• Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.27 no.7
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• pp.1038-1042
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• 2006

A new type of DTPA-bis-amides (L1-L4) and their Gd(III)-complexes of the type $[Gd(L)(H_2O)]{\cdot}nH_2O$ (5: L1; 6: L2; 7: L3; 8: L4) have been prepared and characterized by analytical and spectroscopic techniques. The X-ray crystal structure of 8 has been determined for structural confirmation. The coordination geometry adopts a tricapped trigonal prism geometry with L4 acting as a chelate octadentate and a water molecule in the coordination sphere. Crystals are monoclinic, $P2_1$, a = 14.468(3), b = 19.235(4), c = 13.527(2) $\AA$ $\beta$ = $107.245(3)^{\circ}$, V = 3595.2(11) $\AA^3$, Z = 4, $D_{calc}$ = 1.570. Significant increases in relaxivities are observed with 6 and 7 as compared with that of $Omniscan^{(R)}$, a commercial MR agent: R1 = 12.46 $mM^{-1}\;s^{-1}$, R2 = 8.76 $mM^{-1}\;s^{-1}$ for 6; R1 = 12.77 nm-1 s-1, R2 = 7.60 mM-1 s-1 for 7; R1 = 4.9 $mM^{-1}\;s^{-1}$, R2 = 4.8 $mm^{-1}\;s^{-1}$ for $Omniscan^{(R)}$. In the case of 5, however, both R1 and R2 are found to be lower to show 2.09 $mM^{-1}\;s^{-1}$, and 1.82 $mM^{-1}\;s^{-1}$, respectively.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.29 no.6
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• pp.436-442
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• 2008

Magnetic resonance electrical impedance tomography(MREIT) has been suggested to produce cross-sectional conductivity images of an electrically conducting object such as the human body. In most previous studies, recessed electrodes have been used to inject imaging currents into the object. An MRI scanner was used to capture induced magnetic flux density data inside the object and a conductivity image reconstruction algorithm was applied to the data. This paper reports the performance of a thin and flexible carbon-hydrogel electrode that replaces the bulky and rigid recessed electrode in previous studies. The new carbon-hydrogel electrode produces a negligible amount of artifacts in MR and conductivity images and significantly simplifies the experimental procedure. We can fabricate the electrode in different shapes and sizes. Adding a layer of conductive adhesive, we can easily attach the electrode on an irregular surface with an excellent contact. Using a pair of carbon-hydrogel electrodes with a large contact area, we may inject an imaging current with increased amplitude primarily due to a reduced average current density underneath the electrodes. Before we apply the new electrode to a human subject, we evaluated its performance by conducting MREIT imaging experiments of five swine legs. Reconstructed conductivity images of the swine legs show a good contrast among different muscles and bones. We suggest a future study of human experiments using the carbon-hydrogel electrode following the guideline proposed in this paper.

• Journal of Korean Neurosurgical Society
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• v.29 no.5
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• pp.615-622
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• 2000

Objective : Percutaneous vertebroplasty is an effective and minimally invasive procedure consisting of the injection of a PMMA(polymethyl methacrylate) into the vertebral body compression fracture with osteoporosis. Matherials and Methods : Twenty-eight procedures were performed for vertebral body compression fractures with osteoporosis in 25 patients(22 women, 3 men). The mean age was 65.9 years old. The inclusion criteria for percutaneous vertebroplasty were 1) acute vertebral body compression fracture with osteoporosis, 2) expected high operative morbidity in old age, 3) no neurologic deficits, 4) no or minimal canal enchroachment, 5) patient refusal of invasive surgery. All patients underwent MR images before the procedure. Under local anesthesia, after the percutaneous needle puncture of the involved vertebra via a transpedicular approach and venography using the water soluble contrast material, PMMA injection was introduced into the fractured vertebral body. Results : The procedure was technically successful in all patients. All patients experienced excellent pain relief (complete pain relief ; 10, marked pain relief ; 14). One patient experienced marked pain relief, however, the patient died during the follow-up period due to stomach cancer. There were twelve paravertebral tissue leaks, twelve paravertebral venous plexus leaks, four epidural leaks and one intradiskal leak, but no clinically significant complications occurred in all patients. Conclusion : Percutaneous vertebraoplasty is a valuable procedure in the treatment of vertebral body compression fracture with osteoporosis, providing immediate pain relief and early mobilization. MRI is the most reliable diagnostic tool for identifying painful fractured vertebral body.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Medical Physics Conference
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• 2002.09a
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• pp.506-508
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• 2002

As an advancement of medical imaging modalities and analyzing software with multi-function, active researches to acquire high contrast and high resolution image being done. In recently, development of medical imaging modalities like as Computed Tomography (CT) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is aiming to display anatomical structure more accuracy and faster. Thus, one of the important areas in CT today is the use of CT scanner for the quantitative evaluation of 3-D reconstruction images from 2-D tomographic images. In CT system, the effective slice thickness and the quality of 3-D reconstructed image will be influenced by imaging acquisition parameters (e.g. pitch and scan mode). In diagnosis and surgical planning, the accurate distance measurements of 3-D anatomical structures play an important role and the accuracy of distance measurements will depend on the acquisition parameters such as slice thickness, pitch, and scan mode. The skull phantom was scanned with SDCT for various acquisition parameters and acquisition slice thicknesses were 3 and 5 mm, and reconstruction intervals were 1, 2, and 3 mm to each pitch. 3-D visualizations and distance measurements were performed with PC based 3-D rendering and analyzing software. Results showed that the image quality and the measurement accuracy of 3-D SDCT images are independent to the reconstruction intervals and pitches.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.431-438
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• 1995

Functional imaging based on the susceptibility only is achieved by separation of the susceptibility effect from the mixture of flow effect by use of a tailored RF pulse in conjunction with gradient echo sequence. Using the tailored RF pulse the susceptibility enhanced functional imaging appears to be explicitly related to the deoxygenation processes, while in the conventional gradient echo technique functional contrast on $T2^{*}$ effect images appear to be mixed with a significant fraction of blood flow (in- flow) signals of both arterial as well as venous bloods due to the nature of the fast sequence employed with the gradient echo technique. In this paper, using the tailored RF pulses, one can unambiguously separate the susceptibility and flow effects in functional imaging. Since the signal obtained can be made sufficiently high and represents oxygenation process more accurately, it seems possible to study quantitative oxygen metabolisms in brain function hitherto difficult to do with other gradient echo techniques.

• Journal of Korean Academy of Oral and Maxillofacial Radiology
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.165-174
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• 1996

The authors diagnosed a 33 years old female as benign lymphoepithelial lesion after undergoing clinical, radiological and histopathological examinations and the characteristics were as follows : 1. Clinically, the patient complained of painless bilateral swelling of the parotid glands and dryness of the palate. Rheumatoid factor was detected in her serum. 2. Sialograms showed punctate or globular collections of contrast media distributed evenly throughout the parotid glands in so-called 'cherry blossom' or 'leafless fruit-laden tree' appearance. 3. A salivary gland scan showed no uptake of radioisotopes by the parotid glands. 4. At Tl-weighted imaging of PNS MRI, the lesions had the same signal intensity as the rest of the gland. At TI-weighted imaging, the lesions could be seen as high signal intensity 1.3 cm and 2.1 cm in diameter in the left and the right parotid gland respectively. 5. Ultrasonogram showed sonolucent lesions 20×15mm and 17×14mm in size in the lower part of the left parotid gland and another 18×11mm in size in the lower part of the parotid gland as well as many other small sonolucent lesions. 6. Histopathologically, lymphocytic infiltration replacing the normal acini and lymphoid follicles containing germinal centers could be seen. Epimyoepithelial islands were scattered throughout the lesion and benign lymphoepithelial cysts were also observed.

• Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases
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• v.76 no.2
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• pp.88-92
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• 2014

We hereby report a case on bronchogenic cyst which is initially non-infected, then becomes infected after bronchoscopic ultrasound (US)-guided transesophageal fine-needle aspiration (FNA). The non-infected bronchogenic cyst appears to be filled with relatively echogenic materials on US, and the aspirate is a whitish jelly-like fluid. Upon contrast-enhanced MRI of the infected bronchogenic cyst, a T1-weighted image shows low signal intensity and a T2-weighted image shows high signal intensity, with no enhancements of the cyst contents, but enhancements of the thickened cystic wall. The patient then undergo video-assisted thoracic surgery 14 days after the FNA. The cystic mass is known to be completely removed, and the aspirate is yellowish and purulent. To understand the image findings that pertain to the gross appearance of the cyst contents will help to diagnose bronchogenic cysts in the future.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.41 no.6
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• pp.228-234
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• 2020

Superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs) are approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States. SPIONs are used in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as contrast agents and targeted delivery in nanomedicine using external magnet sources. SPIONs act as an artificial peroxidase (i.e., nanozyme), and these reactions were highly stable in various pH conditions and temperatures. In this study, we report a nanozyme ability of the clustered SPIONs (CSPIONs) synthesized by the oil-in-water (O/W) method and coated with biocompatible poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA). We hypothesize that the CSPIONs can have high sensitivity toward H2O2 derived from the reaction between a fixed amount of glucose and glucose oxidase (GOX). As a result, CSPIONs oxidized a 2,2'-azino-bis(3-ethylbenzthiazoline-6-sulfonic acid) diammonium salt (ABTS) commonly used as a substrate for hydrogen peroxidase in the presence of H2O2, leading to a change in the color of the substrate. We also utilized a colorimetric assay at 417 nm using various glucose concentrations from 5 mM to 1.25 μM to validate β-D-glucose detection. This study demonstrated that the absorbance value increases along with increasing the glucose level. The results were highly repeated at concentrations below 5 mM (all standard deviations < 0.03). Moreover, the sensitivity and limit of detection were 1.50 and 5.44 μM, respectively, in which CSPIONs are more responsive to glucose than SPIONs. In conclusion, this study suggests that CSPIONs have the potential to be used for glucose detection in diabetic patients using a physiological fluid such as ocular, saliva, and urine.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.16-37
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• 2022

Accurate liver segment segmentation based on radiological images is indispensable for the preoperative analysis of liver tumor resection surgery. However, most of the existing segmentation methods are not feasible to be used directly for this task due to the challenge of exact edge prediction with some tiny and slender vessels as its clinical segmentation criterion. To address this problem, we propose a novel deep learning based segmentation model, called Boundary-Aware Dual Attention Liver Segment Segmentation Model (BADA). This model can improve the segmentation accuracy of liver segments with enhancing the edges including the vessels serving as segment boundaries. In our model, the dual gated attention is proposed, which composes of a spatial attention module and a semantic attention module. The spatial attention module enhances the weights of key edge regions by concerning about the salient intensity changes, while the semantic attention amplifies the contribution of filters that can extract more discriminative feature information by weighting the significant convolution channels. Simultaneously, we build a dataset of liver segments including 59 clinic cases with dynamically contrast enhanced MRI(Magnetic Resonance Imaging) of portal vein stage, which annotated by several professional radiologists. Comparing with several state-of-the-art methods and baseline segmentation methods, we achieve the best results on this clinic liver segment segmentation dataset, where Mean Dice, Mean Sensitivity and Mean Positive Predicted Value reach 89.01%, 87.71% and 90.67%, respectively.

• Korean Journal of Radiology
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• v.22 no.11
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• pp.1809-1821
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• 2021

Ovarian cystadenofibroma is a benign ovarian tumor that is characterized by a consistent percentage of masses, which remain indeterminate in ultrasonography and require magnetic resonance (MR) investigation; they may mimic borderline or malignant lesions. Three main morphologic patterns, resembling different ovarian neoplasms, can be identified in cystadenofibromas: multilocular solid lesions, unilocular cystic lesions with parietal thickening, and purely cystic masses. However, a cystoadenofibroma has typical features, such as T2-weighted hypointensity associated with no restrictions in diffusion-weighted imaging (the so-called "dark-dark appearance") and progressive post-contrast enhancement (type I perfusion curve). The purpose of this study was to review the features of ovarian cystadenofibromas in MR imaging and to suggest pearls and pitfalls regarding their correct diagnosis.