• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.36 no.4
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• pp.238-246
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• 2017

High frequency ultrasound imaging typically suffers from low sensitivity due to the small aperture of high frequency transducers and shallow imaging depth due to the frequency-dependent attenuation of ultrasound. These limitations should be overcome to obtain high-frequency, high- resolution ultrasound images. One practical solution to the problems is a high-performance signal receiver capable of detecting a very small signal and amplifying the signal with minimal electronic noise addition. This paper reports a recently developed low-noise, wideband ultrasound receiver for high-frequency, high-resolution ultrasound imaging. The developed receiver has an amplification gain of up to 73 dB and a variable amplification gain range of 48 dB over an operating frequency of 80 MHz. Also, it has an amplification gain flatness of ${\pm}1dB$. Due to these high performances, the developed receiver has a signal-to-noise ratio of at least 8.4 dB and a contrast-to-noise ratio of at least 3.7 dB higher than commercial receivers.

• Korean Journal of Digital Imaging in Medicine
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.1-7
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• 2013

Purpose : The Carotid Angio inspection including Aortic arch applied to wide area is conducted as the Contrast Enhance MR Angiography(CEA) which is using a contrast medium. However it is a burden not only for someone such as infants, pregnant women and patients suffering from kidney failure but continuous use of contrast medium also can be a burden for patients who has been taken follow up inspection since diagnose lesion already. The purpose of this study is to estimate a usefulness of the Time of Flight (TOF) by comparing with CEA. Materials and methods : 10 patients with an average age of 58 (from 45 to 75) who had MRA inspection in our hospital were studied using 3.0 Tesla Aachieva (Philips, Netherland) MRI system and Sense Neuro-Vascular 16 Channels Coil. The same patient was inspected both TOF and CEA simultaneously. The TOF inspection included from Aortic arch to Willis Circle by connecting 3 TOF stacks and so did CEA inspection. The quantitative analysis was conducted through signal to noise ratio(SNR) and contrast to noise ratio(CNR) with soft tissue by setting up an area of interest on CCA bifurcatoin, ICA, ECA, MCA and VA concerning obtained image. In case of qualitative analysis, 3 radiological technologists and 1 radiologist evaluated 4 items (1: Visibility of the blood vessel, 2: Image distortion measure, 3: Overlapping measure with vein, 4: Peripheral blood vessel description measure) into five points scale (1: Very bad, 2: Bad, 3: Normal 4: Good, 5: Very good). Results : Results for the quantitative analysis was obtained by calculating the average of 5 ROIs in case of SNR and CNR separately. Results of SNR, TOF were generally measured higher than CEA (In case of TOF were 166.1, 205.2, 154.39, 172.23, 161.95, and CEA were 92.05, 95.43, 84.76, 73.69, 88.3). But according to the result of CNR, both TOF and CEA were measured similarly as 67.62, 106.71, 55.9, 73.74, 63.46 for TOF and 67.82, 71.19, 60.52, 49.45, 64.07 for CEA. Throughout every results of each ROI, SNR showed statistically meaningful consequence (0.050.05). In case of qualitative analysis the average of each evaluated item was 4.2points and 4.28points in the item1, 2.93points and 4.55points in the item2, 4.6points and 3.13points in the item3, 2.88points and 4.6points in the item4. According to the results TOF was measured higher in the item3 while in the item2 and item4 CEA was higher and in case of the item1, both CEA and TOF were similar. To sum up statistically meaningful results (p<0.05) were shown in the item2, item3 and item4 but not in the item1 (p>0.05). Conclusions : Both TOF and CEA are complementary because each inspection has pros and cons, but when inspect wide area including Aortic arch normally CEA is conducted. But TOF inspection also can be considered as alternative in terms of patients who has difficulty in the contrast medium such as infants, pregnant women and patients suffering from kidney failure and patients during follow up.

• Proceedings of the KOSOMBE Conference
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• v.1998 no.11
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• pp.297-298
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• 1998

Prototype portal imaging device (EPID) based on CCD camera, which has a $20\times20cm^2$ field of view (FOV), has been developed and then tested by acquiring phantom images for 6 MV x-ray beam. While, among the captured images, each frame suffered notorious quantum noise, the frame averaging largely enhanced the image quality against quantum noise. Over 60 frames averaging, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) was increased by $\sim20$ times and contrast was increased about 2 times in the skull-region of the acquired head-phantom image.

• Proceedings of the KSMRM Conference
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• 2003.10a
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• pp.40-40
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• 2003

The purpose of this study was to characterize focal hepatic lesions through pre and post ferucarbotran-enhanced T2 and T2＊-weighted imaging and to help differentiate benign and malignant lesions 대상 및 방법： Consecutive 34 patients with 52 hepatic lesions underwent MRI before and after intravenous bolus injection of ferucarbotran (Resovist Sobering, Berlin, Germany) for evaluation of focal hepatic lesions. Lesions included hemangiomas (n=17), metastases (n=12), cysts (n=10), hepatocellular carcinomas (n=8), dysplastic nodules (n=4), and focal fat deposit (n=1). T2-weighted fast spin echo (TR/TE： 4060/138) and gradient echo T2＊-weighted images(TR/TE： 140/5.3, FA = 90) were obtained according to the institutional routine imaging protocol. Lesional signal-intensity and lesion-to-liver contrast changes were measured by contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) from region of interest.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.573-579
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• 2023

This study compares dose difference between the presence or absence of grid in Chest PA radiography using auto exposure control and compares image quality among presence, absence or virtual grid, and proposes a new clinically useful grid combination for chest radiography. The human body phantom was placed Chest PA position and the dosimeter was placed at T6. The same irradiation conditions and field size were applied. 30 images were obtained in the state in which grid was applied and in the state in which grid was not applied, and an additional 30 images in which the virtual grid was applied to the image without the grid were obtained. Radiation dose was presented to entrance surface dose. The image quality was analyzed by comparing the signal-to-noise and contrast-to-noise ratio. ESD decreased by 48% when the grid was not used, compared to when the grid was used. SNR and CNR increased by 32% and 30% compared to grid use when grid was not used, respectively. In the case of using the virtual grid, it increased by 18% and 16% respectively, compared to the case of using the grid. As a result of this study, it is believed that when using a virtual grid instead of a grid, the quality of the image can be maintained while reducing the patient dose.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartA
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• v.8A no.4
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• pp.499-502
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• 2001

Fractal image coding suffers from the long search time of domain pool although it provides many properties including the high compression ratio. We find that the normalized variance of a block is independent of contrast, brightness. Using this observation, we introduce a self similar block searching method employing the d-dimensional nearest neighbor searching. This method takes Ο(log/N) time for searching the self similar domain blocks for each range block where N is the number of domain blocks. PSNR (Peak Signal Noise Ratio) of this method is similar to that of the full search method that requires Ο(N) time for each range block. Moreover, the image quality of this method is independent of the number of edges in the image.

• Investigative Magnetic Resonance Imaging
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.130-134
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• 1997

Purpose: To analyze contrast-enhancement pattern of stomach cancer on dynamic MRI and to verify the efficacy of intravenous contrast agent in the evaluation of stomach cancer. Materials and Methods: Twelve patients with proven stomach cancer underwent dynamic MRI. By using l.OT scanner, we obtained precontrast FLASH images, and 30, 60, 90 second delay FLASH images after intravenous contrast injection. All patients ingested one liter of water and had intramuscular injection of Buscopan just before MR study. For quantitative analysis we measured signal to noise ratio (SiN) of stomach cancer on each image, and signal difference to noise ratio (SD/N) between cancer and intraluminal fluid, cancer and the pancreas. For qualitative analysis two radiologists evaluated lesion conspicuity on each image by grading system(grade 0, 1, 2, 3: poor, fair, good, excellent). Results: SiN of stomach cancer increased gradually by time(precontrast, 30, 60, 90 second delay: 38.7, 42.5, 57.4, 65.7). SD/N between cancer and intraluminal fluid significantly increased after contrast enhancement(l.24, 25.01, 39.30, 45.89). SD/Ns between cancer and the pancreas were 10.5, 9.33, 9.99, 10.66, respectively. In qualitative analysis, precontrast images were better than postcontrast images for delineation of stomach cancer. Postcontrast images showed clear endo-Iuminal side of stomach cancer, but outer margin of stomach cancer was more distinct on precontrast images. Conclusion: Precontrast MR images are better than postcontrast MR images in the depiction of stomach cancer. Intravenous contrast agent is not imperative in the evaluation of stomach cancer.

• 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.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.12 no.10
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• pp.5056-5078
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• 2018

In this work we propose a compression technique that makes use of linear and perceptually uniform CIE $La^*b^*$ color space in the JPEG image compression framework to improve its performance at lower bitrates. To generate quantization matrices suitable for the linear and perceptually uniform CIE $La^*b^*$ color space, a novel linear Contrast Sensitivity Function (CSF) is used. The compression performance in terms of Compression Ratio (CR) and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), is further improved by utilizing image dependent, variable and non-uniform image sub-blocks generated using a proposed histogram-based merging technique. Experimental results indicate that the proposed linear CSF based quantization technique yields, on an average, 8% increase in CR for the same reconstructed image quality in terms of PSNR as compared to the conventional YCbCr color space. The proposed scheme also outperforms JPEG in terms of CR by an average of 45.01% for the same reconstructed image quality.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.159-168
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• 2019

We examined the effect of Siemens ADMIRE (Advanced Modeled Iterative Reconstruction) on image quality by measuring changes in HU, noise, and SNR of background air, fat, muscle, and background signals on a chest CT scan. Experimental results show that as the ADMIRE Strength increases, the noise decreases and the signal increases, consequently the signal-to-noise ratio increases. ADMIRE can reduce noise by 28 ~ 61% compared to FBP, which is a conventional image reconstruction algorithm, and improves SNR by 16 ~ 100%.