• Transactions of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering
• /
• v.24 no.6
• /
• pp.429-436
• /
• 2014

Most mechanical systems are now operating consistently and getting faster due to the development of automation systems. Peoples' dependence on machines have increased as when problems occur within the mechanical system, personal injury and production loss may come as a result, as most of the mechanical system's malfunctions are caused by the failure of the rotational bearing. What we need now is a maintenance system that can warn us when it detects abnormal conditions before significant damage occurs to the bearing. In this study, we have developed an acoustic emissions sensor that can figure if the bearing works under the normal condition. With this acoustic emissions sensor, we can inspect the bearing for defects by using the Heterodyne technique, which converts the ultrasound signal into audio, as a signal conditioning process.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
• /
• 2009.04a
• /
• pp.565-570
• /
• 2009

Micro particles in fluid can be manipulated by using ultrasonic standing wave since the ultrasound makes particles move by means of its acoustic radiation force. This work concerns the micro particle manipulation system using ultrasonic standing wave which consists of a microchannel, an adaptive layer, a reflector, and an ultrasonic transduer. In the present system, the effects of the structural elements should be carefully considered to comprehend the system and find the optimal operational condition. In this investigation, finite element analysis was employed to analyze the system. Some interesting characteristics on the reflector thickness, the channel width, and the operational frequency were observed. Several experimental results were compared with the analytic results. Consequently, this work solidifies the importance of those system parameters and reveals the possibility of various applications of the particle manipulation using ultrasonic standing wave.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
• /
• v.8 no.5
• /
• pp.1047-1056
• /
• 2007

Basically, an ultrasonic imaging system has two fundamental imaging modes available. One is the B-mode imaging modality which provides an image of reflection coefficient, and the other is the Doppler color flow mode that maps blood flow inside the human heart and blood vessels. This paper presents a new method of detecting and compensating for aliasing that occurs when the Doppler frequency exceeds one-half of the pulse-repetition frequency (PRF). Its validity is shown by computer simulation. The new method not only extends the measurable Doppler frequency, but also helps to reduce the effect of noise. The results show that the aliasing can be compensated for correctly fur signal-to-noise ratios down to 20 dB.

• Applied Microscopy
• /
• v.47 no.3
• /
• pp.165-170
• /
• 2017

Gas vesicles are intracellular gas-filled protein-shelled nanocompartments. The structures are spindle or cylinder-shaped, and typically $0.1{\sim}2{\mu}m$ in length and 45~250 nm in width. A variety of prokaryotes including photosynthetic bacteria and halophilic archaea form gas vesicles in their cytoplasm. Gas vesicles provide cell buoyancy as flotation devices in aqueous habitats. They are used as nanoscale molecular reporters for ultrasound imaging for biomedical purposes. The structures in halophilic archaea are poorly resolved due to the low signal-to-noise ratio from the high salt concentration in the medium. Such a limitation can be overcome using focused ion beam-thinning or inelastically scattered electrons. As the concentric bodies (~200 nm in diameter) in fungi possess gas-filled cores, it is possible that the concept of gas vesicles could be applied to eukaryotic microbes beyond prokaryotes.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
• /
• v.16 no.2
• /
• pp.183-190
• /
• 1995

The use of ultrasound pulsed Doppler systems has become increasingly popular due to the advantages of easy measurements of blood velocity, volume blood blow, and irregularities of the circulatory system. However, the 2-D Doppler systems have several problems, such as range ambiguity, low signal to noise ratio, and slow frame rate. The mean frequency aliasing problem originating from the pulse repetition frequency is one of major limitations in pulsed Doppler systems. A conventional approach to resolve this problem is tracking the mean frequency close to and beyond the Nyquist frequency along the temporal axis. In this paper, a new concept of tracking the mean frequency along the spatial axis is proposed. The proposed technique is fault tolerant by nature and more suitable for multi gate and 2-D Doppler system than conventional methods.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.11 no.2
• /
• pp.499-507
• /
• 2016

Medical imaging techniques such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Computed Tomography (CT) and Ultrasound (US) produce a large amount of digital medical images. Hence, compression of digital images becomes essential and is very much desired in medical applications to solve both storage and transmission problems. But at the same time, an efficient image compression scheme that reduces the size of medical images without sacrificing diagnostic information is required. This paper proposes a novel threshold-based medical image compression algorithm to reduce the size of the medical image without degradation in the diagnostic information. This algorithm discusses a novel type of thresholding to maximize Compression Ratio (CR) without sacrificing diagnostic information. The compression algorithm is designed to get image with high optimum compression efficiency and also with high fidelity, especially for Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) greater than or equal to 36 dB. This value of PSNR is chosen because it has been suggested by previous researchers that medical images, if have PSNR from 30 dB to 50 dB, will retain diagnostic information. The compression algorithm utilizes one-level wavelet decomposition with threshold-based coefficient selection.

• Proceedings of the KOSOMBE Conference
• /
• v.1994 no.05
• /
• pp.96-99
• /
• 1994

Despite the simplicity of processing, a conventional autocorrelation function(ACF) method for the precise determination of fetal heart rate (FHR) has many problems. In case of weak or noise corrupted Doppler ultrasound signal. the ACF method is very sensitive to the threshold level and data window length. It is very troublesome to extract FHR when there is a data loss. To overcome these problems, the high resolution pitch detection algorithm was adopted to estimate the FHR. This method is more accurate, robust and reliable than the ACF method. With a lot of calculation, however, it is impossible to process real time FHR estimation. This paper is presented a new FHR estimation algorithm for real time processing.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
• /
• v.3 no.1
• /
• pp.35-42
• /
• 1982

The objective of this phantom study is to develop a digital method for improving the lateral resolution of B-scan ultrasonographic images irs medical application of ultrasound. By utilizing a discrete state-space modeling approach and Kalman-Buch method for analysis of the transducer's beam profile and the measurement and sampling noise, a stable recursive restoration of the object image was obtained for improved lateral resolution. The point spread function (PSF) was measured for the reflective signals after scanning the small pins located along the depth of interest. One major advantage of the present recursive scheme over the transform method is in its applicability for the space-variant imaging, such as in the case of the rotational movement of transducer.

• Journal of information and communication convergence engineering
• /
• v.15 no.1
• /
• pp.49-52
• /
• 2017

Ganglion cysts are benign soft tissues usually encountered in the wrist. In this paper, we propose a method to extract a ganglion cyst region from ultrasonography images by using image segmentation. The proposed method using the possibilistic c-means (PCM) clustering method is applicable to ganglion cyst extraction. The methods considered in this thesis are fuzzy stretching, median filter, PCM clustering, and connected component labeling. Fuzzy stretching performs well on ultrasonography images and improves the original image. Median filter reduces the speckle noise without decreasing the image sharpness. PCM clustering is used for categorizing pixels into the given cluster centers. Connected component labeling is used for labeling the objects in an image and extracting the cyst region. Further, PCM clustering is more robust in the case of noisy data, and the proposed method can extract a ganglion cyst area with an accuracy of 80% (16 out of 20 images).

• Journal of Industrial Technology
• /
• v.28 no.B
• /
• pp.129-133
• /
• 2008

A method to reduce seam line artifact in spatial compounding of ultrasonic images is presented. Spatial compounding is a speckle reducing imaging technique in which a number of ultrasound images of a given target that have been obtained from multiple view angles are combined into a single compounded image by combining the data received from each data point in the compounded image. Since different view angle results in different view area, and the images of different view arms are combined into an image, the compounded image consists of regions with different signal to noise ratio, and the boundary lines between these regions are visible as seam lines in the compounded images. In this paper, we present an algorithm that reduces the visibility of this seam line in the spatially compounded images. Design procedure for a FIH filter is described and the results of applying the filter to in-vivo ultrasonic images are analyzed.