• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.880-890
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• 2010

The intrasvascular ultrasound (IVUS) imaging technique is used to diagnose cerebrovascular diseases such as stroke. Recently, elasticity imaging methods have been investigated to diagnose blood clots attached to blood vessel intima. However, the IVUS imaging technique is an invasive method that requires a transducer to be inserted into blood vessel. In this paper, strain images are obtained of blood clots attached to blood vessel intima with data acquired from outside the blood vessel using a linear array transducer. In order to measure the displacement of blood vessel accurately, experimental data are acquired by steering ultrasound beams so that they can intersect the blood vessel wall at right angles. The acquired rf data are demodulated to the baseband. The resulting complex baseband signals are then processed by an autocorrelation algorithm to compute the blood vessel movement and thereby produce strain image. This proposed method is verified by experiments on a plastic blood vessel mimicking phantom. The efficacy of the proposed method was verified using a home-made blood vessel mimicking phantom. The blood vessel mimicking phantom was constructed by making a 6 mm diameter hollow cylinder inside it to simulate a blood vessel and adhering 2 mm thick soft plaque to the inner wall of the hollow cylinder. The RF data were acquired using a clinical ultrasound scanner (Accuvix XQ, Medison, Seoul. Korea) with a 7.5 MHz linear array transducer by steering ultrasound beams in steps of $1^{\circ}$ from $-40^{\circ}$ to $40^{\circ}$ for a total of 81 angles. Experimental results show that the plaque region near the blood vessel wall is softer than background tissue. Although the imaging region is restricted due to the limited range of angles for which scan lines are perpendicular to the wall, the feasibility of strain imaging is demonstrated.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.229-240
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• 2004

This paper reports on our development of a dual-mode transceiver for a CMOS high-rate Bluetooth system-onchip solution. The transceiver includes most of the radio building blocks such as an active complex filter, a Gaussian frequency shift keying (GFSK) demodulator, a variable gain amplifier (VGA), a dc offset cancellation circuit, a quadrature local oscillator (LO) generator, and an RF front-end. It is designed for both the normal-rate Bluetooth with an instantaneous bit rate of 1 Mb/s and the high-rate Bluetooth of up to 12 Mb/s. The receiver employs a dualconversion combined with a baseband dual-path architecture for resolving many problems such as flicker noise, dc offset, and power consumption of the dual-mode system. The transceiver requires none of the external image-rejection and intermediate frequency (IF) channel filters by using an LO of 1.6 GHz and the fifth order onchip filters. The chip is fabricated on a $6.5-mm^{2}$ die using a standard $0.25-{\mu}m$ CMOS technology. Experimental results show an in-band image-rejection ratio of 40 dB, an IIP3 of -5 dBm, and a sensitivity of -77 dBm for the Bluetooth mode when the losses from the external components are compensated. It consumes 42 mA in receive ${\pi}/4-diffrential$ quadrature phase-shift keying $({\pi}/4-DQPSK)$ mode of 8 Mb/s, 35 mA in receive GFSK mode of 1 Mb/s, and 32 mA in transmit mode from a 2.5-V supply. These results indicate that the architecture and circuits are adaptable to the implementation of a low-cost, multi-mode, high-speed wireless personal area network.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.101-111
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• 2008

Strain imaging in a medical ultrasound imaging system can differentiate the cancer or tumor in a lesion that is stiffer than the surrounding tissue. In this paper, a strain imaging technique using quasistatic compression is implemented that estimates the displacement between pre- and postcompression ultrasound echoes and obtains strain by differentiating it in the spatial direction. Displacements are computed from the phase difference of complex baseband signals obtained using their autocorrelation, and errors associated with converting the phase difference into time or distance are compensated for by taking into the center frequency variation. Also, to reduce the effect of operator's hand motion, the displacements of all scanlines are normalized with the result that satisfactory strain image quality has been obtained. These techniques have been incorporated into implementing a medical ultrasound strain imaging system that operates in real time.