• Korean Journal of Radiology
• /
• v.23 no.7
• /
• pp.697-719
• /
• 2022

Gadoxetate magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is widely used in clinical practice for liver imaging. For optimal use, we must understand both its advantages and limitations. This article is the outcome of an online advisory board meeting and subsequent discussions by a multidisciplinary group of experts on liver diseases across the Asia-Pacific region, first held on September 28, 2020. Here, we review the technical considerations for the use of gadoxetate, its current role in the management of patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), and its relevance in consensus guidelines for HCC imaging diagnosis. In the latter part of this review, we examine recent evidence evaluating the impact of gadoxetate on clinical outcomes on a continuum from diagnosis to treatment decision-making and follow-up. In conclusion, we outline the potential future roles of gadoxetate MRI based on an evolving understanding of the clinical utility of this contrast agent in the management of patients at risk of, or with, HCC.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
• /
• v.15 no.1
• /
• pp.63-70
• /
• 2021

Radiographic contrast agents are used for diagnostic purposes and are one of the factors affecting measured values in bone density tests. They are absorbed into tissues and have an effect of increasing the measured values of bone density, so they are avoided as much as possible before performing a bone density test. MRI contrast agents, which have different physical properties and mechanisms of action than radiographic contrast agents, are based on gadolinium, a metal element. They have radiopacity characteristics, so MRI are generally performed prior to examination using radiation. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of MRI contrast agents on bone mineral density examination using dual energy X-ray absorption. Two types of gadolinium based MRI contrast agents were injected into an acrylic water tank for each volume, and the humanoid spine phantom was inserted and the BMD and T-score from (L1-L4) were analyzed by scanning a total of 30 times, 5 times for each injection type. The average value of the measured total (L1-L4) bone density for each of the two contrast agents was 0.952±0.052, 0.957±0.050, and 0.956±0.05g/㎠, respectively, for the Gadoterate Meglumine component 0mL, 7.5mL and 15mL, when the gadobutrol components were 0mL, 5mL, and 10mL, there was no statistically significant difference at all sites at 0.953±0.001, 0.954±0.001, and 0.945±0.001g/㎠, respectively(p>0.05). The average value of total T-score was -0.46±0.05, -0.4±0, -0.42±0.04 when the Gadoterate Meglumine component was 0mL, 7.5mL and 15mL, respectively. When the Gadobutrol ingredients were 0mL, 5mL and 10mL, there was no statistically significant difference in all areas, with -0.46±0.05, -0.46±0.05, and 0.5±0.00, respectively. In this experiment, the MRI contrast agent was found to have no effect on bone density tests, using the dual-energy X-ray absorption method. There is a limitation in that physical conditions such as kidney and health conditions etc. were not taken into consideration, so further clinical research is expected to be conducted in the future.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
• /
• v.17 no.3
• /
• pp.449-457
• /
• 2023

Shielding for reducing exposure dose can make the diagnosis limited. The purpose of this study is to increase the efficiency of radiation protection and minimize the loss of image information by producing the shielding made of the water and the contrast medium which has different proportion and finding out the ideal proportion of them. Each shielding materials were made of water and water-soluble iodine contrast medium with the different proportion. The attenuation rate of absorbed dose was evaluated by the shielding materials in the plastic contents for measuring the efficiency of the radiation protection. As a result, the higher ratio of the contrast medium, the more efficient it is for radiation attenuation. The anatomical structure was observed most properly in case of the solution with 20 ml of the contrast medium and most difficultly in case of more than 60 ml of the contrast medium. In case of the signal intensity between skeleton and gas, the difference of average value had a significant as p < 0.001. Shielding with contrast medium attenuates less than the conventional shielding but in the examination for the sensitive part to radiation, it can be used to minimize the loss of the image information and reduce the exposure dose.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
• /
• v.36 no.4
• /
• pp.298-305
• /
• 2009

In contrast to content_based filtering systems, collaborative filtering systems not only don't contain information of items, they can not recommend items when users don't provide the information of their interests. In this paper, we propose the recommender agent using association item tree to solve the shortcomings of collaborative filtering systems. Firstly, the proposed method clusters users into groups using vector space model and K-means algorithm and selects group typical rating values. Secondly, the degree of associations between items is extracted from computing mutual information between items and an associative item tree is generated by group. Finally, the method recommends items to an active user by using a group typical rating value and an association item tree. The recommender agent recommends items by combining user information with item information. In addition, it can accurately recommend items to an active user, whose information is insufficient at first rate, by using an association item tree based on mutual information for the similarity between items. The proposed method is compared with previous methods on the data set of MovieLens recommender system.

• Journal of Soil and Groundwater Environment
• /
• v.26 no.1
• /
• pp.54-64
• /
• 2021

The chemical warfare agents (CWAs) have been developed for offensive or defensive purposes and used as chemical weapons in war and terrorism. The CWAs are exposed to the natural environment, transported through the water system and then eventually contaminate soil and groundwater. Therefore, effective decontamination technology to remediate CWAs are needed. The CWAs are extremely dangerous and prodution is strictly prohibited, therefore, it is difficult to use CWAs even in experimental purpose. In this study, 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D) was chosen as a model representative CWA because it is a simulant of anti-plant CWAs and one of the major component of agent orange. The optimum degradation conditions such as oxidant:activator ratio were determined. The effects of hydroxylamine and chelating agents such as citric acid (CA), oxalic acid (OA), malic acid (MA), and EDTA addition to increase Fe2+ activation were also investigated. Scavenger experiments using tert-butyl alcohol (TBA) and ethanol confirmed that although both sulfate (SO4•-) and hydroxyl radical (•OH) existed in Fe2+-persulfate system, sulfate radical was the predominant radical. To promote the Fe2+ activator effect, the effect of hydroxylamine as a reducing agent was investigated. In chelating agents assisted Fe2+-persulfate oxidation, the addition of 2 mM of CA and MA enhanced 2,4-D degradation. In contrast, EDTA and OA inhibited the 2,4-D removal due to steric hindrance effect.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
• /
• 2004.08a
• /
• pp.101-106
• /
• 2004

In this paper, a blood vessel in an angiographic image, which plays an importance role in the diagnose diseases including in the eyes, brain and heart, is enhanced by using a directed diffusion technique. A fundamental component of the angiographic analysis is vessel segmentation that the proposed method provides a preprocessing of the image into a form suitable for human analysis, or more importantly, for machine analysis such the segmentation. Vessel enhancement is a challenging problem due to the complex nature of vascular trees and to imaging imperfections. Some parts of the inherent imperfections in angiography are the intensity inhomogeneity between the larger and smaller vessels, and another imperfection is the leakage of contrast agent into the background tissue that provides to low contrast between vessels and tissue. In the proposed scheme, the directed diffusion solves the problem by formulating a local geometric structure, which consists of direction and scale of the blood vessels. The diffusion process uses the local structure to enhance by a diffusivity tensor. The proposed algorithm can be applied to maintain sharpness and coherence-smooth the intra-regions into homogeneity better than traditional diffusion methods, which are Gaussian regulation and coherence enhancing diffusion.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
• /
• v.16 no.18
• /
• pp.8351-8358
• /
• 2016

Electronic cleansing is an image post processing technique in which the tagged colonic content is subtracted from colon using CTC images. There are post processing artefacts, like: 1) soft tissue degradation; 2) incomplete cleansing; 3) misclassification of polyp due to pseudo enhanced voxels; and 4) pseudo soft tissue structures. The objective of the study was to subtract the tagged colonic content without losing the soft tissue structures. This paper proposes a novel adaptive method to solve the first three problems using a multi-step algorithm. It uses a new edge model-based method which involves colon segmentation, priori information of Hounsfield units (HU) of different colonic contents at specific tube voltages, subtracting the tagging materials, restoring the soft tissue structures based on selective HU, removing boundary between air-contrast, and applying a filter to clean minute particles due to improperly tagged endoluminal fluids which appear as noise. The main finding of the study was submerged soft tissue structures were absolutely preserved and the pseudo enhanced intensities were corrected without any artifact. The method was implemented with multithreading for parallel processing in a high performance computer. The technique was applied on a fecal tagged dataset (30 patients) where the tagging agent was not completely removed from colon. The results were then qualitatively validated by radiologists for any image processing artifacts.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
• /
• v.6 no.5
• /
• pp.409-414
• /
• 2012

This study acquired molecular lmaging using nano-contrast agents, and the general condition of the same image acquisition to analyze the difference between molecular imaging and general imaging, two images are converted into DWT (Discrete Wavelet Transform). Nano-contrast agent imaging using MRI and molecular imaging using PET study of molecular imaging technology mainstream. DWT analysis of the same lesions using MRI imaging and molecular imaging block lesions are present in the lesions, illustrating the value of a high-frequency feature both highly general imaging and molecular imaging could know that. The high frequency region of the feature extraction values appear higher molecular imaging.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
• /
• v.28 no.12
• /
• pp.1567-1572
• /
• 2004

Although accurate measurement of velocity profiles, multiple velocity vectors, and shear stress in arteries is important, there is still no easy method to obtain such information in vivo. This study shows the utility of combining ultrasound contrast imaging with particle image velocimetry (PIV) for non-invasive measurement of velocity vectors. The steady flow analytical solution and optical PIV measurements (for pulsatile flow) were used for comparison. When compared to the analytical solution, both echo PIV and optical PIV resolved the steady velocity profile well. Error in shear rate as measured by echo PIV (8%) was comparable to the error of optical PIV (6.5%). In pulsatile flow, echo PIV velocity profiles agreed well with optical PIV profiles. Echo PIV followed the general profile of pulsatile shear stress across the artery but underestimated wall shear at certain time points. These studies indicate that echo PIV is a promising technique for the non-invasive measurement of velocity profiles and shear stress.

• Korean Journal of Veterinary Research
• /
• v.60 no.3
• /
• pp.145-153
• /
• 2020

This study aimed to evaluate the effects of a bioabsorbable bone hemostatic agent comprising poly (ethylene glycol-propylene glycol) copolymers (PEG-PPG) on hemostasis and osteogenesis. Bilateral 3 mm diameter calvarial defects were created in 99 male Sprague-Dawley rats. The defects were filled with PEG-PPG or bone wax. The defects of control group were left unfilled. Virtual autopsy was performed to evaluate bioabsorption. The calvaria were subjected to x-ray microtomography (microCT) and histological examination. Bone volume fraction (BV/TV) and bone mineral density (BMD) were measured using microCT; furthermore, white blood cell count and histological examination were performed. After application of PEG-PPG and bone wax, immediate hemostasis was achieved. Autopsy revealed that PEG-PPG disappeared within 48 h at the application site; in contrast, bone wax remained until 12 weeks. The PEG-PPG and control groups showed significantly more osteogenesis than the bone wax group with respect to BV/TV and BMD at 3, 6, and 12 weeks (p < 0.05). Histology revealed that the bone wax group exhibited little bone formation with inflammation. In contrast, PEG-PPG and control groups showed significantly more qualitative osteogenesis than the bone wax group (p < 0.01). In conclusion, PEG-PPG showed immediate hemostasis and was absorbed to allow progressive osteogenesis.