• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• 제16권3호
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• pp.309-316
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• 1995

RF (radio-frequency) probes of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance are one of the important factors and should be designed and built properly depending upon the geometry of the samples and the information. In general there are two kinds of rf probes : one encircles the sample while the other is placed on the surface of the sample. However, in case that the samples on human internal organs have a tube shape, the two kinds of rf probes, as specified above, are usually unsuitable for the internal imaging due to the degradation of signal-to-noise ratios (SNR's). In this case a probe should be positioned as close to the area as possible by putting the probe in the tubelike sample to improve filling factor In the present study inside-out probes have been constructed in the three different shapes such as an anti-solenoidal, a saddle and a dual surface types. 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 SWR's and rf-field uniformity in the area close to the probes in comparing with any other commercial probes. There is a high feasibility that the constructed probes in the present study are applicable to the diagnosis of human bodies.

• Investigative Magnetic Resonance Imaging
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• 제20권1호
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• pp.44-52
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• 2016

Purpose: To quantitatively and qualitatively compare fat-suppressed MRI quality using iterative decomposition of water and fat with echo asymmetry and least-squares estimation (IDEAL) with that using frequency selective fat-suppression (FSFS) T2- and postcontrast T1-weighted fast spin-echo images of the head and neck at 3T. Materials and Methods: The study was approved by our Institutional Review Board. Prospective MR image analysis was performed in 36 individuals at a single-center. Axial fat suppressed T2- and postcontrast T1-weighted images with IDEAL and FSFS were compared. Visual assessment was performed by two independent readers with respect to; 1) metallic artifacts around oral cavity, 2) susceptibility artifacts around upper airway, paranasal sinus, and head-neck junction, 3) homogeneity of fat suppression, 4) image sharpness, 5) tissue contrast of pathologies and lymph nodes. The signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) for each image sequence were assessed. Results: Both IDEAL fat suppressed T2- and T1-weighted images significantly reduced artifacts around airway, paranasal sinus, and head-neck junction, and significantly improved homogeneous fat suppression in compared to those using FSFS (P < 0.05 for all). IDEAL significantly decreased artifacts around oral cavity on T2-weighted images (P < 0.05, respectively) and improved sharpness, lesion-to-tissue, and lymph node-to-tissue contrast on T1-weighted images (P < 0.05 for all). The mean SNRs were significantly improved on both T1- and T2-weighted IDEAL images (P < 0.05 for all). Conclusion: IDEAL technique improves image quality in the head and neck by reducing artifacts with homogeneous fat suppression, while maintaining a high SNR.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제15권1호
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• pp.135-150
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• 2015

Large concrete structures are prone to cracks and damages over time from human usage, weathers, and other environmental attacks such as flood, earthquakes, and hurricanes. The health of the concrete structures should be monitored regularly to ensure safety. A reliable method of real time communications can facilitate more frequent structural health monitoring (SHM) updates from hard to reach positions, enabling crack detections of embedded concrete structures as they occur to avoid catastrophic failures. By implementing an unconventional mode of communication that utilizes guided stress waves traveling along the concrete structure itself, we may be able to free structural health monitoring from costly (re-)installation of communication wires. In stress-wave communications, piezoelectric transducers can act as actuators and sensors to send and receive modulated signals carrying concrete status information. The new generation of lead zirconate titanate (PZT) based smart aggregates cause multipath propagation in the homogeneous concrete channel, which presents both an opportunity and a challenge for multiple sensors communication. We propose a time reversal based pulse position modulation (TR-PPM) communication for stress wave communication within the concrete structure to combat multipath channel dispersion. Experimental results demonstrate successful transmission and recovery of TR-PPM using stress waves. Compared with PPM, we can achieve higher data rate and longer link distance via TR-PPM. Furthermore, TR-PPM remains effective under low signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio. This work also lays the foundation for implementing multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) stress wave communication networks in concrete channels.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• 제35권4호
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• pp.295-302
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• 2016

Underwater acoustic communication channel is often defined as a multipath fading channel since the multipath arrivals from various paths interfere with each other and cause frequency dependent constructive or destructive interference in received signals. Therefore signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of received signal fluctuates as a function of frequency. In addition, sea surface fluctuation induces frequency dependent time variant signal fading due to coherent component variation of surface bounce path. The frequency shift keying (FSK) system is known to be less sensitive and more robust under these interference and fading, and M-ary frequency shift keying (MFSK) system is adopted to increase a data rate. In this study, a bit error rate (BER) of 4 channels 4FSK system are examined in shallow sea multipath channel. Experimental results show that RS code reduces efficiently the BER of 4FSK system since frequency dependent time-varying fading is characterized to give burst errors. The BER of a different data rate or different source-to-receiver range depends on not only the channel coherent bandwidth but also frequency dependent multipath fading.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea TC
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• 제43권10호
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• pp.69-78
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• 2006

High spectral efficiency can be obtained by adaptive modulation in which the modulation scheme is changed according to the channel environment. Thus it is especially suitable to mobile channel which is a typical example of time-varying channel. It is required to determine the optimum thresholds of signal-to-noise ratio(SNR) to change the modulation scheme effectively according to mobile speeds. Thus the optimum thresholds for specific mobile speeds to get the required bit error rate(BER) of $10^{-6}$ are obtained with the powerful turbo code in this paper. In addition, the optimum thresholds for the continuous mobile speed are proposed by interpolation of the obtained results. And the error performance and average spectral efficiency are investigated at various mobile speeds and channel environments.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• 제34권9C호
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• pp.887-895
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• 2009

This paper proposes a cooperative power allocation with the use of partial channel information (e.g., the average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and transmit correlation) in multi-cell dual-hop multi-input single-output (MISO) relay systems. In a dual-hop MISO relay channel, it is desirable to allocate the transmit power between dual-hop links to maximize the end-to-end capacity. We consider the maximization of the end-to-end capacity of a dual-hop MISO relay channel under sum-power constraint. The proposed scheme adaptively allocates the transmit power considering the average channel gain of the target relay and the transmit correlation of the desired and inter-relay interference channel from adjacent relays. It is shown by means of upper-bound analysis that the end-to-end capacity can be maximized by making the angle difference of the principal eigenvectors of the desired and inter-relay interference channel orthogonal in highly-correlated channel environments. Finally, the performance of the proposed scheme is verified by computer simulation.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• 제34권4호
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• pp.295-302
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• 2015

Acoustic channels are characterized by long multipath spreads that cause inter-symbol interference. The way in which this fact influences the design of the receiver structure is considered. To satisfy performance and throughput, we presented consecutive iterative BCJR (Bahl, Cocke, Jelinek, Raviv) equalization to improve the performance and throughput. To achieve low error performance, we resort to powerful BCJR equalization algorithms that iteratively update probabilistic information between inner decoder and outer decoder. Also, to achieve high throughput, we divide long packet into consecutive small packets, and the estimate channel information of previous packets are compensated to next packets. Based on experimental channel response, we confirmed that the performance is improved for long length packet size.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• 제29권10C호
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• pp.1395-1401
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• 2004

In The objective of this paper is to apply blind minimum output energy multiuser detection method to multicarrier direct sequence code division multiple access system. The performance of MC/DS-CDMA is reduced due to multiple access. To increase the performance of system, we need to cancel multiple user components. Blind interference canceller is able to detect the desired's information with the only minimal information of the desired user. We evaluate the performance of the proposed receiver under Gaussian channel. Simulation results show that the proposed receiver has about 6［dB］ gain of signal to noise ratio without multiple user interference and has about 3［dB］ gain of SNR with multiple user interference. Also, the result of comparing the capacity of the active users shows that the proposed method has about 2 times capacity more than conventional method. As a conclusion, simulation results show that the proposed method has better performs better than conventional method.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• 제32권6호
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• pp.548-555
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• 2013

The localization of sources has a numerous number of applications. To estimate the position of sources, the relative delay between two or more received signals for the direct signal must be determined. Although the generalized cross-correlation method is the most popular technique, an approach based on eigenvalue decomposition (EVD) is also popular one, which utilizes an eigenvector of the minimum eigenvalue. The performance of the eigenvalue decomposition (EVD) based method degrades in the low SNR and the correlated environments, because it is difficult to select a single eigenvector for the minimum eigenvalue. In this paper, we propose a new adaptive algorithm based on Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) in order to extend the operation range to the lower SNR and the correlation environments. The proposed algorithm uses the eigenvector corresponding to the maximum eigenvalue in the generalized eigenvalue decomposition (GEVD). The estimated eigenvector contains all the information that we need for time delay estimation. We have performed simulations with uncorrelated and correlated noise for several SNRs, showing that the CCA based algorithm can estimate the time delays more accurately than the adaptive EVD algorithm.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• 제15권11호
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• pp.1305-1318
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• 2012

Image segmentation is one of the difficult research problems in machine vision and pattern recognition field. A commonly used segmentation method is the Otsu method. It is simpler and easier to implement but it fails if the histogram is unimodal or similar to unimodal. And if some target area is smaller than background object, then its histogram has the distribution close to unimodal. In this paper, we proposed an improved image segmentation method based on 1D Otsu method for a small target detection. To overcome drawbacks by unimodal histogram effect, we depressed the background histogram using a logarithm function. And to improve a signal to noise ratio, we used a local average value by the neighbor window for thresholding using 1D Otsu method. The experimental results show that our proposed algorithm performs better segmentation result than a traditional 1D Otsu method, and needs much less computational time than that of the 2D Otsu method.