• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.565-572
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• 2023

This study was conducted to analyze the status radiological imaging examinations assessment in Korea medical institutions conducted in the public sector and suggest a direction for improvement. Among the assessment of medical institutions, the main assessment related to radiographic imaging examinations are the certification evaluation of medical institutions and the adequacy assessment of radiographic imaging examinations. The certification evaluation of medical institutions evaluates the image inspection operation process, provision of accurate results, and compliance with safety management procedures. In the assessment of adequacy of radiographic imaging examinations, structural indicators related to manpower and equipment, patient evaluation implementation rate, and exposure reduction programs were included. However, for safer and higher-quality radiological imaging examinations, it is necessary to increase the participation rate of medical institutions in certification evaluations. In addition, it is necessary to improve the manpower indicator, and incentive payments can be considered to induce quality improvement of medical institutions in the future. Integrated management of radiation exposure at the national level should also be carried out simultaneously.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.807-816
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• 2001

The purpose of this research was to compare American Korean consumers perceptions or evaluations of womens formal wear and casual wear. Results revealed that two groups classified differently the products in formal wear, not casual wear. In general, compared to Korean subjects, Americans rated the Korean business formal wear as more fashionable, attractive, stylish and of having higher quality than U.S. formal wear, indicating they were more likely to purchase. On the other hand, compared to U.S. subjects, in general, Koreans rated higher the U.S. casual wear as more liking, purchasing, comfortable, and appealing than Korean casual wear. Regarding clothing image toward each picture, there was a statically difference in both groups. To increase American or Korean exports of apparels, companies must look globally to develop new markets for their products.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.296-302
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• 2023

As Multimedia industry has evolved, it has become possible to display resolutions in various formats. Therefore, the performance of a scaler algorithm that converts resolutions while maintaining high quality and its hardware implementation are important. Considering the hardware design of an image up/down scaler, this paper proposes a combinatorial scaler algorithm that uses modified bilinear interpolation in the vertical direction and bicubic interpolation in the horizontal direction to reduce the line memory burden. Through quantitative and qualitative evaluations, this paper compared the performance of the proposed algorithm with three other well-known algorithms, and also compared the hardware burden of its hardware implementation. This paper used a sinusoidal signal and eight typical images for performance evaluation.

• Investigative Magnetic Resonance Imaging
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.207-214
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• 2016

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of the number of measurement points on the calculation of transverse relaxation time (T2) with a focus on muscle T2. Materials and Methods: This study assumed that muscle T2 was comprised of a single component. Two phantom types were measured, 1 each for long ("phantom") and short T2 ("polyvinyl alcohol gel"). Right calf muscle T2 measurements were conducted in 9 healthy male volunteers using multiple-spin-echo magnetic resonance imaging. For phantoms and muscle (medial gastrocnemius), 5 regions of interests were selected. All region of interest values were expressed as the mean ${\pm}$ standard deviation. The T2 effective signal-ratio characteristics were used as an index to evaluate the magnetic resonance image quality for the calculation of T2 from T2-weighted images. The T2 accuracy was evaluated to determine the T2 reproducibility and the goodness-of-fit from the probability Q. Results: For the phantom and polyvinyl alcohol gel, the standard deviation of the magnetic resonance image signal at each echo time was narrow and mono-exponential, which caused large variations in the muscle T2 decay curves. The T2 effective signal-ratio change varied with T2, with the greatest decreases apparent for a short T2. There were no significant differences in T2 reproducibility when > 3 measurement points were used. There were no significant differences in goodness-of-fit when > 6 measurement points were used. Although the measurement point evaluations were stable when > 3 measurement points were used, calculation of T2 using 4 measurement points had the highest accuracy according to the goodness-of-fit. Even if the number of measurement points was increased, there was little improvement in the probability Q. Conclusion: Four measurement points gave excellent reproducibility and goodness-of-fit when muscle T2 was considered mono-exponential.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.14 no.9
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• pp.1125-1137
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• 2011

Recently, there have been previous research about the iris recognition in mobile device to increase portability, whose accuracy is affected by the quality of iris image. Iris image is affected by illumination environment during the image acquisition. The existing system has high accuracy in indoor environment. However the accuracy is degraded in outdoor environment, because the gray levels of iris patterns in image are changed, and ghost and eyelash shading regions are produced by the sunlight of various wavelengths into iris region. To overcome these problems, we propose new mobile iris camera system which uses the near-infrared (NIR) light illuminator of 850 nm and band pass filter (BPF) of 850 nm. To measure the performance of the proposed system, we compared it to the existing one with the iris images captured in indoor and outdoor sunlight environments in terms of the equal error rates (EER) based on false acceptance rate (FAR) and false rejection rate (FRR). The experimental result showed that the proposed system had the lower EERs than those of previous system by 0.96% (with frontal light in indoors), 4.94% (with frontal light in outdoor), 9.24% (with side light in outdoor), and 7% (with back light in outdoor), respectively.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.37A no.12
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• pp.1054-1064
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• 2012

HDR (high dynamic range) tone mapping algorithms are used in image processing that reduces the dynamic range of an image to be displayed on LDR (low dynamic range) devices properly. The retinex is one of the tone mapping algorithms to provide dynamic range compression, color constancy, and color rendition. It has been developed through multi-scale methods and luminance-based methods. Retinex algorithms still have drawbacks such as the emphasized noise and desaturation. In this paper, we propose a multi scale tone mapping algorithm for enhancement of contrast, saturation, and noise of HDR rendered images based on visual brightness functions. In the proposed algorithm, HSV color space has been used for preserving the hue and saturation of images. And the algorithm includes the estimation of minimum and maximum luminance level and a visual gamma function for the variation of viewing conditions. And subjective and objective evaluations show that proposed algorithm is better than existing algorithms. The proposed algorithm is expected to image quality enhancement in some fields that require a improvement of the dynamic range due to the changes in the viewing condition.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.51 no.4
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• pp.110-122
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• 2014

As multimedia technologies develop, three-dimensional (3D) technologies are attracting increasing attention from researchers. In particular, video quality assessment (VQA) has become a critical issue in stereoscopic image/video processing applications. Furthermore, a human visual system (HVS) could play an important role in the measurement of stereoscopic video quality, yet existing VQA methods have done little to develop a HVS for stereoscopic video. We seek to amend this by proposing a 3D visual attention (3DVA) model which simulates the HVS for stereoscopic video by combining multiple perceptual stimuli such as depth, motion, color, intensity, and orientation contrast. We utilize this 3DVA model for pooling on significant regions of very poor video quality, and we propose no-reference (NR) stereoscopic VQA (SVQA) method. We validated the proposed SVQA method using subjective test scores from our results and those reported by others. Our approach yields high correlation with the measured mean opinion score (MOS) as well as consistent performance in asymmetric coding conditions. Additionally, the 3DVA model is used to extract information for the region-of-interest (ROI). Subjective evaluations of the extracted ROI indicate that the 3DVA-based ROI extraction outperforms the other compared extraction methods using spatial or/and temporal terms.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.23-30
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• 2018

To evaluate the effect of patient size on effective dose and image quality for Digital Chest Tomosynthesis(DTS) using additional 0.3 mm copper filtration. Eighty artificial nodules were placed in the thorax phantom("Lungman," Kyoto Kagaku, Japan), and Digital Chest Tomosynthesis(DTS) images of the phantom were acquired both with and without added 0.3 mm Cu filtration. To simulate patients of three sizes: small, average size and oversize, one or two 20-mm-thick layer of PMMA(polymethyl methacrylatek) blocks were placed on the phantom. The Effective dose was calculated using Monte Carlo simulations. Two evaluations of image quality methods have been employed. Three readers counted the number of nodules detected in the lung, and the measured contrast-to-noise ratios(CNRs) were used. Data were analyzed statistically. The ED reduced $26{\mu}Sv$ in a phantom, $33{\mu}Sv$ in one 20-mm-thick layer of PMMA block placed on the phantom, and $48{\mu}Sv$ in two 20-mm-thick layer of PMMA blocks placed on the phantom. The Effective dose(ED) differences between DTS with and without filtration were significant(p<0.05). In particular, when we used two 20-mm-thick layer of PMMA blocks placed on the phantom, the ED was significantly reduced by 36% compared with those without additional filtration. Nodule detection sensitivities were not different between with and without added filtration. Differences of CNRs were statistically insignificant(p>0.05). Use of additional filtration allows a considerable dose reduction during Digital Chest Tomosynthesis(DTS) without loss of image quality. In particular, additional filtration showed outstanding result for effective dose reduction on two 20-mm-thick layer of PMMA blocks placed on the phantom. It applies to overweight patients.

• Proceedings of the Korea Contents Association Conference
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• 2009.05a
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• pp.1141-1149
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• 2009

In Bone Mineral Density(BMD) measurements, accuracy and precision must be superior in order to know the small changes in bone mineral density and actual biological changes. Therefore the purpose of this study is to increase the reliability of bone mineral density inspection through appropriate management of image quality from machines and inspectors. For the machine management method, the recommended phantom from each bone mineral density machine manufacturer was used to take 10~25 measurements to determine the standard amount and permitted limit. On each inspection day, measurements were taken everyday or at least three times per week to verify the whether or not change existed in the amount of actual bone mineral density. Also evaluations following Shewhart control chart and CUSUM control chart rules were made for the bone mineral density figures from the phantoms used for measurements. Various forms of management became necessary for machine installation and movement. For the management methods of inspectors, evaluation of the measurement precision was conducted by testing the reproducibility of the exact same figures without any real biological changes occurring during reinspection. There were two measurement methods followed: patients were either measured twice with 30 measurements or three times with 15 measurements. An important point to make regarding measurements is that after the first inspection and any other inspection following, the patient was required to come off the inspection table completely and then get back on for any further measurements. With a 95% confidence level, the precision error produced from the measurement bone mineral figures produced a precision error of 2.77 times the minimum of the biological bone mineral density change (Least significant change: LSC). In order to assure reliability in inspection, there needs to be good oversight of machine management and measurer for machine operation and inspection error. Accuracy error in machines needs to be reduced to under 1% for scientific development in bone mineral density machines.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.9 no.6
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• pp.178-186
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• 2009

The quality control is needed to ensure the accuracy of medical information and achieved by evaluating the performance of and maintaining the system and practicing various measurements and evaluations. The Korean Institute for Accreditation of Medical Image, therefore, have held educational program for quality control of special medical equipments. The major of programs participants, however, are radiology specialists with only small number of radiological technologists from some hospitals, furthermore, the follow-up education and the share of information between participants and non-participants are insufficient in general, thus, the knowledge level of radiological technologists, regardless of their participation, is relatively low. This study carried out the questionnaire research for the 500 radiological technologists registered in Korean Society of MRI Technology, on the basis of 2008, and performed analysis for five months from May to Oct., 2008. The questionnaires were delivered by post to each radiological technologists and the response rate was 36%(n=180). The results of this revealed that the 86.7% of respondents felt the necessity of inspection on quality management, while only the 27.8% completed the educational program for manager of special medical equipment. and only the half(53.9%) had the knowledge about inspection on quality management. The completion of educational program had no correlations with sex, age, size of occupying hospital, the number of radiological technologists in occupying site and MRI laboratory, career year of general radiologist and in MRI laboratory, and the presence of biomedical engineering department in occupying hospital. The 78.0% of participants at the educational program for quality management held by the Korean Institute for Accreditation of Medical Image had the knowledge about inspection on quality management(p<.05) whereas the 43.9% of the hospitals held such program and the 54.4% of radiological technologists from those hospitals had related knowledge, which indicated that such programs held by hospitals had not effects on the knowledge level of radiological technologists. This indicates also that the contents, methods, and other conditional factors of educational programs are important for the outcome of them.