-grow-factor-based nano-cosmetics showed the highest absorption rate at 3/10MHz dual frequency. The size of the cosmetic particles decreased by 5-9 %. Furthermore, the temperature rise caused by ultrasound could be visually recognized by the thermochromic pigment in the phantom turning white. We presented a skin-mimicking phantom. The device can be customized according to the size of the ultrasound probe and has the advantage of quantitatively evaluating the transdermal permeability of cosmetics at a low cost. The development of the skin-mimicking phantom will be useful for determining the suitable conditions required to increase the absorption rate of cosmetics using ultrasound.