• The Korean Journal of Nuclear Medicine
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• v.38 no.2
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• pp.143-151
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• 2004

Recent progress in the development of non-invasive imaging technologies continues to strengthen the role of molecular imaging biological research. These tools have been validated recently in variety of research models, and have been shown to provide continuous quantitative monitoring of the location(s), magnitude, and time-variation of gene expression. This article reviews the principles, characteristics, categories and the use of radionuclide reporter gene imaging technologies as they have been used in imaging cell trafficking, imaging gene therapy, imaging endogenous gene expression and imaging molecular interactions. The studios published to date demonstrate that reporter gene imaging technologies will help to accelerate pre-clinical model validation as well as allow for clinical monitoring of human diseases.

• Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging
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• v.43 no.3
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• pp.229-239
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• 2009

Molecular imaging strives to visualize processes in living subjects at the molecular level. Monitoring biochemical processes at this level will allow us to directly track biological processes and signaling events that lead to pathophysiological abnormalities, and help make personalized medicine a reality by allowing evaluation of therapeutic efficacies on an individual basis. Although most molecular imaging techniques emerged from the field of oncology, they have now gradually gained acceptance by the cardiovascular community. Hence, the availability of dedicated high-resolution small animal imaging systems and specific targeting imaging probes is now enhancing our understanding of cardiovascular diseases and expediting the development of newer therapies. Examples include imaging approaches to evaluate and track the progress of recent genetic and cellular therapies for treatment of myocardial ischemia. Other areas include in vivo monitoring of such key molecular processes as angiogenesis and apoptosis, Cardiovascular molecular imaging is already an important research tool in preclinical experiments. The challenge that lies ahead is to implement these techniques into the clinics so that they may help fulfill the promise of molecular therapies and personalized medicine, as well as to resolve disappointments and controversies surrounding the field.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.93-98
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• 1996

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new localized imaging method of reduced imaging time luting a locally-linear gradient. Since most fast MR(Magnetic Resonance) imaging methods need the whole $\kappa$-space(Spatial frequency space) data corresponding to the whole imaging area, there are limitstions in reducing the minimum imaging time. The imaging method proposed in this paper uses a specially-made gradient coil generating a local ramp-shape field and uniform field outside of the imaging areal Conventional imaging sequences can be used without any RF/gradient pulse sequence modifiestions except the change in the number of encoding steps and the field of view.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.22-29
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• 2006

This paper proposes an efficient array beamforming method using spatial matched filtering for ultrasound imaging. In the proposed method, ultrasound waves are transmitted from an array subaperture with fixed transmit focus as in conventional array imaging. At receive, radio frequency (RF) echo signals from each receive channel are passed through a spatial matched filter that is constructed based on the system transmit-receive spatial impulse response. The filtered echo signals are then summed. The filter remaps and spatially registers the acoustic energy from each element so that the pulse-echo impulse response of the summed output is focused with acceptably low side lobes. Analytical beam pattern analysis and simulation results using a linear array show that the proposed spatial filtering method can provide more improved spatial resolution and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) compared with conventional dynamic receive focusing (DRF) method by implementing two-way dynamically focused beam pattern throughout the field.

• Proceedings of the KOSOMBE Conference
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• v.1985 no.06
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• pp.40-43
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• 1985

• Proceedings of the KOSOMBE Conference
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• v.1997 no.05
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• pp.230-234
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• 1997

The matching pursuit (MP) algorithm developed by S. Mallat and Z. Zhang is applied to magnetic resonance (MR) imaging. Since matching pursuit is a greedy algorithm to find waveforms which are the best match for an object-signal, the signal can be decomposed with a few iterations. In this paper, we propose an application of the MP algorithm to the MR imaging to reduce imaging time. Inner products of residual signals and selected waveforms in the MP algorithm are derived from the MR signals by excitation of RF pulses which are fourier transforms of selected waveforms. Results from computer simulations demonstrate that the imaging time is reduced by using the MP algorithm and further a progressive reconstruction can be achieved.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.265-270
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• 2007

Polarization imaging systems have been widely used to selectively characterize skin lesions. Nevertheless, current systems are used in single-mode due to the limitations of a fixed polarization mode and a single-working distance of light source, in which uniform light distribution is achieved on target area. To address such limitations, we developed a variable polarization imaging system based on multi-working distance of light source for various clinical diagnoses. In this study, we characterize the imaging system and present experiment results demonstrating its clinical usefulness. The imaging system consists of a CCD color camera, linear polarization filters, and a single-layered LED ring light source which provides uniform light distribution at multi-working distances. The first polarizer was placed on the light source and the second polarizer placed on objective lens provides continuous linear polarization angle from $0^{\circ}\;to\;90^{\circ}$. The clinical efficacy of the imaging system was investigated by acquiring and analyzing clinical images of skin wrinkle and dental plaque. With the experiments, we verified the potential usefulness of the imaging system for other clinical applications.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.117-124
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• 2006

Recently, active research has been going on to measure the elastic modulus of human soft tissue with medical ultrasound imaging systems for the purpose of diagnosing cancers or tumors which have been difficult to detect with conventional B-mode imaging techniques. In this paper, a real-time ultrasonic elasticity imaging system is implemented in software on a Pentium processor-based ultrasonic diagnostic imaging system. Soft tissue is subjected to external vibration, and the resulting tissue displacements change the phase of received echoes, which is in turn used to estimate tissue elasticity. It was confirmed from experiment with a phantom that the implemented elasticity imaging system could differentiate between soft and hard regions, where the latter is twice harder than the former, while operating at an adequate frame rate of 20 frames/s.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.36 no.3
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• pp.55-60
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• 2015

An effective image retrieval system is required as the amount of medical imaging data is increasing recently. Authors reviewed the recent development of text-based medical image retrieval including the use of controlled vocabularies - RadLex (Radiology Lexicon), FMA (Foundational Model of Anatomy), etc - natural language processing, semantic ontology, and image annotation and markup.

• Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging
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• v.40 no.6
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• pp.279-292
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• 2006

Recent progress in the development of non-invasive imaging technologies continues to strengthen the role of biomedical research. These tools have been validated recently in variety of research models, and have born shown to provide continuous quantitative monitoring of the location(s), magnitude, and time-variation of gene delivery and/or expression. This article reviews the use of PET technologies as they have been used in imaging biological processes for molecular imaging applications. The studies published to date demonstrate that noninvasive imaging tools will help to accelerate pre-clinical model validation as well as allow for clinical monitoring of human diseases.