• Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging
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• v.43 no.3
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• pp.165-173
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• 2009

Nuclear cardiology in Korea is less active, compared to nuclear oncology, but it has been specialized and ramified. Lately, sophisticated nuclear cardiac imaging methods provide more convenience for patients. It is necessary to accurately estimate the recent progress in the imaging devices for nuclear cardiology. Myocardial perfusion imaging is a well established study to evaluate heart function. Myocardial perfusion SPECT and PET have been used for assessment of coronary artery disease with various radiopharmaceuticals. And of late, the development of advanced imaging devices - multi-pinhole technique and high definition imaging technique - and software made the scanning time shorter and expanded the application field. Therefore, it is required to review the nuclear cardiology hardware/software for the clinical practice and research. In this review, the characteristics about recently-developed SPECT/PET and software for nuclear cardiology are described. It is hoped that this information would contribute to improving the activity of nuclear cardiac research in Korea where the research for the fusion imaging combining a and nuclear imaging is drawing more attention.

• Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging
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• v.43 no.4
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• pp.253-258
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• 2009

Bone scintigraphy using $^{99m}$Tc-labeled phosphate agents has long been the standard evaluation method for whole skeletal system. However, recent shortage of $^{99m}$Tc supply and advanced positron emission tomography (PET) technology evoked the attention to surrogate radiopharmaceuticals and imaging modalities for bone. Actually, fluorine-18 ($^{18}$F) was the first bone seeking radiotracer before the introduction of $^{99m}$Tc-labeled agents even though its clinical application failed to become pervasive anymore after the rapid spread of Anger type gamma camera systems in early 1970s. However, rapidly developed PET technology made us refocus on the usefulness of $^{18}$F as a PET tracer. Early study comparing $^{18}$F-Na PET scan and planar bone scintigraphy reported that PET has higher sensitivity and specificity in the diagnosis of metastatic bone lesions than planar bone scan. Subsequent reports comparing between PET and both planar and SPECT bone image also revealed better results of PET scan in similar study groups. Rapid clinical application of PET/CT also accumulated considerable amount of experiences in skeletal evaluation and this modality is known to have better diagnostic power than stand alone PET system as well as bone scan. Furthermore $^{18}$F-Na PET/CT revealed better or at least equal results in detection of primary and metastatic bone lesions compared with CT and MRI. Therefore, it is obvious that $^{18}$F-Na PET/CT has potential to become new imaging modality for practical skeletal evaluation so continuous and careful evaluation of this modality and radiopharmaceutical must be required.

• Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging
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• v.42 no.sup1
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• pp.121-125
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• 2008

$^{18}F-FDG$ PET has a higher diagnostic accuracy than a in initial staging of testicular cancer. In seminoma, it can discriminate residual tumor from necrosis/fibrosis or mature teratoma. $^{18}F-FDG$ PET is also useful for the response evaluation of chemotherapy. However, there's no clinical evidence for the use of $^{18}F-FDG$ PET in the diagnosis and differential diagnosis of testicular cancer.

• Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging
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• v.42 no.sup1
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• pp.76-90
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• 2008

$^{18}F-FDG$ PET in combination with conventional imaging modalities could help avoid unnecessary biopsy for the primary mass, and it also has a high diagnostic accuracy in patients with dense breasts. In the assessment of metastasis, $^{18}F-FDG$ PET was useful to select patients who required sentinel lymph node biopsy and to detect extra-axillary lymph node metastasis and distant metastasis. To increase the sensitivity for osteoblastic bone metastasis, bone scintigraphy should be added. In the detection of recurrence, $^{18}F-FDG$ PET showed a higher diagnostic accuracy than tumor marker or computed tomography, and therefore it can be used in routine breast cancer follow-up. $^{18}F-FDG$ PET has been reported that it correctly predicted the response of neoadjuvant chemotherapy on as early as 8th day of treatment. Therefore, it is useful for the early detect of therapeutic response in advanced breast cancer.

• Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging
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• v.42 no.sup1
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• pp.126-129
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• 2008

Renal cell carcinoma is the most common histological type of renal malignancy, predominant in men and the primary treatment modality of this tumor is surgery. The role of diagnostic imaging in the management of this tumor is the evaluation of extent of disease as well as the detection and characterization of renal mass. US has long been a routine screening tool for kidney but tomographic imaging modalities such as CT and MRI begin to be also commonly used these days. On the other hand, the sensitivity of $^{18}F-FDG-PET$ in detection of renal mass is relatively low because of inherent limitation caused by FDG excretion pathway despite avid uptake of FDG to tumor cell per se. Many studies revealed FDG PET scan could play an important role in detection of metastatic lesions although the sensitivity for the detection of primary lesion is not so high. Furthermore, development of PET/CT scanner will make it possible to expand the indication of FDG PET scan in this malignancy.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.1
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• pp.222-228
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• 2023

This study aimed to analyze the applicability of the improved median filter in positron emission tomography (PET)/magnetic resonance (MR) fusion images based on parallel imaging using generalized autocalibrating partially parallel acquisition (GRAPPA). In this study, a PET/MR fusion imaging system based on a 3.0T magnetic field and ¹⁸F radioisotope were used. An improved median filter that can set a mask of the median value more efficiently than before was modeled and applied to the acquired image. As quantitative evaluation parameters of the noise level, the contrast to noise ratio (CNR) and coefficient of variation (COV) were calculated. Additionally, no-reference-based evaluation parameters were used to analyze the overall image quality. We confirmed that the CNR and COV values of the PET/MR fusion images to which the improved median filter was applied improved by approximately 3.32 and 2.19 times on average, respectively, compared to the noisy image. In addition, the no-reference-based evaluation results showed a similar trend for the noise-level results. In conclusion, we demonstrated that it can be supplemented by using an improved median filter, which suggests the problem of image quality degradation of PET/MR fusion images that shortens scan time using GRAPPA.

• Journal of Korean Neurosurgical Society
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• v.49 no.5
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• pp.278-283
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• 2011

Objective : The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether $^{18}F$-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (FOG-PET) can be used to assess the therapeutic response of brain abscess. Methods : A study was conducted on 10 consecutive patients with brain abscess, Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) with diffuse-weighted imaging (DWI) was performed at 3 and 6 weeks after surgical treatment and intravenous antibiotics therapy and FOG-PET at 6 weeks after treatment. The extent of the abscess, signal changes on MRI, and FOG-PET standardized uptake values were analyzed and correlated with the response to therapy. Results : Aspiration or craniotomy with excision of the abscess followed by intravenous antibiotics for 6-8 weeks resulted in good recovery with no recurrence. In 10 patients, two had low signal intensity on the DWI; one had no uptake on FOG-PET imaging after 6 weeks antibiotics and discontinued intravenous treatment, but the other patient had diffuse, increased uptake on FOG-PET imaging after 6 weeks antibiotics and underwent an additional 2 weeks of intravenous antibiotics. The remaining eight patients had high signals on the DWI. Four had no uptake on FOG-PET imaging and the treatment period varied from 6 to 8 weeks (mean, 6.75 weeks). Among the other four patients, FOG was accumulated in a diffuse or local area corresponding to a high signal area within the DWI and 2 weeks of intravenous antibiotics was added. Conclusion : MRI plus FOG-PET improved the accuracy of assessing therapeutic responses to antibiotics treatment of brain abscess and aided in optimizing therapy.

• The Korean Journal of Nuclear Medicine
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• v.36 no.1
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• pp.74-79
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• 2002

In addition to the well-established use of positron emission tomography (PET) in clinical oncology, novel roles for PET are rapidly emerging in the field of gene therapy. Methods for controlled gene delivery to living bodies, made available through advances in molecular biology, are currently being employed in animals for research purposes and in humans to treat diseases such as cancer. Although gene therapy is still in its early developmental stage, it is perceived that many serious illnesses could be treated successfully by the use of therapeutic gene delivery. A major challenge for the widespread use of human gene therapy is to achieve a controlled and effective delivery of foreign genes to target cells and subsequently, adequate levels of expression. As such, the availability of noninvasive imaging methods to accurately assess the location, duration, and level of transgene expression is critical for optimizing gene therapy strategies. Current endeavors to achieve this goal include methods that utilize magnetic resonance imaging, optical imaging, and nuclear imaging techniques. As for PET, reporter systems that utilize genes encoding enzymes that accumulate positron labeled substrates and those transcribing surface receptors that bind specific positron labeled ligands have been successfully developed. More recent advances in this area include improved reporter gene constructs and radiotracers, introduction of potential strategies to monitor endogenous gene expression, and human pilot studies evaluating the distribution and safety of reporter PET tracers. The remarkably rapid progress occurring in gene imaging technology indicates its importance and wide range of application. As such, gene imaging is likely to become a major and exciting new area for future application of PET technology.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.54 no.7
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• pp.2592-2598
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• 2022

Research groups in the field of PET instrumentation are studying time-of-flight(TOF) technology to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of PET images. Scintillation light transport and collection plays an important role in improving the coincidence resolving time(CRT) of PET detector based on a pixelated crystal array. Four crystal arrays were designed by the different optical reflection configuration such as external reflectors and surface treatment on the CRT and compared with the light output, energy resolution and CRT. The design proposed in the study was composed of 8 × 8 LYSO crystal array consisted of 3 × 3 × 15 mm³ pixels. The entrance side was roughened while the other five surfaces were polished. Four sides of all crystal pixels were wrapped with ESR-film, and the entrance surface was covered by Teflon-tape. The design provided an excellent timing resolution of 210 ps and improved the CRT by 16% compared to the conventional method using a polishing treatment and ESR-film. This study provided a method for improving the light output and CRT of a pixelated scintillation crystal-based brain TOF PET detector. The proposed configuration might be an attractive detector design for TOF brain PET requiring fast timing performance with high cost-effectiveness.

• The Korean Journal of Nuclear Medicine
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• v.38 no.3
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• pp.209-217
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• 2004

Evaluation of dementia in patients with early symptoms of cognitive decline is clinically challenging, but the need for early, accurate diagnosis has become more crucial, since several medication for the treatment of mild to moderate Alzheimer' disease are available. Many neurodegenerative diseases produce significant brain function alteration even when structural imaging (CT or MRI) reveal no specific abnormalities. The role of PET and SPECT brain imaging in the initial assessment and differential diagnosis of dementia is beginning to evolve vapidly and growing evidence indicates that appropriate incorporation of PET into the clinical work up can improve diagnostic and prognostic accuracy with respect to Alzheimer's disease, the most common cause of dementia in the geriatric population. in the fast few years, studios comparing neuropathologic examination with PET have established reliable and consistent accuracy for diagnostic evaluations using PET - accuracies substantially exceeding those of comparable studies of diagnostic value of SPECT or of both modalities assessed side by side, or of clinical evaluations done without nuclear imaging. This review deals the role of functional brain imaging techniques in the evaluation of dementias and the role of nuclear neuroimaging in the early detection and diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease.