• Progress in Medical Physics
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.62-71
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• 2009

Recently, optical coherence tomography (OCT) has demonstrated considerable promise for the noninvasive assessment of biological tissues. However, OCT images difficult to analyze due to speckle noise. In this paper, we tested various image processing techniques for speckle removal of human and rabbit cartilage OCT images. Also, we distinguished the images which get with methods of image segmentation for OCT images, and found the most suitable method for segmenting an image. And, we selected image segmentation suitable for OCT before image reconstruction. OCT was a weak point to system design and image processing. It was a limit owing to measure small a distance and depth size. So, good edge matching algorithms are important for image reconstruction. This paper presents such an algorithm, the chamfer matching algorithm. It is made of background for 3D image reconstruction. The purpose of this paper is to describe good image processing techniques for speckle removal, image segmentation, and the 3D reconstruction of cartilage OCT images.

• Quality Improvement in Health Care
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.324-334
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• 1998

Background : Strategic planning is an organizationwide or systemwide, ongoing look into the future usually of 2~3 years, based on objective analysis of the current environment and trends, but it can incorporate both short-term and long-term goals. The strategic planning process includes external analysis, internal analysis, issue analysis, development of mission, vision and values, and lastly development of organizational goals and objectives. As a part of the strategic quality planning process, certain service lines, important organizationwide functions, or key processes supporting these functions can be prioritized to expedite and roll out certain strategic goals. This is called strategic quality initiatives. Methods : We organized a quality improvement team, a subgroup of 21st century vision planning corps of our medical center, and pursued QI activities for improvement of healthcare environment, particularly in the admission setting. We developed a strategic quality initiative based on the results of patient satisfaction surveys, and carried out functions of self-directed work team. Results : The strategic goal was to be the benchmark for peer group hospitals in Korea for providing cost-effective best-practice. The QI team included 3 medical doctors, 1 nurse, 1 social worker, and 1 QI consultant as well as many operational members to support services and quality initiatives met every Tuesday for 18 weeks. Outcome objectives were to improve patient satisfaction score. The issues included in the objectives were comfort, temperature, noise, cleanliness of the admission wards, quality and education of patient meals, matters regarding the admission process, and an appurtenant facility such as restaurant or convenience store. Every issue was discussed and recommendations, conclusions and opportunities were implemented. Conclusions : By developing a strategic quality initiative as a part of the strategic quality planning process, and pursuing a self-directed work team, certain sen/ice lines, important organizationwide functions, or key processes supporting these functions can be improved effectively within a short period. Strategic quality initiatives serve to support, or roll out, certain strategic goals that are relevant to performance improvement and development of specific measurable outcome objectives, and associated performance measure for each initiative. Each strategic quality initiative should include a statement of intent outcome objectives, and performance measures. We will come back with follow up of the strategic quality initiative, for improvement of healthcare environment, and results of patient satisfaction re-survey.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.2523-2527
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• 2014

Background: Serum thyroglobulin detection plays an essential role during the follow-up of thyroid cancer patients treated with total/near total thyroidectomy and radioiodine ablation. The aim of this retrospective study was to evaluate the relationship between stimulated serum thyroglobulin (Tg) level at the time of high dose $^{131}I$ ablation and risk of recurrence, using a three-level classification in patients with differentiated thyroid cancer (DTC) according to the ATA guidelines. Also we investigated the relationship between postoperative stimulated Tg at the time of ablation and DxWBS results at 8-10 months thereafter. Materials and Methods: Patients with radioiodine accumulation were regarded as scan positive (scan+). If there was no relevant pathological radioiodine accumulation or minimal local accumulation in the thyroid bed region, this were regarded as scan negative (scan-) at the time of DxWBS. We classified patients in 3 groups as low, intermediate and high risk group for assessment of risk of recurrence according to the revised ATA guidelines. Also, we divided patients into 3 groups based on the stimulated serum Tg levels at the time of $^{131}I$ ablation therapy. Groups 1-3 consisted of patients who had Tg levels of ${\leq}2ng/ml$, 2-10 ng/ml, and ${\geq}10ng/ml$, respectively. Results: A total of 221 consecutive patients were included. In the high risk group according to the ATA guideline, while 45.5% of demonstrated Scan(+) Tg(+), 27.3% of patients demonstrated Scan(-) Tg(-); in the intermediate group, the figures were 2.3% and 90.0% while in the low risk group, they were 0.6% and 96.4%. In 9 of 11 patients with metastases (81.8%), stimulated serum Tg level at the time of radioiodine ablation therapy was over 10, however in 1 patient (9.1%) it was <2ng/mL and in one patient it was 2-10ng/mL (p=0.005). Aggressive subtypes of DTC were found in 8 of 221 patients and serum Tg levels were ${\leq}2ng/ml$ in 4 of these 8. Conclusions: We conclude that TSH-stimulated serum thyroglobulin level at the time of ablation may not determine risk of recurrence. Therefore, DxWBS should be performed at 8-12 months after ablation therapy.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.30 no.8
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• pp.410-420
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• 2011

The present study aims to investigate the soundscapes of Jeju olle route through the soundwalking. In order to do this, sound measurements and sound recording were undertaken at 10 points along Jeju olle route. Also, loudness of background sound and figure sound were examined. Subjective surveys were carried out using questionnaire and interviews with 32 tourists and 5 acoustical specialists in order to investigate the loudest sound, most pleasant and unpleasant sound, and impressive sound among 17 natural and artificial sounds. Additionally, laboratory experiments were achieved to evaluates sound that have been recorded at the field using same questionnaire and the results were compared with those of field experiments. As a result, the sound heard most in Jeju olle route is the sea wave sound, wind sound, automobile noise, and human voice. It was revealed that the most pleasant sound consisted of nature sound among them, and that unpleasant sounds are artificial sounds. The results of subjective test denote that unpleasant sound is affected by ratio of artificial sound and nature sound. And this also affects the assessment about the loudness of the sound. Also, it was found that the results of both field test and laboratory test are closely correlated in the evaluation of loudness of sound and unpleasant feeling.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.10 no.8
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• pp.1068-1077
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• 2007

This paper proposes a method that extracts characteristics of cracks such as length, thickness and direction from a concrete slab surface image with image processing techniques. These techniques extract the cracks from the concrete surface image in variable conditions including bad image conditions) using the ART2-based RBF network to recognize the dominant directions -45 degree, 45 degree, horizontal and vertical) of the extracted cracks from the automatically calculated specifications like the lengths, directions and widths of the cracks. Our proposed extraction algorithms and analysis of the concrete cracks used a Robert operation to emphasize the cracks, and a Multiple operation to increase the difference in brightness between the cracks and background. After these treatments, the cracks can be extracted from the image by using an iterated binarization technique. Noise reduction techniques are used three separate times on this binarized image, and the specifications of the cracks are extracted form this noiseless image. The dominant directions can be recognized by using the ART2-based RBF network. In this method, the ART2 is used between the input layer and the middle layer to learn, and the Delta learning method is used between the middle layer and the output layer. The experiments using real concrete images showed that the cracks were effectively extracted, and the Proposed ART2-based RBF network effectively recognized the directions of the extracted cracks.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.36 no.3
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• pp.179-186
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• 2009

This paper proposes a target speech extraction which restores speech signal of a target speaker form noisy convolutive mixture of speech and an interference source. We assume that the target speaker is known and his/her utterances are available in the training time. Incorporating the additional information extracted from the training utterances into the separation, we combine convolutive blind source separation(CBSS) and non-negative decomposition techniques, e.g., probabilistic latent variable model. The nonnegative decomposition is used to learn a set of bases from the spectrogram of the training utterances, where the bases represent the spectral information corresponding to the target speaker. Based on the learned spectral bases, our method provides two postprocessing steps for CBSS. Channel selection step finds a desirable output channel from CBSS, which dominantly contains the target speech. Reconstruct step recovers the original spectrogram of the target speech from the selected output channel so that the remained interference source and background noise are suppressed. Experimental results show that our method substantially improves the separation results of CBSS and, as a result, successfully recovers the target speech.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.22 no.7
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• pp.519-527
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• 2003

Speech is much influenced by the existence of outliers which are introduced by such an unexpected happenings as additive background noise, change of speaker's utterance pattern and voice detection errors. These kinds of outliers may result in severe degradation of speaker recognition performance. In this paper, we proposed the GMM based on robust principal component analysis (RPCA-GMM) using M-estimation to solve the problems of both ouliers and high dimensionality of training feature vectors in speaker identification. Firstly, a new feature vector with reduced dimension is obtained by robust PCA obtained from M-estimation. The robust PCA transforms the original dimensional feature vector onto the reduced dimensional linear subspace that is spanned by the leading eigenvectors of the covariance matrix of feature vector. Secondly, the GMM with diagonal covariance matrix is obtained from these transformed feature vectors. We peformed speaker identification experiments to show the effectiveness of the proposed method. We compared the proposed method (RPCA-GMM) with transformed feature vectors to the PCA and the conventional GMM with diagonal matrix. Whenever the portion of outliers increases by every 2%, the proposed method maintains almost same speaker identification rate with 0.03% of little degradation, while the conventional GMM and the PCA shows much degradation of that by 0.65% and 0.55%, respectively This means that our method is more robust to the existence of outlier.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.20 no.6
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• pp.818-826
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• 2015

Recently, objective image quality assessment (IQA) methods that elaborately reflect the visual quality perception characteristics of human visual system (HVS) have actively been studied. Among those characteristics of HVS, luminance adaptation (LA) effect, indicating that HVS has different sensitivities depending on background luminance values to distortions, has widely been reflected into many existing IQA methods via Weber's law model. In this paper, we firstly reveal that the LA effect based on Weber's law model has inaccurately been reflected into the conventional IQA methods. To solve this problem, we firstly derive a new LA effect-based Local weight Function (LALF) that can elaborately reflect LA effect into IQA methods. We validate the effectiveness of our proposed LALF by applying LALF into SSIM (Structural SIMilarity) and PSNR methods. Experimental results show that the SSIM based on LALF yields remarkable performance improvement of 5% points compared to the original SSIM in terms of Spear rank order correlation coefficient between estimated visual quality values and measured subjective visual quality scores. Moreover, the PSNR (Peak to Signal Noise Ratio) based on LALF yields performance improvement of 2.5% points compared to the original PSNR.

• The Korean Journal of Nuclear Medicine Technology
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.24-27
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• 2016

Purpose In this study, we evaluated image quality of lesion in the vicinity according filling and empty bladder developing bladder phantom. Materials and Methods Bladder phantom was developed by modifying NEMA IEC body phantom. Air-balloon was described as bladder and 6 insert were set as lesion in the vicinity bladder according to distance. The images were evaluated in terms of % BV, comparison of SUV and peak count rate (Single, Random and True count). Results % BV was decreased far away from bladder. There were different for SUV about $7.8{\pm}3.8%$ between filling and empty bladder. True count rate was decreased about 38 %. Single and random count were increased about 44, 61%. Conclusion When the lesion is close to bladder, noise is increased. That's why prior to PET-CT scan, It is important to urinate. and It helps patient to get the accurate result.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.23-27
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• 2005

Background and Objectives : Voice disorders can cause problems in patients with benign vocal cord lesions emotionally, physically, economically and functionally. Neither subjective nor objective voice examinations can evaluate such factors adequately. The Voice Handicap Index (VHI) subjectively evaluates voice disorders in terms of physical, functional, emotional factors and measures the patient's perception of the impact of voice disorder. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the usefulness of VHI in the patients with benign vocal cord lesions. Materials and Method : The authors evaluated 37 patients who experienced laryngeal microsurgery for benign vocal cord lesions from september 2003 to August 2004. The VHI was used to measure the postoperative changes of the patient's perception and acoustic analysis and aerodynamic tests were also done. Statistical analysis was done using paired t-test and Pearson's correlation. Results : The VHI scores showed statistically significant reductions postoperatively. In acoustic analysis, jitter and shimmer had statistically significant reductions after surgery but noise-to-harmonics ratio did not. A statistically significant change in the average MFR and MPT perioperatively was found. The relationship between VHI and acoustic, aerodynamic analysis attained statistical significance. Conclusion : The VHI is a useful assessment tool to monitor the patient's self-perception of voice change after the surgery of benign vocal cord lesions. The VHI measurement, when combined with acoustic and aerodynamic analyses, will be helpful in comparing functional outcomes after voice surgery.