• The Korean Journal of Nuclear Medicine
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.73-82
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• 1997

Regional myocardial blood flow (rMBF) can be noninvasively quantified using N-13 ammonia and dynamic positron emission tomography (PET). The quantitative accuracy of the rMBF values, however, is affected by the distortion of myocardial PET images caused by finite PET image resolution and cardiac motion. Although different methods have been developed to correct the distortion typically classified as partial volume effect and spillover, the methods are too complex to employ in a routine clinical environment. We have developed a refined method incorporating a geometric model of the volume representation of a region-of-interest (ROI) into the two-compartment N-13 ammonia model. In the refined model, partial volume effect and spillover are conveniently corrected by an additional parameter in the mathematical model. To examine the accuracy of this approach, studies were performed in 9 coronary artery disease patients. Dynamic transaxial images (16 frames) were acquired with a GE $Advance^{TM}$ PET scanner simultaneous with intravenous injection of 20 mCi N-13 ammonia. rMBF was examined at rest and during pharmacologically (dipyridamole) induced coronary hyperemia. Three sectorial myocardium (septum, anterior wall and lateral wall) and blood pool time-activity curves were generated using dynamic images from manually drawn ROIs. The accuracy of rMBF values estimated by the refined method was examined by comparing to the values estimated using the conventional two-compartment model without partial volume effect correction rMBF values obtained by the refined method linearly correlated with rMBF values obtained by the conventional method (108 myocardial segments, correlation coefficient (r)=0.88). Additionally, underestimated rMBF values by the conventional method due to partial volume effect were corrected by theoretically predicted amount in the refined method (slope(m)=1.57). Spillover fraction estimated by the two methods agreed well (r=1.00, m=0.98). In conclusion, accurate rMBF values can be efficiently quantified by the refined method incorporating myocardium geometric information into the two-compartment model using N-13 ammonia and PET.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.216-225
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• 2011

Following the proliferation of three-dimensional video contents and displays, many terrestrial broadcasting companies have been preparing for stereoscopic 3DTV service. In terrestrial stereoscopic broadcast, it is a difficult task to code and transmit two video sequences while sustaining as high quality as 2DTV broadcast due to the limited bandwidth defined by the existing digital TV standards such as ATSC. Thus, a terrestrial 3DTV broadcasting with a heterogeneous video codec system, where the left image and right images are based on MPEG-2 and H.264/AVC, respectively, is considered in order to achieve both high quality broadcasting service and compatibility for the existing 2DTV viewers. Without significant change in the current terrestrial broadcasting systems, we propose a joint rate control scheme for stereoscopic 3DTV service based on the heterogeneous dual codec systems. The proposed joint rate control scheme applies to the MPEG-2 encoder a quadratic rate-quantization model which is adopted in the H.264/AVC. Then the controller is designed for the sum of the left and right bitstreams to meet the bandwidth requirement of broadcasting standards while the sum of image distortions is minimized by adjusting quantization parameter obtained from the proposed optimization scheme. Besides, we consider a condition on maintaining quality difference between the left and right images around a desired level in the optimization in order to mitigate negative effects on human visual system. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed bit rate control scheme outperforms the rate control method where each video coding standard uses its own bit rate control algorithm independently in terms of the increase in PSNR by 2.02%, the decrease in the average absolute quality difference by 77.6% and the reduction in the variance of the quality difference by 74.38%.