• Korean Journal of Veterinary Research
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• v.62 no.3
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• pp.23.1-23.5
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• 2022

A 5-year-old castrated male domestic shorthair cat was referred for further investigation of pulmonary nodules incidentally detected on thoracic radiographs. Thoracic radiographs identified ill-defined soft tissue opacity nodules with small faint mineral opacity. Thoracic computed tomography (CT) revealed that bronchial dilation and bronchial wall thickening in bilateral cranial and accessory lung lobes. Round to ellipsoid mineralized concretions were found embedded in the intrabronchial soft tissue attenuation material. Based on radiography, CT, and cytology, the patient was tentatively diagnosed as having broncholithiasis with chronic bronchitis. This report described the CT diagnosis of broncholithiasis, which has been rarely reported in a cat.

• Journal of Yeungnam Medical Science
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.226-236
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• 1995

We studied to evaluate CT characteristics of bronchogenic cysts. We retrospectively evaluated CT of 11 patients with pathologically proved bronchogenic cyst. Precontrast and postcontrast CT scan was performed in all. We analyzed CT with viewpoints of location, size, attenuation on pre- and postcontrast scan, and calcification. Three of 11 bronchogenic cysts were intrapulmonary in location and eight were located in the mediastinum. Two of 3 intrapulmonary bronchogenic cysts were located in the right lower lobe, and the remaining one was left lower lobe. Intrapulmonary bronchogenic cysts ranged from 6cm to 12cm in diameter (average, 9.7 cm). On CT, intrapulmonary bronchogenic cysts appeared as thin-wall air cyst, homogenous water attenuation and soft tissue attenuation with air bubble respectively. Mediastinal bronchogenic cysts were located in posterior mediastinum(n=5), superior mediastinum(n=2), middle mediastinum(n=1) respectively. These cysts ranged in size from 3cm to 8cm in diameter (average, 5.0 cm). On CT, five showed homogenous water attenuation, two soft tissue attenuation similar to that of muscle, one air-fluid level. Calcification or contrast enhancement was not detected in any cases. On operative findings, all of intrapulmonary bronchogenic cysts contained dirty pus-like material and all of mediastinal bronchogenic cysts contained whitish or yellowish mucus material. Bronchogenic cysts showed homogenous water density in many cases, homogenous soft tissue density, air-fluid level and air-filled cyst. The constellation of CT findings may be helpful in the diagnosis and differentiation of bronchogenic cyst.

• The Korean Journal of Nuclear Medicine Technology
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.49-61
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• 2014

Purpose: With the aging of the population, the attack rate of osteoporotic vertebral compression fracture is in the increasing trend, and percutaneous vertebroplasty (PVP) is the most commonly performed standardized treatment. Although there is a research report of the excellence of usefulness of the SPECT/CT examination in terns of the exact diagnosis before and after the procedure, the bone cement material used in the procedure influences the image quality by forming an artifact in the CT image. Therefore, the objective of the research lies on evaluating the effect the bone cement gives to a SPECT/CT image. Materials and Methods: The images were acquired by inserting a model cement to each cylinder, after setting the background (3.6 kBq/mL), hot cylinder (29.6 kBq/mL) and cold cylinder (water) to the NEMA-1994 phantom. It was reconstructed with Astonish (Iterative: 4 Subset: 16), and non attenuation correction (NAC), attenuation correction (AC+SC-) and attenuation and scatter correction (AC+SC+) were used for the CT correction method. The mean count by each correction method and the count change ratio by the existence of the cement material were compared and the contrast recovery coefficient (CRC) was obtained. Additionally, the bone/soft tissue ratio (B/S ratio) was obtained after measuring the mean count of the 4 places including the soft tissue(spine erector muscle) after dividing the vertebral body into fracture region, normal region and cement by selecting the 20 patients those have performed PVP from the 107 patients diagnosed of compression fracture. Results: The mean count by the existence of a cement material showed the rate of increase of 12.4%, 6.5%, 1.5% at the hot cylinder of the phantom by NAC, AC+SC- and AC+SC+ when cement existed, 75.2%, 85.4%, 102.9% at the cold cylinder, 13.6%, 18.2%, 9.1% at the background, 33.1%, 41.4%, 63.5% at the fracture region of the clinical image, 53.1%, 61.6%, 67.7% at the normal region and 10.0%, 4.7%, 3.6% at the soft tissue. Meanwhile, a relative count reduction could be verified at the cement adjacent part at the inside of the cylinder, and the phantom image on the lesion and the count increase ratio of the clinical image showed a contrary phase. CRC implying the contrast ratio and B/S ratio was improved in the order of NAC, AC+SC-, AC+SC+, and was constant without a big change in the cold cylinder of the phantom. AC+SC- for the quantitative count, and AC+SC+ for the contrast ratio was analyzed to be the highest. Conclusion: It is considered to be useful in a clinical diagnosis if the application of AC+SC+ that improves the contrast ratio is combined, as it increases the noise count of the soft tissue and the scatter region as well along with the effect of the bone cement in contrast to the fact that the use of AC+SC- in the spine SPECT/CT examination of a PVP performed patient drastically increases the image count and enables a high density of image of the lesion(fracture).

• The Korean Journal of Nuclear Medicine
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.90-101
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• 1997

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of various quantitative indices for the differentiation of benign from malignant primary soft tissue tumors by FDG-PET. A series of 32 patients with a variety of histologically or clinically confirmed benign (20) or malignant (12) soft tissue lesions were evaluated with emission whole body (5min/bed position) PET after injection of [$^{18}F$]FDG. Regional 20min transmission scan for the attenuation correction and calculation of SUV was performed in 16 patients (10 benign, 6malignant) followed by dynamic acquisition for 56min. Postinjection transmission scan for the attenuation correction and calculation of SUV was executed in the other 16 patients (10 benign, 6 malignant). The following indices were obtained. the peak and average SUV (pSUV, aSUV) of lesions, tumor-to-background ratio acquired at images of 51 min p.i. ($TBR_{51}$), tumor-to-background ratio of areas under time-activity curves ($TBR_{area}$) and the ratio between the activities of tumor ROI at 51 min p. i. and at the time which background ROI reaches maximum activity on the time-activity curves ($T_{51}/T_{max}$). The pSUV, aSUV, $TBR_{51}$, and $TBR_{area}$ in malignant lesions were significantly higher than those in benign lesions. We set the cut-off values of pSUV, aSUV, $TBR_{51},\;TBR_{area}$ and $T_{51}/T_{max}$ for the differentiation of benign and malignant lesions at 3.5, 2.8, 5.1, 4.3 and 1.55, respectively. The sensitivity, specificity and accuracy were 91.7%, 80.0%, 84.4% by pSUV and aSUV, 83.3%, 85.0%, 84.4% by $TBR_{51}$, 83.3%, 100%, 93.8% by $TBR_{area}$ and 66.7%, 70.0%, 68.8% by $T_{51}/T_{max}$. The time-activity curves did not give additional information compared to SUV or TBR. The one false negative was a case with low-grade fibrosarcoma and all four false positives were cases with inflammatory change on histology. The visual, analysis of FDG-PET also detected the metastatic lesions in malignant cases with comparable accuracy In conclusion, all pSUV, aSUV, $TBR_{51}$, and $TBR_{area}$ are useful metabolic semi-quantitative indices with good accuracy for the differentiation of benign from malignant soft-tissue lesions.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.8
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• pp.2854-2863
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• 2023

Objective: To present a hybrid approach that incorporates a constrained beam-hardening estimator (CBHE) and deep learning (DL)-based post-refinement for metal artifact reduction in dental cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT). Methods: Constrained beam-hardening estimator (CBHE) is derived from a polychromatic X-ray attenuation model with respect to X-ray transmission length, which calculates associated parameters numerically. Deep-learning-based post-refinement with an artifact disentanglement network (ADN) is performed to mitigate the remaining dark shading regions around a metal. Artifact disentanglement network (ADN) supports an unsupervised learning approach, in which no paired CBCT images are required. The network consists of an encoder that separates artifacts and content and a decoder for the content. Additionally, ADN with data normalization replaces metal regions with values from bone or soft tissue regions. Finally, the metal regions obtained from the CBHE are blended into reconstructed images. The proposed approach is systematically assessed using a dental phantom with two types of metal objects for qualitative and quantitative comparisons. Results: The proposed hybrid scheme provides improved image quality in areas surrounding the metal while preserving native structures. Conclusion: This study may significantly improve the detection of areas of interest in many dentomaxillofacial applications.

• The Korean Journal of Nuclear Medicine Technology
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.10-14
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• 2013

Purpose: Due to developed simultaneous PET/MRI, it has become possible to obtain more anatomical image information better than conventional PET/CT. By the way, in the PET/CT, the linear absorption coefficient is measured by X-ray directly. However in case of PET/MRI, the value is not measured from MRI images directly, but is calculated by dividing as 4 segmentation ${\mu}-map$. Therefore, in this paper, we will evaluate the SUV's difference of attenuation correction PET images from PET/MRI and PET/CT. Materials and Methods: Biograph mCT40 (Siemens, Germany), Biograph mMR were used as a PET/CT, PET/MRI scanner. For a phantom study, we used a solid type $^{68}Ge$ source, and a liquid type $^{18}F$ uniformity phantom. By using VIBE-DIXON sequence of PET/MRI, human anatomical structure was divided into air-lung-fat-soft tissue for attenuation correction coefficient. In case of PET/CT, the hounsfield unit of CT was used. By setting the ROI at five places of each PET phantom images that is corrected attenuation, the maximum SUV was measured, evaluated %diff about PET/CT vs. PET/MRI. In clinical study, the 18 patients who underwent simultaneous PET/CT and PET/MRI was selected and set the ROI at background, lung, liver, brain, muscle, fat, bone from the each attenuation correction PET images, and then evaluated, compared by measuring the maximum SUV. Results: For solid $^{68}Ge$ source, SUV from PET/MRI is measured lower 88.55% compared to PET/CT. In case of liquid $^{18}F$ uniform phantom, SUV of PET/MRI as compared to PET/CT is measured low 70.17%. If the clinical study, the background SUV of PET/MRI is same with PET/CT's and the one of lung was higher 2.51%. However, it is measured lower about 32.50, 40.35, 23.92, 13.92, 5.00% at liver, brain, muscle, fat, femoral head. Conclusion: In the case of a CT image, because there is a linear relationship between 511 keV ${\gamma}-ray$ and linear absorption coefficient of X-ray, it is possible to correct directly the attenuation of 511 keV ${\gamma}-ray$ by creating a ${\mu}$map from the CT image. However, in the case of the MRI, because the MRI signal has no relationship at all with linear absorption coefficient of ${\gamma}-ray$, the anatomical structure of the human body is divided into four segmentations to correct the attenuation of ${\gamma}-rays$. Even a number of protons in a bone is too low to make MRI signal and to localize segmentation of ${\mu}-map$. Therefore, to develope a proper sequence for measuring more accurate attenuation coefficient is indeed necessary in the future PET/MRI.

• The Korean Journal of Nuclear Medicine Technology
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.68-80
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• 2012

Purpose : More recently, combined PET/MR scanners have been developed in which the MR data can be used for both anatometabolic image formation and attenuation correction of the PET data. For quantitative PET information, correction of tissue photon attenuation is mandatory. The attenuation map is obtained from the CT scan in the PET/CT. In the case of PET/MR, the attenuation map can be calculated from the MR image. The purpose of this study was to assess the quantitative differences between MR-based and CT-based attenuation corrected PET images. Materials and Methods : Using the uniform cylinder phantom of distilled water which has 199.8 MBq of $^{18}F$-FDG put into the phantom, we studied the effect of MR-based and CT-based attenuation corrected PET images, of the PET-CT using time of flight (TOF) and non-TOF iterative reconstruction. The images were acquired from 60 minutes at 15-minute intervals. Region of interests were drawn over 70% from the center of the image, and the Scanners' analysis software tools calculated both maximum and mean SUV. These data were analyzed by one way-anova test and Bland-Altman analysis. MR images are segmented into three classes(not including bone), and each class is assigned to each region based on the expected average attenuation of each region. For clinical diagnostic purpose, PET/MR and PET/CT images were acquired in 23 patients (Ingenuity TF PET/MR, Gemini TF64). PET/CT scans were performed approximately 33.8 minutes after the beginnig of the PET/MR scans. Region of interests were drawn over 9 regions of interest(lung, liver, spleen, bone), and the Scanners' analysis software tools calculated both maximum and mean SUV. The SUVs from 9 regions of interest in MR-based PET images and in CT-based PET images were compared. These data were analyzed by paired t test and Bland-Altman analysis. Results : In phantom study, MR-based attenuation corrected PET images generally showed slightly lower -0.36~-0.15 SUVs than CT-based attenuation corrected PET images (p<0.05). In clinical study, MR-based attenuation corrected PET images generally showed slightly lower SUVs than CT-based attenuation corrected PET images (excepting left middle lung and transverse Lumbar) (p<0.05). And percent differences were -8.01.79% lower for the PET/MR images than for the PET/CT images. (excepting lung) Based on the Bland-Altman method, the agreement between the two methods was considered good. Conclusion : PET/MR confirms generally lower SUVs than PET/CT. But, there were no difference in the clinical interpretations made by the quantitative comparisons with both type of attenuation map.

• Journal of Korean Neurosurgical Society
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• v.44 no.2
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• pp.95-97
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• 2008

The authors report an extremely rare case with intraventricular and subarachnoid fat developed after trauma to spine and soft tissue in a 54-year-old male. The initial computed tomography (CT) showed multiple low attenuation lesions, which were thought to be pneumocephalus. Cerebral magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) showed lesions with high signal intensity on T1-weighted magnetic resonance images and high signal intensity on T2-weighted images, indicating fat globules within the CSF. In this report, the clinical presentation, radiological findings, and a review of the literature are presented.

• Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases
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• v.58 no.6
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• pp.543-553
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• 2005

Radiological analysis of chest lesions detected on chest radiographs or CT scans begins with their classification into parenchymal, pleural, or extrapleural lesions according to their presumed origin. The mediastinum is divided anatomically into the anterior, middle, and posterior mediastinal compartments, and localizing a mediastinal mass to one of these divisions can facilitate their differential diagnosis. A differential diagnosis of a mediastinal mass is usually based on a number of findings, including its location; the structure from which it is arising; whether it is single, multifocal (involving several different areas or lymph node groups), or diffuse; its size and shape; its attenuation (fatty, fluid, soft-tissue, or a combination of these); the presence of calcification along with its characteristics and amount; and its opacification following the administration of contrast agents.

• Imaging Science in Dentistry
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• v.51 no.1
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• pp.87-90
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• 2021

The increased use of cone-beam computed tomographic (CBCT) scans has made it increasingly necessary to evaluate incidental findings on CBCT scans. This report describes the case of a 66-year-old female patient who presented to the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology, Radiology and Medicine at the College of Dentistry of the author's institution and underwent a CBCT scan for maxillary alveolar process implant planning. Upon evaluation of the CBCT scan, a radiopaque (soft tissue attenuation) mass in the left superior aspect of the nasal cavity and left locule of the sphenoid sinus with opacification of the left locule of the sphenoid sinus was incidentally noted. These radiographic findings were suggestive of a space-occupying mass with a high possibility of malignancy. A further medical evaluation confirmed renal cell cancer metastasis to the sphenoid sinus. This study shows the significance of reviewing the entire CBCT scan for incidental findings.