Comparison of Ultrasound Image Quality using Edge Enhancement Mask (경계면 강조 마스크를 이용한 초음파 영상 화질 비교)
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- Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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- v.17 no.1
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- pp.157-165
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- 2023
Ultrasound imaging uses sound waves of frequencies to cause physical actions such as reflection, absorption, refraction, and transmission at the edge between different tissues. Improvement is needed because there is a lot of noise due to the characteristics of the data generated from the ultrasound equipment, and it is difficult to grasp the shape of the tissue to be actually observed because the edge is vague. The edge enhancement method is used as a method to solve the case where the edge surface looks clumped due to a decrease in image quality. In this paper, as a method to strengthen the interface, the quality improvement was confirmed by strengthening the interface, which is the high-frequency part, in each image using an unsharpening mask and high boost. The mask filtering used for each image was evaluated by measuring PSNR and SNR. Abdominal, head, heart, liver, kidney, breast, and fetal images were obtained from Philips epiq5g and affiniti70g and Alpinion E-cube 15 ultrasound equipment. The program used to implement the algorithm was implemented with MATLAB R2022a of MathWorks. The unsharpening and high-boost mask array size was set to 3*3, and the laplacian filter, a spatial filter used to create outline-enhanced images, was applied equally to both masks. ImageJ program was used for quantitative evaluation of image quality. As a result of applying the mask filter to various ultrasound images, the subjective image quality showed that the overall contour lines of the image were clearly visible when unsharpening and high-boost mask were applied to the original image. When comparing the quantitative image quality, the image quality of the image to which the unsharpening mask and the high boost mask were applied was evaluated higher than that of the original image. In the portal vein, head, gallbladder, and kidney images, the SNR, PSNR, RMSE and MAE of the image to which the high-boost mask was applied were measured to be high. Conversely, for images of the heart, breast, and fetus, SNR, PSNR, RMSE and MAE values were measured as images with the unsharpening mask applied. It is thought that using the optimal mask according to the image will help to improve the image quality, and the contour information was provided to improve the image quality.
This paper aims to newly investigate the meaning of life in this era when various discussions on life and ethical living are commonly raised by comparing and examining the theories of life proposed by Confucianism and Daesoon Thought. Both Confucianism and Daesoon Thought explain the creation of all things as having been based on the principles of life in heaven and earth. Specifically, there is the will to live (生意 saengeui) and also divine beings (神明 sinmyeong). For this reason, everything in heaven and earth is created by obtaining the same principle of life such that it is an equal being with the same intrinsic value. Here the consciousness of being one body amid all things as one living thing is established. The consciousness of being one body forms an organic worldview in which all things are one. As a result, all things in heaven and earth exist within a mutual organic relationship, and that makes oneself and others precious life partners that coexist rather than separate beings. Nevertheless, both Confucianism and Daesoon Thought define humans as outstanding beings, set aside for a higher purpose than other beings. The excellence of humans is that by constantly engaging in self reflection and completing tasks through independent efforts, they thereby achieve the great moral doctrine of coexistence and symbiosis. In this process, cultivation of character (修養 suyang) and cultivation of the Dao (修道 sudo) are presented as means to realize one's nature and establish the right human image. By realizing nature or humanity through the cultivation of character and cultivation of the Dao, humans fulfill their responsibilities and missions by independently participating in being nourished by Heaven and Earth (天地化育 cheonjihwayuk) or the Reordering Works of Heaven and Earth (天地公事 cheonjigongsa), both being based in the concept of the three generative forces of Heaven, Earth, and Humanity (天·地·人 cheon·ji·in). In the end, the theories of life posited by Confucianism and Daesoon Thought are based on a consciousness of being one body. Both emphasize the characteristics and roles of humans who are distinguished from other beings and phenomena. At this time, human characteristics and roles are revealed as the reasons for which humans have a responsibility and mission take care of all things. From this point of view, it can be seen that the theoretical structure of Neo-Confucianism and Daesoon Thought, in regards to their theories of life, is rather similar.
This paper aims to study on conceptual suitability or unfitness of Silhak(實學). It is general that by criticizing Chujahak(朱子學) or beyond the limitation of Seonglihak(性理學), Silhak has developed practical tendency to reforming the society in the middle and end of Chosen Dynasty, related to the context of Korean national reflection in modern times. However, it is unfortunate to be understood. As presented in Chosenwangjosillok(『朝鮮王朝實錄』), there has been a few usages in the term 'Silhak'. In short, it was different from its contemporary meaning. At that time, it was usually used to have the meaning of Gyunghak(經學), compared to Sajanghak(詞章學), or rarely, of 'the true study' or 'the practical study'. Therefore, it is to claim that its conception has been manipulated or exaggerated very seriously. Since 1930s, in particular, its conception has been misused in interpreting works of Jung Yak-Yong by some scholars, such as Jung In-Bo, Moon Il-Pyung and An Jae-Hong, who tried to apply the term to overcome the Japanese colonial era symbolised as modernity based on the future life of Korea. Even though their attempt has led to have crucial discussions on the conceptions of Silhak, it has an unnecessary result that there has been a new and totally different understanding of Silhak in South Korea, North Korea, China, Japan, etc., which means that the unsustainable conception of Silhak has been one of major problems in studying of Silhak. To give an practical solution, I would try to make sense of 'time spirit' whose scholars studied Silhak in the middle and end of Chosen Dynasty. A problem, however, is that a scholar group in the name of Bukhakpa(北學派) had certain links and bonds. This is because many scholars studying of Silhak were usually features out of the main stream, which made them it difficult to form any various groups. That is to say, it seems to be natural that they have dreamed of utopian imaginations less than of overlapping points in reality. To sum up, it would be concluded at least that any approach to human lives and thoughts in the given conceptions of Silhak, e.g. ethical thoughts of Silhak, enables us to be indifferentiated to take its true meaning and time spirit of Chosen Dynasty. To be disenchanted of its social roles in Chosen Dynasty, fundamentally, it should be escaped from the wrong net of illusions and sings in understanding Silhak in certain eclectic steps.
This paper introduces the seismic facies classification and mapping of igneous bodies found in the sedimentary sequences of the Yellow Sea shelf area of Korea. In the research area, six extrusive and three intrusive types of igneous bodies were found in the Late Cretaceous, Eocene, Early Miocene, and Quaternary sedimentary sequences of the northeastern, southwestern and southeastern sags of the Gunsan Basin. Extrusive igneous bodies include the following six facies: (1) monogenetic volcano (E.mono) showing cone-shape external geometry with height less than 200 m, which may have originated from a single monogenetic eruption; (2) complex volcano (E.comp) marked by clustered monogenetic cones with height less than 500 m; (3) stratovolcano (E.strato) referring to internally stratified lofty volcanic edifices with height greater than 1 km and diameter more than 15 km; (4) fissure volcanics (E.fissure) marked by high-amplitude and discontinuous reflectors in association with normal faults that cut the acoustic basement; (5) maar-diatreme (E.maar) referring to gentle-sloped low-profile volcanic edifices with less than 2 km-wide vent-shape zones inside; and (6) hydrothermal vents (E.vent) marked by upright pipe-shape or funnel-shape structures disturbing sedimentary sequence with diameter less than 2 km. Intrusive igneous bodies include the following three facies: (1) dike and sill (I.dike/sill) showing variable horizontal, step-wise, or saucer-shaped intrusive geometries; (2) stock (I.stock) marked by pillar- or horn-shaped bodies with a kilometer-wide intrusion diameter; and (3) batholith and laccoliths (I.batho/lac) which refer to gigantic intrusive bodies that broadly deformed the overlying sedimentary sequence.
In this paper, we suggest an application system architecture which provides accurate, fast and efficient automatic gasometer reading function. The system captures gasometer image using mobile device camera, transmits the image to a cloud server on top of private LTE network, and analyzes the image to extract character information of device ID and gas usage amount by selective optical character recognition based on deep learning technology. In general, there are many types of character in an image and optical character recognition technology extracts all character information in an image. But some applications need to ignore non-of-interest types of character and only have to focus on some specific types of characters. For an example of the application, automatic gasometer reading system only need to extract device ID and gas usage amount character information from gasometer images to send bill to users. Non-of-interest character strings, such as device type, manufacturer, manufacturing date, specification and etc., are not valuable information to the application. Thus, the application have to analyze point of interest region and specific types of characters to extract valuable information only. We adopted CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) based object detection and CRNN (Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network) technology for selective optical character recognition which only analyze point of interest region for selective character information extraction. We build up 3 neural networks for the application system. The first is a convolutional neural network which detects point of interest region of gas usage amount and device ID information character strings, the second is another convolutional neural network which transforms spatial information of point of interest region to spatial sequential feature vectors, and the third is bi-directional long short term memory network which converts spatial sequential information to character strings using time-series analysis mapping from feature vectors to character strings. In this research, point of interest character strings are device ID and gas usage amount. Device ID consists of 12 arabic character strings and gas usage amount consists of 4 ~ 5 arabic character strings. All system components are implemented in Amazon Web Service Cloud with Intel Zeon E5-2686 v4 CPU and NVidia TESLA V100 GPU. The system architecture adopts master-lave processing structure for efficient and fast parallel processing coping with about 700,000 requests per day. Mobile device captures gasometer image and transmits to master process in AWS cloud. Master process runs on Intel Zeon CPU and pushes reading request from mobile device to an input queue with FIFO (First In First Out) structure. Slave process consists of 3 types of deep neural networks which conduct character recognition process and runs on NVidia GPU module. Slave process is always polling the input queue to get recognition request. If there are some requests from master process in the input queue, slave process converts the image in the input queue to device ID character string, gas usage amount character string and position information of the strings, returns the information to output queue, and switch to idle mode to poll the input queue. Master process gets final information form the output queue and delivers the information to the mobile device. We used total 27,120 gasometer images for training, validation and testing of 3 types of deep neural network. 22,985 images were used for training and validation, 4,135 images were used for testing. We randomly splitted 22,985 images with 8:2 ratio for training and validation respectively for each training epoch. 4,135 test image were categorized into 5 types (Normal, noise, reflex, scale and slant). Normal data is clean image data, noise means image with noise signal, relfex means image with light reflection in gasometer region, scale means images with small object size due to long-distance capturing and slant means images which is not horizontally flat. Final character string recognition accuracies for device ID and gas usage amount of normal data are 0.960 and 0.864 respectively.
The wall shear stress in the vicinity of end-to end anastomoses under steady flow conditions was measured using a flush-mounted hot-film anemometer(FMHFA) probe. The experimental measurements were in good agreement with numerical results except in flow with low Reynolds numbers. The wall shear stress increased proximal to the anastomosis in flow from the Penrose tubing (simulating an artery) to the PTFE: graft. In flow from the PTFE graft to the Penrose tubing, low wall shear stress was observed distal to the anastomosis. Abnormal distributions of wall shear stress in the vicinity of the anastomosis, resulting from the compliance mismatch between the graft and the host artery, might be an important factor of ANFH formation and the graft failure. The present study suggests a correlation between regions of the low wall shear stress and the development of anastomotic neointimal fibrous hyperplasia(ANPH) in end-to-end anastomoses. 30523 T00401030523 ^x Air pressure decay(APD) rate and ultrafiltration rate(UFR) tests were performed on new and saline rinsed dialyzers as well as those roused in patients several times. C-DAK 4000 (Cordis Dow) and CF IS-11 (Baxter Travenol) reused dialyzers obtained from the dialysis clinic were used in the present study. The new dialyzers exhibited a relatively flat APD, whereas saline rinsed and reused dialyzers showed considerable amount of decay. C-DAH dialyzers had a larger APD(11.70
The wall shear stress in the vicinity of end-to end anastomoses under steady flow conditions was measured using a flush-mounted hot-film anemometer(FMHFA) probe. The experimental measurements were in good agreement with numerical results except in flow with low Reynolds numbers. The wall shear stress increased proximal to the anastomosis in flow from the Penrose tubing (simulating an artery) to the PTFE: graft. In flow from the PTFE graft to the Penrose tubing, low wall shear stress was observed distal to the anastomosis. Abnormal distributions of wall shear stress in the vicinity of the anastomosis, resulting from the compliance mismatch between the graft and the host artery, might be an important factor of ANFH formation and the graft failure. The present study suggests a correlation between regions of the low wall shear stress and the development of anastomotic neointimal fibrous hyperplasia(ANPH) in end-to-end anastomoses. 30523 T00401030523 ^x Air pressure decay(APD) rate and ultrafiltration rate(UFR) tests were performed on new and saline rinsed dialyzers as well as those roused in patients several times. C-DAK 4000 (Cordis Dow) and CF IS-11 (Baxter Travenol) reused dialyzers obtained from the dialysis clinic were used in the present study. The new dialyzers exhibited a relatively flat APD, whereas saline rinsed and reused dialyzers showed considerable amount of decay. C-DAH dialyzers had a larger APD(11.70