• Journal of Soil and Groundwater Environment
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• v.13 no.6
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• pp.93-102
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• 2008

Experimental studies were conducted to characterize the synthesized nanoscale zero-valent iron (NZVI) which is resistant to oxidation in the atmospheric environment. XRD, XPS, and TEM analyses revealed that the oxidation-resistant NZVI particles formed under various controlled air contact conditions (4, 8 and 12 mL/min) have shells with ${\sim}$5 nm thickness. The shells consist of magnetite (${Fe_3}{O_4}$) and maghemite (${\gamma}-{Fe_2}{O_3}$), predominantly. No substantial differences were found in the shell components and thickness among NZVI particles formed under the various air flow rates. On the other hand, shell was not detected in the TEM image of rapidly oxidized NZVI particles. NZVI particles synthesized under the various air flow rates showed similar TCE degradation performances ($k_{obs}$= 0.111, 0.102, and 0.086 $hr^{-1}$), which are equivalent to approximately 80% of those obtained by the fresh NZVI particles. TCE degradation efficiencies of the NZVI particles(fresh, controlled air contact and rapidly oxidized) were improved after equilibrating with water for one day, indicating that depassivation of the shells occurred. The performances of NZVI particles decreased to 90% and 50% of those of the fresh NZVI particles, when they were equilibrated with the atmosphere for a week and two months, respectively. The NZVI particles synthesized under the controlled air contact would have advantages over traditional NZVI particles in terms of practical application into the site, because of their inertness toward atmospheric oxygen.

• Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging
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• v.42 no.1
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• pp.61-69
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• 2008

Purpose: Micro-pinhole SPECT system with conventional multiple-head gamma cameras has the advantage of high magnification factor for imaging of rodents. However, several geometric factors should be calibrated to obtain the SPECT image with good image quality. We developed a simplified geometric calibration method for rotating triple-head pinhole SPECT system and assessed the effects of the calibration using several phantom and rodent imaging studies. Materials and Methods: Trionix Triad XLT9 triple-head SPECT scanner with 1.0 mm pinhole apertures were used for the experiments. Approximately centered point source was scanned to track the angle-dependent positioning errors. The centroid of point source was determined by the center of mass calculation. Axially departed two point sources were scanned to calibrate radius of rotation from pinhole to center of rotation. To verify the improvements by the geometric calibration, we compared the spatial resolution of the reconstructed image of Tc-99m point source with and without the calibration. SPECT image of micro performance phantom with hot rod inserts was acquired and several animal imaging studies were performed. Results: Exact sphere shape of the point source was obtained by applying the calibration and axial resolution was improved. Lesion detectibility and image quality was also much improved by the calibration in the phantom and animal studies. Conclusion: Serious degradation of micro-pinhole SPECT images due to the geometric errors could be corrected using a simplified calibration method using only one or two point sources.

• Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging
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• v.40 no.5
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• pp.263-270
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• 2006

Purpose: Several radioisotope-labeled thymidine derivatives such as $[^{11}C]$thymidine was developed to demonstrate cell proliferation in tumor. But it is difficult to track metabolism with $[^{11}C]$thymidine due to rapid in vivo degradation and its short physical half-life. 3'-$[^{18}F]$fluoro-3'-deoxythymidine ($[^{18}F]$FLT) was reported to have the longer half life of fluorine-18 and the lack of metabolic degradation in vivo. Here, we described the synthesis of the 3'-$[^{18}F]$fluoro-3'-deoxythymidine ($[^{18}F]$FLT) and compared with $([^{18}F]FET)\;and\;([^{18}F]FDG)$ in cultured 9L cell and obtained the biodistribution and PET image in 9L tumor hearing rats. Material and Methods: For the synthesis of $[^{18}F]$FLT, 3-N-tert-butoxycarbonyl-(5'-O-(4,4'-dimet hoxytriphenylmethyl)-2'-deoxy-3'-O-(4-nitrobenzenesulfonyl)-${\beta}$-D-threopentofuranosyl)thymine was used as a FLT precursor, on which the tert-butyloxycarbonyl group was introduced to protect N3-position and nitrobenzenesulfonyl group. Radiolabeling of nosyl substitued precursor with $^{18}F$ was performed in acetonitrile at $120^{\circ}C$ and deproteced with 0.5 N HCI. The cell uptake was measured in cultured 9L glioma cell. The biodistribution was evaluated in 9L tumor bearing rats after intravenous injection at 10 min, 30 min, 60 min and 120 min and obtained PET image 60 minutes after injection. Results: The radiochemical yield was about 20-30% and radiochemical purity was more than 95% after HPLC purification. Cellular uptake of $[^{18}F]$FLT was increased as time elapsed. At 120 min post-injection, the ratios of tumor/blood, tumor/muscle and tumor/brain were $1.61{\pm}0.34,\;1.70{\pm}0.30\;and\;9.33{\pm}2.22$, respectively. The 9L tumor was well visualized at 60 min post injection in PET image. Conclusion: The uptake of $[^{18}F]$FLT in tumor was higher than in normal brain and PET image of $[^{18}F]$FLT was acceptable. These results suggest the possibility of $[^{18}F]$FLT at an imaging agent for brain tumor.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.39 no.3
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• pp.58-65
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• 2002

In order to reduce blocking artifacts in inter-frame coded images, we propose a new image restoration algorithm, which directly processes differential images before reconstruction. We note that blocking artifact in inter-frame coded images is caused by both 8$\times$8 DCT and 16$\times$16 macroblock based motion compensation, while that of intra-coded images is caused by 8$\times$8 DCT only. According to the observation, we Propose a new degradation model for differential images and the corresponding restoration algorithm that utilizes additional constraints and convex sets for discontinuity inside blocks. The proposed restoration algorithm is a modified version of standard regularization that incorporate!; spatially adaptive lowpass filtering with consideration of edge directions by utilizing a part of DCT coefficients. Most of video coding standard adopt a hybrid structure of block-based motion compensation and block discrete cosine transform (BDCT). By this reason, blocking artifacts are occurred on both block boundary and block interior For more complete removal of both kinds of blocking artifacts, the restored differential image must satisfy two constraints, such as, directional discontinuities on block boundary and block interior Those constraints have been used for defining convex sets for restoring differential images.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.47 no.6
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• pp.107-116
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• 2010

Smear is a phenomenon that occurs when an extremely strong light source appears in the imaging system with CCD sensor. It occurs due to the signal charge transfer of CCD and appears as bright lines of noise emanating vertically (or horizontally) from the light source. For still images, smear can be reduced by using a mechanical shutter or special drive methods, but these techniques cannot be applied to image sequences. In this paper, we propose a smear removal method that can be applied to imaging systems for not only still images but also image sequences. The proposed method uses the optical black region(OBR) which is a group of pixels located in the boundary of CCD imaging sensors. Although the OBR is not exposed to light, it contains smear information caused by the charge transport. First, noise and the smear signal in the OBR is separated, and noise is removed to correctly estimate smear effect. Then, corrected OBR signal is uniformly subtracted to eliminate smear effect. Also, if saturation is occurred, the current pixel is substituted by weighted summation of neighboring pixels to improve the visual degradation. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the conventional methods.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Surveying, Geodesy, Photogrammetry and Cartography
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• v.37 no.6
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• pp.445-452
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• 2019

In this study, parallel processing codes of k-means clustering algorithm were developed and implemented in a PC-cluster for unsupervised classification of large satellite images. We implemented intra-node code using multicores of CPU (Central Processing Unit) based on OpenMP (Open Multi-Processing), inter-nodes code using a PC-cluster based on message passing interface, and hybrid code using both. The PC-cluster consists of one master node and eight slave nodes, and each node is equipped with eight multicores. Two operating systems, Microsoft Windows and Canonical Ubuntu, were installed in the PC-cluster in turn and tested to compare parallel processing performance. Two multispectral satellite images were tested, which are a medium-capacity LANDSAT 8 OLI (Operational Land Imager) image and a high-capacity Sentinel 2A image. To evaluate the performance of parallel processing, speedup and efficiency were measured. Overall, the speedup was over N / 2 and the efficiency was over 0.5. From the comparison of the two operating systems, the Ubuntu system showed two to three times faster performance. To confirm that the results of the sequential and parallel processing coincide with the other, the center value of each band and the number of classified pixels were compared, and result images were examined by pixel to pixel comparison. It was found that care should be taken to avoid false sharing of OpenMP in intra-node implementation. To process large satellite images in a PC-cluster, code and hardware should be designed to reduce performance degradation caused by file I / O. Also, it was found that performance can differ depending on the operating system installed in a PC-cluster.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.43 no.6 s.312
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• pp.26-33
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• 2006

Film restoration is to detect the location and extent of defected regions from a given movie film, and if present, to reconstruct the lost information of each region. It has gained increasing attention by many researchers, to support multimedia service of high quality. In general, an old film is degraded by dust, scratch, flick, and so on. Among these, the most frequent degradation is the scratch. So far techniques for the scratch restoration have been developed, but they have limited applicability when dealing with all kinds of scratches. To fully support the automatic scratch restoration, the system should be developed that can detect all kinds of scratches from a given frame of old films. This paper presents a neurual network (NN)-based texture classifier that automatically detect all kinds of scratches from frames in old films. To facilitate the detection of various scratch sizes, we use a pyramid of images generated from original frames by having the resolution at three levels. The image at each level is scanned by the NN-based classifier, which divides the input image into scratch regions and non-scratch regions. Then, to reduce the computational cost, the NN-based classifier is only applied to the edge pixels. To assess the validity of the proposed method, the experiments have been performed on old films and animations with all kinds of scratches, then the results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.231-238
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• 1995

Tc-99m-MIBI (Sestamibi) myocardial SPECT along with TI-201 tomographic Imaging has demonstrated wide application and high image quality sufficient for the diagnosis of myocardial perfusion defect, which consequently reflects regional myocardial blood flow. The qualitative values of myocardial SPECT with Tc-99m-MIBI as well ds the quantitative cases depend in some degree on the reconstruction techniques of multiple projections. Filtered backprojection (FBP) Is the common standard method for reconstruction rather than the complicated and time-consuming arithmetic methods. In FBP it is known that the distribution of radioactivity in reconstructed transverse slices varies with the selected litter parameters such as cutoff frequencies and order (Butterworth case) The cutoff frequencies used in clinicAl practice partially remove and decrease the true radioactive distribution and alter the pixel counts, which lead to underestimation of true counts in specific myocardial regions. In this study, we have investigated the effect of cutoff frequencies of reconstruction filter on the artifactually induced perfusion defects, which are often demonstrated near inferior and/or inferoseptal cardiac walls due to the intense hepatic uptake of Tc-99m-MIBI. A computerized method for Identifying the relative degree of artifactual perfusion defect and for comparing those degrees along with the relative amount of hepatic uptake to myocardium was developed and patient images were studied to observe the quantitative degree of underestimation of myocardial perfusion, and to propose some reasonable threshold of cutoff frequency in the diagnosis of perfusion defect quantitatively. We concluded that from the quantitative viewpoint cutoff frequencies may be used as high as possible with the sacrifice of homogeneity of image quality, and those frequencies lower than the common 0.3 Wyquist frequency would reveal severe degradation of radioactive distribution near inferior and/or inferoseptal myocardium when applying Butterworth or low pass filter.

• The Journal of the Institute of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.43-53
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• 2016

In this study, under the assumption that there may be differences in colour attributes that can be perceived according to the brightness of the background and the size of the colour stimulus, a test was conducted where colour matching was done for stimulus sizes of $10^{\circ}$ and $20^{\circ}$ in terms of peripheral vision by varying the background brightness. The test results showed that depending on the background brightness and the specific combinations of the Munsell colour attributes used as the test stimulus, colours can be perceived differently even if they are the same colours. In addition, in contrast to findings from previous studies on colour perception according to the stimulus size, it was found that even if the size of the colour stimulus is relatively small, colours can be perceived more colourfully or more brightly with changes in the background brightness. Based on the findings of this study, degradation in image quality can be improved, which may occur when the size of the input image is changed at a later time, and also, contributions can be made when it comes to the reproduction of effective sold three-dimensional structures that reflect visual qualities when processing 3D holographic imagery, in addition to 2D imagery.

• Investigative Magnetic Resonance Imaging
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.290-302
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• 2014

Purpose : Susceptibility-weighted magnetic resonance (MR) sequence is three-dimensional (3D), spoiled gradient-echo pulse sequences that provide a high sensitivity for the detection of blood degradation products, calcifications, and iron deposits. This pictorial review is aimed at illustrating and discussing its main clinical applications. Materials and Methods: SWI is based on high-resolution, 3D, fully velocity-compensated gradient-echo sequences using both magnitude and phase images. To enhance the visibility of the venous structures, the magnitude images are multiplied with a phase mask generated from the filtered phase data, which are displayed at best after post-processing of the 3D dataset with the minimal intensity projection algorithm. A total of 200 patients underwent MR examinations that included SWI on a 3 tesla MR imager were enrolled. Results: SWI is very useful in detecting multiple brain disorders. Among the 200 patients, 80 showed developmental venous anomaly, 22 showed cavernous malformation, 12 showed calcifications in various conditions, 21 showed cerebrovascular accident with susceptibility vessel sign or microbleeds, 52 showed brain tumors, 2 showed diffuse axonal injury, 3 showed arteriovenous malformation, 5 showed dural arteriovenous fistula, 1 showed moyamoya disease, and 2 showed Parkinson's disease. Conclusion: SWI is useful in detecting occult low flow vascular lesions, calcification and microbleed and characterising diverse brain disorders.