• Investigative Magnetic Resonance Imaging
• /
• v.10 no.2
• /
• pp.108-116
• /
• 2006

Purpose : High-resolution spiral-scan imaging is performed at 3 Tesla MRI system. Since the gradient waveforms for the spiral-scan imaging have lower slopes than those for the Echo Planar Imaging (EPI), they can be implemented with the gradient systems having lower slew rates. The spiral-scan imaging also involves less eddy currents due to the smooth gradient waveforms. The spiral-scan imaging method does not suffer from high specific absorption rate (SAR), which is one of the main obstacles in high field imaging for rf echo-based fast imaging methods such as fast spin echo techniques. Thus, the spiral-scan imaging has a great potential for the high-speed imaging in high magnetic fields. In this paper, we presented various high-resolution images obtained by the spiral-scan methods at 3T MRI system for various applications. Materials and Methods : High-resolution spiral-scan imaging technique is implemented at 3T whole body MRI system. An efficient and fast higher-order shimming technique is developed to reduce the inhomogeneity, and the single-shot and interleaved spiral-scan imaging methods are developed. Spin-echo and gradient-echo based spiral-scan imaging methods are implemented, and image contrast and signal-tonoise ratio are controlled by the echo time, repetition time, and the rf flip angles. Results : Spiral-scan images having various resolutions are obtained at 3T MRI system. Since the absolute magnitude of the inhomogeneity is increasing in higher magnetic fields, higher order shimming to reduce the inhomogeneity becomes more important. A fast shimming technique in which axial, sagittal, and coronal sectional inhomogeneity maps are obtained in one scan is developed, and the shimming method based on the analysis of spherical harmonics of the inhomogeneity map is applied. For phantom and invivo head imaging, image matrix size of about $100{\times}100$ is obtained by a single-shot spiral-scan imaging, and a matrix size of $256{\times}256$ is obtained by the interleaved spiral-scan imaging with the number of interleaves of from 6 to 12. Conclusion : High field imaging becomes increasingly important due to the improved signal-to-noise ratio, larger spectral separation, and the higher BOLD-based contrast. The increasing SAR is, however, a limiting factor in high field imaging. Since the spiral-scan imaging has a very low SAR, and lower hardware requirements for the implementation of the technique compared to EPI, it is suitable for a rapid imaging in high fields. In this paper, the spiral-scan imaging with various resolutions from $100{\times}100$ to $256{\times}256$ by controlling the number of interleaves are developed for the high-speed imaging in high magnetic fields.

• Journal of electromagnetic engineering and science
• /
• v.6 no.2
• /
• pp.110-116
• /
• 2006

A reflective array type surface acoustic wave(SAW) dispersive delay line(DDL) with high time-bandwidth at the V/UHF-band is designed and fabricated for compressive receiver applications. This type of the SAW DDL has the properties of the relative bandwidth of 20 %, the time delay of 49.89 usec, the insertion loss of 38.5 dB and the side lobe rejection of 39 dB. In comparison with a commercial SAW DDL, the insertion loss, amplitude ripple and side lobe rejection are improved by $1.5dB{\pm}0.6dB$ and 4 dB respectively. Using the fabricated SAW DDL, the prototype of the compressive receiver is developed. It is composed of RF converter, fast tunable LO, chirp LO, A/D converter, signal processing unit and control unit. This prototype system shows a fine frequency resolution of below 30 kHz with high scan rate.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Electromagnetic Engineering and Science
• /
• v.25 no.12
• /
• pp.1219-1227
• /
• 2014

For development of the surface acoustic wave bandpass filter(SAW-BPF), we fabricated the high quality ZnO thin films through the step-by-step(double) deposition using two different deposition methods which are pulsed laser deposition(PLD) and RF sputtering techniques. The second growth of ZnO thin films was completed by RF sputtering method on the first ZnO thin films pre-deposited by PLD method. The characteristics of ZnO thin films were analyzed by XRD, SEM and AFM systems. The FWHM of ${\omega}$-scan analysis and the minimum RMS value of surface roughness of step-by-step grown ZnO thin films were $0.79^{\circ}$ and 1.108 nm respectively. As a result, the crystallinity and the preferred orientation of the grown ZnO thin films were kept good quality and the surface roughnesses of those were improved by post-annealing process as comparison with ZnO thin film fabricated by the conventional PLD technique only. Using these proposed ZnO thin films, we demonstrated the RF device such as SAW-BPF, built by the proposed ZnO thin films, shows that it has the bandwidth of 2.98 MHz and the insertion loss of 36.5 dB at the center frequency of 260.8 MHz, respectively.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
• /
• v.24 no.2
• /
• pp.180-185
• /
• 2004

Conventional ultrasonic examination to detect micro and small surface cracks is based on the pulse-echo technique using a normal immersion focused transducer with high frequency, or an angle-beam transducer generating surface waves. It is difficult to make an automatic ultrasonic system that can detect micro and small surface cracks and position in a large structure like steel and ceramic rolls, because of the huge data of inspection and the ambiguous position data of the transducer. In this study, a high-precision scanning acoustic microscope with a 10MHz large-aperture transducer has been used to assess the existence, position and depth of a surface crack from the real-time A, B, C scans obtained by exploiting the ultrasonic diffraction. The ultrasonic method with large aperture transducer has improved the accuracy of the crack depth assessment and also the scanning speed by ten times, compared with the conventional ultrasonic methods.