• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.261-268
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• 2004

Osteoporosis is a clinical condition in which the amount of bone tissue is reduced and the likelihood of fracture is increased. It is known that the electrical property of the bone is related to its density, and, in particular, the electrical resistance of the bone decreases as the bone loss increases. This implies that the electrical property of bone may be an useful parameter to diagnose osteoporosis, provided that it can be readily measured. The study attempted to evaluate the electrical conductivity of bone using a technique of electrical impedance tomography (EIT). It nay not be easy in general to get an EIT for the bone due to the big difference (an order of 2) of electrical properties between the bone and the surrounding soft tissue. In the present study, we took an adaptive mesh regeneration technique originally developed for the detection of two phase boundaries and modified it to be able to reconstruct the electrical conductivity inside the boundary provided that the geometry of the boundary was given. Numerical simulation was carried out for a tibia phantom, circular cylindrical phantom (radius of 40 mm) inside of which there is an ellipsoidal homeogenous tibia bone (short and long radius are 17 mm and 15 mm, respectively) surrounded by the soft tissue. The bone was located in the 15 mm above from the center of the circular cross section of the phantom. The electrical conductivity of the soft tissue was set to be 4 mS/cm and varies from 0.01 to 1 ms/cm for the bone. The simulation considered measurement errors in order to look into its effects. The simulated results showed that, if the measurement error was maintained less than 5 %, the reconstructed electrical conductivity of the bone was within 10 % errors. The accuracy increased with the electrical conductivity of the bone, as expected. This indicates that the present technique provides more accurate information for osteoporotic bones. It should be noted that tile simulation is based on a simple two phase image for the bone and the surrounding soft tissue when its anatomical information is provided. Nevertheless, the study indicates the possibility that the EIT technique may be used as a new means to detect the bone loss leading to osteoporotic fractures.

• Journal of the Korean Geophysical Society
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.57-66
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• 2000

The location and geometry of the Ulsan Fault play important roles in interpreting tectonic evolution of the southeastern part of the Korean Peninsula. Dipole-dipole electrical resistivity surveys and seismic refraction surveys were carried out in the Yaksoo area, Ulsan in order to measure the thickness of the alluvium covering the Ulsan Fault and to find associated fracture zones and possibly the location of its major fault plane. The collected data were analyzed and interpreted. Some results reported previously by others were also used in this interpretation. No low resistivity anomalies were found in the cross-sectional resistivity image of the survey line located in the east of the Dong River. In contrast, well-developed continuous low resistivity anomalies were detected in the west of the Dong River. This strongly suggests that the major fault plane of the Ulsan Fault is located under or in the west part of the Dong River. Two refraction boundaries corresponding to the underground water level and the bottom of the alluvium were found by refraction surveys carried out on the limited part of the east survey line. The thickness of the alluvium was found to be about 30 m. Small faults in the basement rock identified by reflection surveys were not detected by both resistivity and refraction seismic surveys. This might be explained by assuming that low resistivity anomaly is more closely related to the clay contents than the water contents. On the other hand, it may be resulted by the limited resolution of the resistivity and refraction surveys. Detailed study is required to clarify the reason. Resistivity survey is frequently considered to be a good exploration method to detect subsurface faults. However, it appears to be less useful than reflection seismic survey in this work. In dipole-dipole resistivity survey, the number of separation should be increased to survey deeper subsurface with the same resolution. However, signal to noise ratio decreases as the number of separation increases. In this survey area, the signal to noise ratio of up to sixteen separations was good enough based on the statistical properties of measurements.

• Geophysics and Geophysical Exploration
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.171-182
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• 2018

We performed the seismic field data processing using an open-source software (Madagascar) to verify if it is applicable to processing of field data, which has low signal-to-noise ratio and high uncertainties in velocities. The Madagascar, based on Python, is usually supposed to be better in the development of processing technologies due to its capabilities of multidimensional data analysis and reproducibility. However, this open-source software has not been widely used so far for field data processing because of complicated interfaces and data structure system. To verify the effectiveness of the Madagascar software on field data, we applied it to a typical seismic data processing flow including data loading, geometry build-up, F-K filter, predictive deconvolution, velocity analysis, normal moveout correction, stack, and migration. The field data for the test were acquired in Gunsan Basin, Yellow Sea using a streamer consisting of 480 channels and 4 arrays of air-guns. The results at all processing step are compared with those processed with Landmark's ProMAX (SeisSpace R5000) which is a commercial processing software. Madagascar shows relatively high efficiencies in data IO and management as well as reproducibility. Additionally, it shows quick and exact calculations in some automated procedures such as stacking velocity analysis. There were no remarkable differences in the results after applying the signal enhancement flows of both software. For the deeper part of the substructure image, however, the commercial software shows better results than the open-source software. This is simply because the commercial software has various flows for de-multiple and provides interactive processing environments for delicate processing works compared to Madagascar. Considering that many researchers around the world are developing various data processing algorithms for Madagascar, we can expect that the open-source software such as Madagascar can be widely used for commercial-level processing with the strength of expandability, cost effectiveness and reproducibility.