• Proceedings of the KOSOMBE Conference
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• v.1997 no.11
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• pp.571-574
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• 1997

fMRI, functional MRI introduced recently appears based on the gradient echo technique which is sensitive to the field inhomogeneity developed due to the local susceptibility changes of blood oxygenation and deoxygenation. Common to all the gradient echo techniques is that the signal due to the susceptibility effects is generally decreased with increasing inhomogeneity due to the $T2^*$ effect or conventionally known as blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) effect. It is, also found that the BOLD sensitivity is also dependent on the imaging modes, namely whether the imaging is in axial, or coronal or sagittal mode as well as the directions of the vessels against the main magnetic field. We have, therefore, launched a systematic study of imaging mode dependent signal change or BOLD sensitivity as well as the signal changes due to the tilting angle of the imaging planes. Study has been made or both TRFGE sequence and CGE sequence to compare the distinctions of the each mode since each technique has different sensitivity against susceptibility effect. Method of computation and both the computer simulations and their corresponding experimental results are presented.

• Proceedings of the KOSOMBE Conference
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• v.1990 no.05
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• pp.25-27
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• 1990

By designing the gradient pulses to be velocity compensated during one pulse cycle in SSFP (steady state free precession) imaging, the flowing spins can be maintained in the steady state. In the new SSFP sequence the flow signal which might be lost in conventional SSFP imaging sequences can be restored owing to the signal contribution from the preceding pulse cycles. By using the proposed SSFP sequence substantial restoration of the flow signal has been observed for the CSF (cerebro spinal fluid) of the human head.

• Proceedings of the KOSOMBE Conference
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• v.1995 no.11
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• pp.78-81
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• 1995

In imaging the samples or human internal organs in a tube shape, general RF-probe types (that encircles a sample or places on top of the sample) are usually unsuitable for the internal imaging due to the degradation of signal-to-noise ratios(SNR's). In the present study the inside-out probes for Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) have been constructed in the three different shapes such as an anti-solenoidal, a saddle and a dual surface types which are positioned as close to the area as possible by putting the probe inside the tubelike sample to improve filling factor. RF-field distributions have also been calculated depending upon the geometrical changes of anti-solenoid probes. Moreover, the performance of the inside-out probes has been checked by measuring SNR's of the images acquired. The inside-out probes constructed in this study produced better SNR's and rf-field uniformity in the area close to the probes in comparing with any other commercial probes. There is a high possibility that the constructed probes in the present study are applicable to the diagnosis of human bodies.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.25 no.6
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• pp.431-438
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• 2004

Medical ultrasonic imaging is a useful imaging facility known to be most safe and easy. It enables physicians to observe the inside structures of the bodies, blood flow, and motions of internal organs. Some physical properties of biologic tissues can also be estimated from backscattered sounds. However, the ultrasonic pulses interrogating the living organisms leave their footprints in the returning signals during imaging. Some significant details are buried in the footprints and their overlaps from adjacent particles. These distortions also decrease the quality of the images. Many research efforts have been made to enhance the image quality and to recover the acoustic information in various ways. In this study, a new interrogation method based on the wavelet and subband filter bank is proposed. It adopts the subband wavelet filters satisfying the perfect-reconstruction (PR) conditions as the interrogating pulses to restore the details useful in tissue characterization and to enhance the image quality. The proposed method was applied to two types of simulations of ultrasonic imaging. The results showed its ability to restore the detailsin the simulated interrogation of biologic tissues, and verified the improved image quality in the simulated imaging of general ultrasonic phantom compared with the conventional method.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.28 no.3
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• pp.317-324
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• 2007

The application of diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and fiber tractography to Wallerian degeneration (WD) is important because this technique is a very potent tools for quantitatively evaluating fiber tracts in vivo brain. We analyzed a case and control using tracts of interest (TOI) analysis to quantify WD. We scanned a case of old infarction and an age-matched healthy volunteer. T1 magnetization prepared rapid acquisition gradient echo (MPRAGE), fluid attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) and 12-direction diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) were obtained and analyzed using TOI analysis. The value of mean diffusity ($D_{av}$) and fracional anisotrophy (FA) were analyzed statistically by MWU test. A p-value of less than 0.05 was considered to indicate statistical significance. A comparison of the global fiber diffusion characteristics shows WD of both the corpus callosum and the ipsilateral superior longitudinal fasciculus. The corpus callosum in particular showed trans-hemispherical degeneration. Local fiber characteristics along the geodesic paths show WD in the corpus callosum, ipsilateral superior longitudinal fasciculus, ipsilateral corticospinal tract, and ipsilateral corticothalamic tract. We have demonstrated changes in $D_{av}$ and FA values and a clear correspondence with the WD in various tracts. TOI analysis successfully revealed radial WD in white matter tracts from a region of encephalomalacia and primary gliosis, although they were only slightly affected.

• Proceedings of the KOSOMBE Conference
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• v.1997 no.05
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• pp.235-238
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• 1997

The Graphical User Interface (GUI) software is developed for 0.3 Tesla Permanent Magnet Resonance Imaging (MRI) system and the state of art of designing GUI system is discussed in this paper. The Object-Oriented concepts are applied for designing GUI software utilizing Interbase ODBC Database layer. Also, Multimedia concepts such as voice, sound and music are integrated in GUI system to enhance the efficiency of MRI operation.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.37 no.4
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• pp.140-146
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• 2016

The ultrasound imaging in medical diagnosis has become a popular modality because of its safe, noninvasive, portable, relatively inexpensive, and provides a real-time image formation. However, usefulness of ultrasound imaging is at times limited due to the presence of signal-dependent noise like as speckle. Therefore, noise reduction is very important, as various types of noise generated limits the effectiveness of medical image diagnosis. This paper introduces a speckle noise reduce algorithm using total variation denoising (TVD) in Laplacian pyramid. With this method, speckle is removed by TVD of bandpass ultrasound images in Laplacian pyramid domain. For TVD in each pyramid layer, a ${\lambda}$ is selected by trial-and-error method. The visual comparison of despeckled 'in vivo' ultrasound images from pancreas shows that the proposed method could effectively preserve edges and detailed structures while thoroughly suppressing speckle. For a Simulated B-mode image, contrast-to-noise-ratio (CNR) and signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) were obtained like 4.65 dB and 14.11 dB, respectively. The results show that the proposed method can conduct better than some of the existing methods in terms of the CNR and the SNR.

• Journal of radiological science and technology
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• v.39 no.3
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• pp.399-406
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• 2016

Near-infrared radiation (NIR) is non-ionizing, non-invasive, and deep tissue penetration in biological material, thereby increasing research interests as a medical imaging technique in the world. However, the use of current near-infrared medical image is extremely limited in Korea (ROK) since it is not well known among radiologic technologists and radiological researchers. Therefore to strengthen the knowledge for NIR medical imaging is necessary so as to prepare a qualified radiological professionals to serve medical images in high-quality on the clinical sites. In this study, an overview of the features and principles of NIR imaging was demonstrated. The latest research topics and worldwide research trends were introduced for radiologic technologist to reinforce their technical skills. In particular, wound care and diabetic foot which have high feasibility for clinical translation were introduced in order to contribute to accelerating NIR research for developing the field of radiological science.

• Proceedings of the KOSOMBE Conference
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• v.1998 no.11
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• pp.297-298
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• 1998

Prototype portal imaging device (EPID) based on CCD camera, which has a $20\times20cm^2$ field of view (FOV), has been developed and then tested by acquiring phantom images for 6 MV x-ray beam. While, among the captured images, each frame suffered notorious quantum noise, the frame averaging largely enhanced the image quality against quantum noise. Over 60 frames averaging, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) was increased by $\sim20$ times and contrast was increased about 2 times in the skull-region of the acquired head-phantom image.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.31 no.3
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• pp.177-186
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• 2010

In 3D ultrasound color Doppler imaging (CDI), 8-16 pulse transmissions (ensembles) per each scanline are used for effective clutter rejection and flow estimation, but it yields a low volume acquisition rate. In this paper, we have evaluated three flow estimation methods: autoregression (AR), eigendecomposition (ED), and autocorrelation combined with adaptive clutter rejection (AC-ACR) for a small ensemble size (E=4). The performance of AR, ED and AC-ACR methods was compared using 2D and 3D in vivo data acquired under different clutter conditions (common carotid artery, kidney and liver). To evaluate the effectiveness of three methods, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were generated. For 2D kidney in vivo data, the AC-ACR method outperforms the AR and ED methods in terms of the area under the ROC curve (AUC) (0.852 vs. 0.793 and 0.813, respectively). Similarly, the AC-ACR method shows higher AUC values for 2D liver in vivo data compared to the AR and ED methods (0.855 vs. 0.807 and 0.823, respectively). For the common carotid artery data, the AR provides higher AUC values, but it suffers from biased estimates. For 3D in vivo data acquired from a kidney transplant patient, the AC-ACR with E=4 provides an AUC value of 0.799. These in vivo experiment results indicate that the AC-ACR method can provide more robust flow estimates compared to the AR and ED methods with a small ensemble size.