• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.69-77
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• 2017

This paper proposes a composite filter for noise reduction of image. To improve the image quality by reducing the noise in the liver ultrasound image, we tried to help the accurate image analysis. In the experiment, the top seven composite filters were selected by combining the Gaussian blur filter, the sharpening filter, and the median filter using the ATS-539 ultrasonic phantom, and applied to the ultrasound image in which this was done. As a result, it was found that the values of SNR, CNR and MSR all increased when the top seven composite filters were applied. In addition, PSNR of more than 30 dB, close to SSIM 1 showed that the image loss rate is small. Therefore, the appropriate application of the proposed composite filter in this research will be useful for accurate video reading and analysis.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.29 no.8
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• pp.504-508
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• 2010

In conventional diagnostic ultrasound strain imaging, when displaying strain image on a monitor, human visual characteristics are utilized such that hard regions are displayed as dark and soft regions are displayed as bright. Thus, hard regions representing tumor or cancer are displayed as dark, decreasing the contrast inside the lesion. Because the lesion area is stiff and thus displayed as dark, a method of inverting the image brightness and thereby increasing the contrast in the lesion for better diagnostic purposes is proposed wherein a postcompression signal is extended in the time domain by a factor corresponding to the reciprocal of the amount of the applied compression using a technique termed globally uniform stretching. Experiments were carried out to verify the proposed method on an ultrasound elasticity phantom with radio-frequency data acquired from a diagnostic ultrasound clinical scanner. It is found that the new method improves the contrast-to-noise ratio by a factor of up to about 1.8 compared to a conventional strain imaging method that employs a reversed gray color map without globally uniform stretching.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.693-699
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• 2023

Ultrasound is widely used in the medical field for non-destructive and non-invasive disease diagnosis. In order to improve the disease diagnosis accuracy of diagnostic medical images, improving spatial resolution is a very important factor. In this study, we aim to model the super resolution convolutional neural network (SRCNN) algorithm in ultrasound images and analyze its applicability in the medical diagnostic field. The study was conducted as an experimental study using Field II simulation and open source clinical liver hemangioma ultrasound imaging. The proposed SRCNN algorithm was modeled so that end-to-end learning can be applied from low resolution (LR) to high resolution. As a result of the simulation, we confirmed that the full width at half maximum in the phantom image using a Field II program was improved by 41.01% compared to LR when SRCNN was used. In addition, the peak to signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index (SSIM) evaluation results showed that SRCNN had the excellent value in both simulated and real liver hemangioma ultrasound images. In conclusion, the applicability of SRCNN to ultrasound images has been proven, and we expected that proposed algorithm can be used in various diagnostic medical fields.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.179-185
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• 2001

혈관에 발생하는 동맥 경화증은 그 발생 시기와 진행 정도를 예측하기 힘들어 초기 단계의 진단 및 치료가 어렵다. 이러한 이유로 혈관 질병의 진단은 많은 연구자들의 관심 대상이 되어왔고, 현재까지도 그 진단 장치 및 방법에 관한 연구가 활발히 진행되고 있다. 혈관 벽의 두께 측정은 혈관 질병을 진단할 수 있는 대표적인 지표이다. 그러므로 본 연구는 혈관 벽에서 수신되는 초음파 RF(Radio Frequency) 신호를 wavelet 변환하여 두께를 측정할 수 있는 방법을 제안한다. 시뮬레이션 결과를 토대로 두께가 각각 0.53mm, 1.2mm인 고분자 물질을 가지고 두께측정 실험을 행하였다. 기존의 방법인 주파수 스펙트럼법과 제안한 방법인 wavelet 변환법에 의하여 측정된 평균 두께는 0.53mm인 경우 각각 0.670$\pm$0.168mm(79.10%), 0.448$\pm$0.084mm(84.53%)이고, 1.2mm인 경우 각각 0.962$\pm$0.072mm(80.17%), 1.149$\pm$0.066mm(95.15%)이다. In-vitro 실험을 행하기 위하여 한천, gelatin, SiC 결정을 가지고 두께가 0.85mm인 혈관 유사 시편을 제작하였고, 이 시편으로부터 데이터를 획득하여 이를 제안한 방법으로 두께를 측정하였다. 그 결과 제안한 방법으로 측정된 평균 두께는 0.8008$\pm$0.0154mm(94.22%)이다. 결론적으로 wavelet 변환을 통해서 혈관 벽의 두께를 정밀하게 측정할 수 있는 가능성이 있음을 알 수 있다.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.313-320
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• 1998

Tri-phasic pulsatile flow is the general flow pattern of human circulary system. In emulating the various situation of cardiovascular system, it is essential to make tri-phasic source flow. To emulate tri-phasic pulsatile flow, we used electro-hydronic style LVAD(Left Ventricular Assist Device) with glass phantom and rubber tube. We have selected control parameters and examined the changing effect of each parameter by using Doppler ultrasound. In this experiment, it was shown that the distal compliance and the break time were the major factors to form tri-phasic flow. The results make it possible to emulate and explain the various situation of human vascular system. In this point, this results will be an useful method in the clinic application.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.899-909
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• 2021

In Musculoskeletal ultrasound examination, a linear transducer (12-5 MHz) with a contact surface length of 6 cm, which is commonly distributed in medical institutions, does not contact with bent fingers and wrist depressions only by using a conventional liquid ultrasound gel, which causes image loss. In order to solve this image loss, the use of commercially available Water gel pad is increasing. However, it is a disposable medical product. Repeated use is prohibited and expensive. In this study, in order to reduce the economic burden caused by the use of the commercialized Water gel Pad, we searched for water-soluble food thickener powder that can be easily purchased around our lives and manufactured Gel pads. Among them, kappa-Carrageenan Gel Pad, iota-Carrageenan Gel Pad, and Agar-Agar Gel Pad satisfied the evaluation criteria without artifacts in image evaluation using the N-365 Multipurpose Phantom. Also, the price to purchase the food thickener powder was about 38 times cheaper than the existing commercialized Water gel pad. As a result, if you use the food thickener powder such as kappa-Carrageenan, iota-Carrageenan and Agar-Agar to make solidified elastic Gel pad without a cover instead of the commercially available expensive disposable Water gel pad, the convenience and usefulness of use are improved. It is judged that the manufactured Gel pads can contribute well to the role of efficient ultrasound propagation medium.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.32 no.2
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• pp.158-164
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• 2011

Breast cancer is the most frequently appearing cancer in women, these days. To reduce mortality of breast cancer, periodic check-up is strongly recommended. X-ray mammography is one of powerful diagnostic imaging systems to detect 50~100 um micro-calcification which is the early sign of breast cancer. Although x-ray mammography has very high spatial resolution, it is not easy yet to distinguish cancerous tissue from normal tissues in mammograms and new tissue characterizing methods are required. Recently ultrasound elastography technique has been developed, which uses the phenomenon that cancerous tissue is harder than normal tissues. However its spatial resolution is not enough to detect breast cancer. In order to develop a new elastography system with high resolution we are developing x-ray elasticity imaging technique. It uses the small differences of tissue positions with and without external breast compression and requires an algorithm to detect tissue displacement. In this paper, computer simulation is done for preliminary study of x-ray elasticity imaging. First, 3D x-ray breast phantom for modeling woman's breast is created and its elastic model for FEM (finite element method) is generated. After then, FEM experiment is performed under the compression of the breast phantom. Using the obtained displacement data, 3D x-ray phantom is deformed and the final mammogram under the compression is generated. The simulation result shows the feasibility of x-ray elasticity imaging. We think that this preliminary study is helpful for developing and verifying a new algorithm of x-ray elasticity imaging.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.23 no.6
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• pp.419-430
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• 2002

In this paper. we propose an efficient method for implementing hi-directional pixel-based focusing(BiPBF) based on a sparse array imaging technique. The proposed method can improve spatial resolution and frame rate of ultrasound imaging with reduced hardware complexity by synthesizing transmit apertures with a small number of sparsely distributed subapertures. As the distance between adjacent subapertures increases, however. the image resolution tends to decrease due to the elevation of grating lobes. Such grating lobes can be eliminated in conventional synthetic aperture imaging techniques. On the contrary, grating lobes arisen from employing sparse synthetic transmit apertures can not be eliminated, which has been shown analytically in this paper. We also propose the condition and method for suppressing the grating lobes below -40dB, which is generally required in practical imaging. by placing the transmit focal depth at a near depth and properly selecting the subaperture distance in Proportion to receive aperture size. The results of both the Phantom and in vivo experiments show that the proposed method implements two-wav dynamic focusing using a smaller number of subapertures, resulting in reduced system complexity and increased frame rate.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.468-475
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• 2018

In medical ultrasound imaging, frequency-dependent attenuation downshifts and reduces a center frequency and a frequency bandwidth of received echo signals, respectively. This causes considerable errors in quadrature demodulation (QDM), result in lowering signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and contrast resolution (CR). To address this problem, adaptive dynamic QDM (ADQDM) that estimates center frequencies along depth was introduced. However, the ADQDM often fails when imaging regions contain hypoechoic regions. In this paper, we introduce a valid region-based ADQDM (VR-ADQDM) method to reject the misestimated center frequencies to further improve SNR and CR. The valid regions are regions where the center frequency decreases monotonically along depth. In addition, as a low-pass filter of QDM, Gaussian wavelet based dynamic filtering was adopted. From the phantom experiments, average SNR improvements of the ADQDM and the VR-ADQDM over the traditional QDM were 1.22 and 5.27 dB, respectively, and the corresponding maximum SNR improvements were 2.56 and 10.58 dB. The contrast resolution of the VR-ADQDM was also improved by 0.68 compared to that of the ADQDM. Similar results were obtained from in vivo experiments. These results indicate that the proposed method would offer promises for imaging technically-difficult patients due to its capability in improving SNR and CR.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Medical Physics Conference
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• 2004.11a
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• pp.122-125
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• 2004

In radiotherapy of tumors in liver, enough planning target volume (PTV) margins are necessary to compensate breathing-related movement of tumor volumes. To overcome the problems, this study aims to obtain patients' body movements by using a moving phantom and an ultrasonic sensor, and to develop respiration gating techniques that can adjust patients' beds by using reversed values of the data obtained. The phantom made to measure patients' body movements is composed of a microprocessor (BS II, 20 MHz, 8K Byte), a sensor (Ultra-Sonic, range 3 cm ${\sim}$3 m), host computer (RS232C) and stepping motor (torque 2.3Kg) etc., and the program to control and operate it was developed. The program allows the phantom to move within the maximum range of 2 cm, its movements and corrections to take place in order, and x, y and z to move successively. After the moving phantom was adjusted by entering random movement data(three dimensional data form with distance of 2cm), and the phantom movements were acquired using the ultra sonic sensor, the two data were compared and analyzed. And then, after the movements by respiration were acquired by using guinea pigs, the real-time respiration gating techniques were drawn by operating the phantom with the reversed values of the data. The result of analyzing the acquisition-correction delay time for the three types of data values and about each value separately shows that the data values coincided with one another within 1% and that the acquisition-correction delay time was obtained real-time (2.34 ${\times}$ 10$^{-4}$sec). This study successfully confirms the clinic application possibility of respiration gating techniques by using a moving phantom and an ultra sonic sensor. With ongoing development of additional analysis system, which can be used in real-time set-up reproducibility analysis, it may be beneficially used in radiotherapy of moving tumors.