• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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• 2022.11a
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• pp.300-302
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• 2022

Palm vein identification has attracted attention due to its distinct characteristics and excellent recognition accuracy. However, many contactless palm vein identification systems suffer from the issue of having low-quality palm images, resulting in degradation of recognition accuracy. This paper proposes the use of U-Net architecture to correctly segment the vascular blood vessel from palm images. Attention gate mechanism and residual block are also utilized to effectively learn the crucial features of a specific segmentation task. The experiments were conducted on CASIA dataset. Hessian-based Jerman filtering method is applied to label the palm vein patterns from the original images, then the network is trained to segment the palm vein features from the background noise. The proposed method has obtained 96.24 IoU coefficient and 98.09 dice coefficient.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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• 2009.11a
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• pp.345-346
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• 2009

The segmentation of vessel including portal vein, hepatic vein and artery, from Computed Tomography (CT) images plays an important role in the therapeutic strategies for hepatic diseases. Representing segmented vessels in three dimensional spaces is extremely useful for doctors to plan liver surgery. In this paper, proposed method is focused on smoothing technique of segmented 3D liver vessels, which derived from 3D region growing approach. A pixel expand algorithm has been developed first to avoid vessel lose and disconnection cased by the next smoothing technique. And then a binary volume filtering technique has been implemented and applied to make the segmented binary vessel volume qualitatively smoother. This strategy uses an iterative relaxation process to extract isosurfaces from binary volumes while retaining anatomical structure and important features in the volume. Hard and irregular place in volume image has been eliminated as shown in the result part, which also demonstrated that proposed method is a suitable smoothing solution for post processing of fine vessel segmentation.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.46 no.1
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• pp.23-31
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• 2009

Recently, biometric techniques such as face recognition, finger-print recognition and iris recognition have been widely applied for various applications including door access control, finance security and electric passport. This paper presents the method of using finger-vein pattern for the personal identification. In general, when the finger-vein image is acquired from the camera, various conditions such as the penetrating amount of the infrared light and the camera noise make the segmentation of the vein from the background difficult. This in turn affects the system performance of personal identification. To solve this problem, we propose the novel and fast method for extracting the finger-vein region. The proposed method has two advantages compared to the previous methods. One is that we adopt a locally adaptive thresholding method for the binarization of acquired finger-vein image. Another advantage is that the simple morphological opening and closing are used to remove the segmentation noise to finally obtain the finger-vein region from the skeletonization. Experimental results showed that our proposed method could quickly and exactly extract the finger-vein region without using various kinds of time-consuming filters for preprocessing.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.16-37
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• 2022

Accurate liver segment segmentation based on radiological images is indispensable for the preoperative analysis of liver tumor resection surgery. However, most of the existing segmentation methods are not feasible to be used directly for this task due to the challenge of exact edge prediction with some tiny and slender vessels as its clinical segmentation criterion. To address this problem, we propose a novel deep learning based segmentation model, called Boundary-Aware Dual Attention Liver Segment Segmentation Model (BADA). This model can improve the segmentation accuracy of liver segments with enhancing the edges including the vessels serving as segment boundaries. In our model, the dual gated attention is proposed, which composes of a spatial attention module and a semantic attention module. The spatial attention module enhances the weights of key edge regions by concerning about the salient intensity changes, while the semantic attention amplifies the contribution of filters that can extract more discriminative feature information by weighting the significant convolution channels. Simultaneously, we build a dataset of liver segments including 59 clinic cases with dynamically contrast enhanced MRI(Magnetic Resonance Imaging) of portal vein stage, which annotated by several professional radiologists. Comparing with several state-of-the-art methods and baseline segmentation methods, we achieve the best results on this clinic liver segment segmentation dataset, where Mean Dice, Mean Sensitivity and Mean Positive Predicted Value reach 89.01%, 87.71% and 90.67%, respectively.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.423-430
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• 2013

Recently, the personal identification technologies using vein pattern of back of the hand, palm, and finger have been developed actively because it has the advantage that the vein blood vessel in the body is impossible to damage, make a replication and forge. However, it is difficult to extract clearly the vein region from captured vein images through common image prcessing based region segmentation method, because of the light scattering and non-uniform internal tissue by skin layer and inside layer skeleton, etc. Especially, it takes a long time for processing time and makes a discontinuity of blood vessel just in a image because it has non-uniform illumination due to use a locally different adaptive threshold for the binarization of acquired finger-vein image. To solve this problem, we propose illumination normalization based fast method for extracting the finger-vein region. The proposed method has advantages compared to the previous methods as follows. Firstly, for remove a non-uniform illumination of the captured vein image, we obtain a illumination component of the captured vein image by using a low-pass filter. Secondly, by extracting the finger-vein path using one time binarization of a single threshold selection, we were able to reduce the processing time. Through experimental results, we confirmed that the accuracy of extracting the finger-vein region was increased and the processing time was shortened than prior methods.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.430-437
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• 2010

It is essential for living donor liver transplantation that surgeon must understand the hepatic vessel structure to improve the success rate of operation. In this paper, we extract the liver boundary without other surrounding structures such as heart, stomach, and spleen using the contrast enhanced MDCT liver image sequence. After that, we extract the major hepatic veins (left, middle, right hepatic vein) with morphological filter after review the basic structure of hepatic vessel which reside in segmented liver image region. The purpose of this study is provide the overall status of transplantation operation with size estimation of resection part which is dissected along with the middle hepatic vein. The method of liver extraction is as follows: firstly, we get rid of background and muscle layer with gray level distribution ratio from sampling process. secondly, the coincident images match with unit mesh image are unified with resulted image using the corse coordinate of liver and body. thirdly, we extract the final liver image after expanding and region filling. Using the segmented liver images, we extract the hepatic vessels with morphological filter and reversed the major hepatic vessels only with a results of ascending order of vessel size. The 3D reconstructed views of hepatic vessel are generated after applying the interpolation to provide the smooth view. These 3D view are used to estimate the dissection line after identify the middle hepatic vein. Finally, the volume of resection region is calculated and we can identify the possibility of successful transplantation operation.

• Journal of Korea Society of Digital Industry and Information Management
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.97-110
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• 2022

The case study looks into the case of the "extreme" market segmentation strategy of company L with its top luxury windows and door brand "Lonchel". Company L has long enjoyed a leading position in the Korean windows and doors mass market. However, it went against their already well-established flagship brand and created a completely new one called "Lonchel", pursuing an extreme market segmentation strategy focusing on the small niche market of highest-income customers exclusively. The strategy has turned out to be successful and the company has gained long-lasting competitive advantages. In this vein this study analyzes the market environment in which the top-tier brand "Lonchel" appeared, the concept of the extreme positioning and the smallest viable market, the characteristics of target customers, the company's analysis of and response to them, and the analysis of products to meet their needs. The brand operation plan and promotion will be also reviewed. Through this, we intend to draw implications related to the extreme positioning strategy that a company may pursue in a target market of small groups of people.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.679-684
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• 2023

Venous puncture is widely used to obtain blood samples for pathological examination. Because the invasive venipuncture method using a needle is repeatedly performed, the pain suffered by the patient increases, so our research team pre-developed a miniaturized near-infrared (NIR) imaging system in advance. To improve the image quality of the acquired NIR images, this study aims to model the non-local means (NLM) algorithm, which is well known to be efficient in noise reduction, and analyze its applicability in the system. The developed NIR imaging system is based on the principle that infrared rays pass through dichroic and long-pass filters and are detected by a CMOS sensor module. The proposed NLM algorithm is modeled based on the principle of replacing the pixel from which noise is to be removed with a value that reflects the distances between surrounding pixels. After acquiring an NIR image with a central wavelength of 850 nm, the NLM algorithm was applied to segment the final vein area through histogram equalization. As a result, the coefficient of variation of the NIR image of the vein using the NLM algorithm was 0.247 on average, which was an excellent result compared to conventional filtering methods. In addition, the dice similarity coefficient value of the NLM algorithm was improved by 62.91 and 9.40%, respectively, compared to the median filter and total variation methods. In conclusion, we demonstrated that the NLM algorithm can acquire accurate segmentation of veins acquired with a NIR imaging system.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.19B no.2
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• pp.123-126
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• 2012

This paper proposed a method to separate a liver into left and right liver lobes for simple and exact volumetry of the river graft at abdominal MDCT(Multi-Detector Computed Tomography) image before the living donor liver transplantation. A medical team can evaluate an accurate river graft with minimized interaction between the team and a system using this algorithm for ensuring donor's and recipient's safe. On the image of segmented liver, 2 points(PMHV: a point in Middle Hepatic Vein and PPV: a point at the beginning of right branch of Portal Vein) are selected to separate a liver into left and right liver lobes. Middle hepatic vein is automatically segmented using PMHV, and the cutting line is decided on the basis of segmented Middle Hepatic Vein. A liver is separated on connecting the cutting line and PPV. The volume and ratio of the river graft are estimated. The volume estimated using 2 points are compared with a manual volume that diagnostic radiologist processed and estimated and the weight measured during surgery to support proof of exact volume. The mean ${\pm}$ standard deviation of the differences between the actual weights and the estimated volumes was $162.38cm^3{\pm}124.39$ in the case of manual segmentation and $107.69cm^3{\pm}97.24$ in the case of 2 points method. The correlation coefficient between the actual weight and the manually estimated volume is 0.79, and the correlation coefficient between the actual weight and the volume estimated using 2 points is 0.87. After selection the 2 points, the time involved in separation a liver into left and right river lobe and volumetry of them is measured for confirmation that the algorithm can be used on real time during surgery. The mean ${\pm}$ standard deviation of the process time is $57.28sec{\pm}32.81$ per 1 data set ($149.17pages{\pm}55.92$).

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.435-441
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• 2018

In this study, we performed to design an image guiding algorithm to improve the efficiency and safety of treatment of varicose vein by focused ultrasound. The algorithm was suggested by different guiding images according to the location of varicose veins. In the case of deep-seated varicose veins, the target area was marked on the surface of the blood vessel in the obtained cross-sectional blood vessel ultrasound image. In the case of the superficial varicose vein, A guiding system based on image segmentation algorithm of the vascular region was suggested and designed two different algorithms according to varicose veins progression degree. as a results, the algorithm based on ultrasound image show a small error with $830{\mu}m$ at maximum. However, the algorithm based on charge coupled device image has a maximum error of 8.3 mm in some data. Therefore, it is expected that additional study is needed for superficial varicose vein image guiding algorithm, and it is expected that the accuracy of blood vessel tracking should be evaluated by constructing simple system.