• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.28-34
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• 2014

Recently, ultrasound therapy has become a new and effective treatment for many brain diseases. Therefore, skull-mimicking phantoms have been developed to simulate the skull and brain tissue of a human and allow further research into ultrasound therapy. In this study, the suitability of various skull-mimicking materials(HDPE, POM C, Acrylic) for studies of brain-tumor treatments was evaluated using focused ultrasound. The acoustic properties of three synthetic resins were measured. The skull-mimicking materials were then combined with an egg white phantom to observe the differences in the ultrasound beam distortion according to the type of material. High-intensity polyethylene was found to be suitable as a skull-mimicking phantom because it had acoustic properties and a denatured-area shape that was close to those of the skull,. In this study, a skull-mimicking phantom with a multi-layer structure was produced after evaluating several skull-mimicking materials. This made it possible to predict the denaturation in a skull in relation to focused ultrasound. The development of a therapeutic protocol for a range of brain diseases will be useful in the future.

• Journal of Korean Neurosurgical Society
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• v.62 no.6
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• pp.712-722
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• 2019

Objective : Although magnetic resonance guided focused ultrasound (MRgFUS) has been used as minimally invasive and effective neurosurgical treatment, it exhibits some limitations, mainly related to acoustic properties of the skull barrier. This study was undertaken to identify skull characteristics that contribute to optimal ultrasonic energy transmission for MRgFUS procedures. Methods : For ex vivo skull experiments, various acoustic fields were measured under different conditions, using five non-embalmed cadaver skulls. For clinical skull analyses, brain computed tomography data of 46 patients who underwent MRgFUS ablations (18 unilateral thalamotomy, nine unilateral pallidotomy, and 19 bilateral capsulotomy) were retrospectively reviewed. Patients' skull factors and sonication parameters were comparatively analyzed with respect to the cadaveric skulls. Results : Skull experiments identified three important factors related skull penetration of ultrasound, including skull density ratio (SDR), skull volume, and incidence angle of the acoustic rays against the skull surface. In clinical results, SDR and skull volume correlated with maximal temperature (Tmax) and energy requirement to achieve Tmax (p<0.05). In addition, considering the incidence angle determined by brain target location, less energy was required to reach Tmax in the central, rather than lateral targets particularly when compared between thalamotomy and capsulotomy (p<0.05). Conclusion : This study reconfirmed previously identified skull factors, including SDR and skull volume, for successful MRgFUS; it identified an additional factor, incidence angle of acoustic rays against the skull surface. To guarantee successful transcranial MRgFUS treatment without suffering these various skull issues, further technical improvements are required.

• Journal of Korean Neurosurgical Society
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• v.65 no.3
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• pp.348-353
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• 2022

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a major public health issue that causes significant morbidity and mortality in the pediatric population. Pediatric minor TBIs are the most common and are widely underreported because not all patients seek medical attention. The specific management of these patients is distinct from that of adult patients because of the different physiologies in these age groups. This article focuses on minor TBIs, particularly growing skull fractures, traumatic cerebrospinal fluid leakage, and concussion.

• Proceedings of the Korea Multimedia Society Conference
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• 2012.05a
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• pp.205-208
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• 2012

Nowadays GPU (Graphic Process Unit) is not only used to show and render some images, but also for another computation. In this paper, we tried to use GPU to do some morphology operations to remove skull from axial MRI images. This skull removing process is an important step in brain segmentation because we would like to work with the brain only, without any skull on it. The result shows that simple morphology operations to remove skull has been successfully applied on MRI images, but there are still many parts that can be develop to get better images.

• Journal of Korean Neurosurgical Society
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• v.52 no.1
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• pp.55-57
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• 2012

Alveolar soft part sarcoma (ASPS) with skull and brain metastases is extremely rare. A 53-year-old patient diagnosed as skull metastasis of ASPS visited our clinic complaining of an outgrowing scalp mass in spite of radiation therapy. Past medical history revealed that the patient had been diagnosed and treated for ASPS of the thigh 4 years ago. Magnetic resonance imaging revealed a hyperintense ovoid mass on the T2-weighted image, an isointense on the T1-weighted image, and a homogeneous enhanced mass with gadolinium. Another small-sized enhanced mass with mild peritumoral swelling was found at the deep white matter of the left frontal lobe. A gross total resection of the skull lesion with cranioplasty was performed for the surgical defect. A histologic examination of the specimens revealed metastatic ASPS involving the skull. Surgery with a total removal of the lesions may be effective for improving a patient's symptoms especially from neurological dysfunction.

• Journal of Korean Neurosurgical Society
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• v.30 no.1
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• pp.89-94
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• 2001

Skull or brain metastasis from thyroid carcinoma is rare. Between Jan. 1993. and Jan. 2000. the authors experienced 7 cases of skull(4 cases) or brain(3 cases) metastasis from thyroid carcinoma. Clinical characteristics, radiologic findings and pathologic features were analyzed retrospectively. Among 4 cases of skull metastasis, 3 cases were follicular carcinoma and one was papillary carcinoma with follicular variant. All cases of brain metastasis were papillary carcinoma. We treated the patients by combination with surgical resection, radioactive iodine therapy and radiation therapy. Characteristics of skull or brain metastasis from thyroid carcinoma is reviewed with a pertinent literature.

• Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology
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• v.19 no.7
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• pp.1424-1431
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• 2005

In this study, head injury by impact force was evaluated by numerical analysis with 3-dimensional finite element (FE) model. Brain deformation by frontal head impact was analyzed to evaluate traumatic brain injury (TBI). The variations of head acceleration and intra-cranial pressure (ICP) during the impact were analyzed. Relative displacement between the skull and the brain due to head impact was investigated from this simulation. In addition, pathological severity was evaluated according to head injury criterion (HIC) from simulation with FE model. The analytic result of brain damage was accorded with that of the cadaver test performed by Nahum et al.(1977) and many medical reports. The main emphasis of this study is that our FE model was valid to simulate the traumatic brain injury by head impact and the variation of the HIC value was evaluated according to various impact conditions using the FE model.

• Journal of Korean Neurosurgical Society
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• v.48 no.1
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• pp.73-78
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• 2010

Objective : Streptococcus pyogenes is a beta-hemolytic bacterium that belongs to Lancefield serogroup A, also known as group A streptococci (GAS). There have been five reported case in terms of PubMed-based search but no reported case of brain abscess caused by Streptococcus pyogenes as a result of penetrating skull injury. We present a patient who suffered from penetrating skull injury that resulted in a brain abscess caused by Streptococcus pyogenes. Methods : The patient was a 12-year-old boy who fell down from his bicycle while cycling and ran into a tree. A wooden stick penetrated his skin below the right lower eyelid and advanced to the cranium. He lost consciousness on the fifth day of the incident and his body temperature was measured as $40^{\circ}C$. While being admitted to our hospital, a cranial computed tomography revealed a frontal cystic mass with a perilesional hypodense zone of edema. There was no capsule formation around the lesion after intravenous contrast injection. Paranasal CT showed a bone defect located between the ethmoidal sinus and lamina cribrosa. Results : Bifrontal craniotomy was performed. The abscess located at the left frontal lobe was drained and the bone defect was repaired. Conclusion : Any penetrating lesion showing a connection between the lamina cribrosa and ethmoidal sinus may result in brain abscess caused by Streptococcus pyogenes. These patients should be treated urgently to repair the defect and drain the abscess with appropriate antibiotic therapy started due to the fulminant course of the brain abscess caused by this microorganism.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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• 2009.11a
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• pp.343-344
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• 2009

The aim in this paper is to show how to extract scalp of a series of brain MR images by using region growing segmentation algorithm. Most researches are all forces on the segmentation of skull, gray matter, white matter and CSF. Prior to the segmentation of these inner objects in brain, we segmented the scalp and the brain from the MR images. The scalp mask makes us to quickly exclude background pixels with intensities similar those of the skull, while the brain mask obtained from our brain surface. We make use of connected threshold method (CTM) and confidence connected method (CCM). Both of them are two implementations of region growing in Insight Toolkit (ITK). By using these two methods, the results are displayed contrast in the form of 2D and 3D scalp images.

• Journal of Korean Neurosurgical Society
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• v.64 no.5
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• pp.763-775
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• 2021

Objective : Hemorrhagic transformation (HT) can be occurred after acute cerebral infarction. HT can worse symptoms in severe cases and adversely affect long-term prognosis. As bone and vascular smooth muscle are composed of type 1 collagen, we aimed to identify a potential relationship between bone mineral density (BMD) and HT after acute cardioembolic stroke. Methods : As an indicator of BMD, we used mean frontal skull Hounsfield unit (HU) values on brain computed tomography (CT). Multivariative hazard ratios were calculated using Cox regression analysis to identify whether the osteoporotic condition was an independent predictor of HT after acute cardioembolic stroke. Results : This 11-year analysis enrolled 506 patients who diagnosed as acute cardioembolic infarction. The first tertile of skull HU value was an independent predictor of HT development compared to the third tertile (hazard ratio, 2.12; 95% confidence interval, 1.13-3.98; p=0.020). We observed no interactions between age and skull HU with respect to HT statistically. Conclusion : The results of this study revealed an association between osteoporotic conditions and HT development after acute cardioembolic stroke. A convenient method to measure the cancellous bone HU value of the frontal skull using brain CT images may be useful for predicting HT in patients with acute cerebral infarction.