• Investigative Magnetic Resonance Imaging
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.179-201
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• 2019

Portable low-cost magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) systems have the potential to enable "point-of-care" and timely MRI diagnosis, and to make this imaging modality available to routine scans and to people in underdeveloped countries and areas. With simplicity, no maintenance, no power consumption, and low cost, permanent magnets/magnet arrays/magnet assemblies are attractive to be used as a source of static magnetic field to realize the portability and to lower the cost for an MRI scanner. However, when taking the canonical Fourier imaging approach and using linear gradient fields, homogeneous fields are required in a scanner, resulting in the facts that either a bulky magnet/magnet array is needed, or the imaging volume is too small to image an organ if the magnet/magnet array is scaled down to a portable size. Recently, with the progress on image reconstruction based on non-linear gradient field, static field patterns without spatial linearity can be used as spatial encoding magnetic fields (SEMs) to encode MRI signals for imaging. As a result, the requirements for the homogeneity of the static field can be relaxed, which allows permanent magnets/magnet arrays with reduced sizes, reduced weight to image a bigger volume covering organs such as a head. It offers opportunities of constructing a truly portable low-cost MRI scanner. For this exciting potential application, permanent magnets/magnet arrays have attracted increased attention recently. A magnet/magnet array is strongly associated with the imaging volume of an MRI scanner, image reconstruction methods, and RF excitation and RF coils, etc. through field patterns and field homogeneity. This paper offers a review of permanent magnets and magnet arrays of different kinds, especially those that can be used for spatial encoding towards the development of a portable and low-cost MRI system. It is aimed to familiarize the readers with relevant knowledge, literature, and the latest updates of the development on permanent magnets and magnet arrays for MRI. Perspectives on and challenges of using a permanent magnet/magnet array to supply a patterned static magnetic field, which does not have spatial linearity nor high field homogeneity, for image reconstruction in a portable setup are discussed.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2011.07a
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• pp.2005-2006
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• 2011

Due to the advantages of small sizes, more I/O ports, etc., Ball Grid Array (BGA) has been used in the production of printed circuit board (PCB). However, BGA voids can degrade the performance of the board and cause failure. To automatically detect the voids in X-ray image, a novel blob filter that makes use of the local image gradient magnitude is proposed in this paper. The utilization of the local image gradient magnitude makes the proposed filter invariant to the image brightness, void shape, void position, and component interference. Furthermore, different sizes of box filters are employed to analyze the image in multi-scale, and as a result, the proposed blob filter is robust to void size. Experimental results show that the proposed method can obtain void detection accuracy up to 96.104% while keep low false ratio.

• Journal of Soil and Groundwater Environment
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.64-81
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• 2016

To analyze the influence of various groundwater flow rates (specific discharge) on BHE system with balanced and unbalanced energy loads under assuming same initial temperature (15℃) of ground and groundwater, numerical modeling using FEFLOW was used for this study. When groundwater flow is increased from 1 × 10⁻⁷ to 4 × 10⁻⁷m/s under balanced energy load, the performance of BHE system is improved about 26.7% in summer and 22.7% at winter time in a single BHE case as well as about 12.0~18.6% in summer and 7.6~8.7% in winter time depending on the number of boreholes in the grid, their array type, and bore hole separation in multiple BHE system case. In other words, the performance of BHE system is improved due to lower avT in summer and higher avT in winter time when groundwater flow becomes larger. On the contrary it is decreased owing to higher avT in summer and lower avT in winter time when the numbers of BHEs in an array are increased, Geothermal plume created at down-gradient area by groundwater flow is relatively small in balanced load condition while quite large in unbalanced load condition. Groundwater flow enhances in general the thermal efficiency by transferring heat away from the BHEs. Therefore it is highly required to obtain and to use adequate informations on hydrogeologic characterristics (K, S, hydraulic gradient, seasonal variation of groundwater temperature and water level) along with integrating groundwater flow and also hydrogeothermal properties (thermal conductivity, seasonal variation of ground temperatures etc.) of the relevant area for achieving the optimal design of BHE system.

• Korean Journal of Optics and Photonics
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• v.33 no.6
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• pp.245-251
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• 2022

We have developed a multi-channel fiber laser for tiled laser beam combining and a laser output array system for multi-beam alignment. The fiber laser is a master oscillator power amplifier configuration that has a common seed, a preamplifier, and a 7-channel amplifier. The output power of each channel is more than 10 W. The laser output array system is a packed cylindrical configuration for a high fill-factor, and it has capabilities for collimation and tilt control with built-in PZT. Multi-beam alignment to a target is successfully implemented using PZT controlled with a stochastic parallel gradient descent (SPGD) algorithm.

• Proceedings of the Korea Committee for Ocean Resources and Engineering Conference
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• 2001.10a
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• pp.190-195
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• 2001

Flow patterns are very complex and interactive between cylinders. The patterns are turbulent and non-linear caused by various factors. In this paper, flow patterns and pressure gradient around vertical cylinders were investigated by experiment. Changing gaps between cylinders the flow patterns are measured at a fixed coming velocity. Flow patterns showed very complex and closely related to the coming velocity and cylinder space. The pressure gradient around the flow field is observed by twelve hole pitot tubes and manometer. The experiment has been conducted in circulating water channel with PIV system. That can visualize flow patterns. The laser beam was used to reflect the image from particles and recorded by CCD camera. The cylinders were spaced from ID to 5D with 0.5m/sec of incoming flow velocity. The experimental results using pitot tube showed in good agreement with results of precious by others study. The results can be applied in the understanding and design of multiple pile array structures.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.133-148
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• 1998

The objective of this paper is to present an adaptive algorithm for computing the weight vector which provides a beam pattern having its maximum gain along the direction of the mobile target signal source in the presence of interfering signals within a cell. The conjugate gradient method (CGM) is modified in such a way that the suboptimal weight vector is produced with the computational load of O(16N), which has been found to be small enough for the real-time processing of signals in most land mobile communications with the digital signal processor (DSP) off the shelf, where N denotes the number of antenna elements of the array. The adaptive procedure proposed in this paper is applied to code division multiple access (CDMA) mobile communication system to show its excellent performance in terms of signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR), bit error rate (BER), and capacity, which are enhanced by about 7 dB, ${\frac{1}{100}}$ times, and 7 times, respectively, when the number of antenna elements is 6 and the processing gain is 20 dB.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.61-68
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• 2001

In this paper, an analytical method and a difference approximation method to calculate the gradient of an objective function have been applied to the directivity optimization in an adaptive ultrasonic transducer which is combined with a point source array and an optimization algorithm (DFP method). To compare these two methods, quasi-ideal .beam with a beam width and direction specified are chosen as the desired directivity. As the numerical results, the difference approximation method shows better suppressive capacity of side lobe level, good stability in the convergence processing, faster convergence speed and excellent adaptability compared with the analytical method.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.25 no.6
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• pp.431-434
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• 2016

Currently, the radial basis function network (RBFN) and various other neural networks are employed to classify gases using chemical sensors arrays, and their performance is steadily improving. In particular, the identification performance of the RBFN algorithm is being improved by optimizing parameters such as the center, width, and weight, and improved algorithms such as the radial basis function network-stochastic gradient (RBFN-SG) and radial basis function network-normalized stochastic gradient (RBFN-NSG) have been announced. In this study, we optimized the number of centers, which is one of the parameters of the RBFN-NSG algorithm, and observed the change in the identification performance. For the experiment, repeated measurement data of 8 samples were used, and the elbow method was applied to determine the optimal number of centers for each sample of input data. The experiment was carried out in two cases(the only one center per sample and the optimal number of centers obtained by elbow method), and the experimental results were compared using the mean square error (MSE). From the results of the experiments, we observed that the case having an optimal number of centers, obtained using the elbow method, showed a better identification performance than that without any optimization.

• Investigative Magnetic Resonance Imaging
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.12-21
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• 2003

Purpose : In order to overcome limitations in the existing conventional spectrometer, a new spectrometer with advanced functionalities is designed and implemented. Materials and Methods : We designed a spectrometer using the TMS320C6701 DSP capable of 1 giga floating point operations per second (GFLOPS). The spectrometer can generate continuously varying complicate gradient waveforms by real-time calculation, and select image plane interactively. The designed spectrometer is composed of two parts: one is DSP-based digital control part, and the other is analog part generating gradient and RF waveforms, and performing demodulation of the received RF signal. Each recover board can measure 4 channel FID signals simultaneously for parallel imaging, and provides fast reconstruction using the high speed DSP. Results : The developed spectrometer was installed on a 1.5 Tesla whole body MRI system, and performance was tested by various methods. The accurate phase control required in digital modulation and demodulation was tested, and multi-channel acquisition was examined with phase-array coil imaging. Superior image quality is obtained by the developed spectrometer compared to existing commercial spectrometer especially in the fast spin echo images. Conclusion : Interactive control of the selection planes and real-time generation of gradient waveforms are important functions required for advanced imaging such as spiral scan cardiac imaging. Multi-channel acquisition is also highly demanding for parallel imaging. In this paper a spectrometer having such functionalities is designed and developed using the TMS320C6701 DSP having 1 GFLOPS computational power. Accurate phase control was achieved by the digital modulation and demodulation techniques. Superior image qualities are obtained by the developed spectrometer for various imaging techniques including FSE, GE, and angiography compared to those obtained by the existing commercial spectrometer.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.11 no.10
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• pp.1460-1470
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• 2008

As the performance of recent mobile systems increases, a vector graphic has been implemented to represent various types of dynamic menus, mails, and two-dimensional maps. This paper proposes a hardware accelerator for open vector graphics (OpenVG), which is widely used for two-dimensional vector graphics. We analyze the specifications of an OpenVG and divide the OpenVG into several functions suitable for hardware implementation. The proposed hardware accelerator is implemented on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) board using hardware description language (HDL) and is about four times faster than an Alex processor.