• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SC
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• v.40 no.5
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• pp.341-349
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• 2003

A real time interactive controller (spectrometer) for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system has been developed using high speed digital signal processors (DSP). The controller generates radio frequency (rf) waveforms and audio frequency gradient waveforms and controls multiple receivers for data acquisition. By employing DSPs having high computational power (e.g., TMS320C670l) real time generation of complicated gradient waveforms and interactive control of selection planes are possible, which are important features in real-time imaging of moving organs, e.g., cardiac imaging. The spectrometer was successfully implemented at a 1.5 Tesla whole body MRI system for clinical application. Performance of the spectrometer is verified by various experiments including high- speed imaging such as fast spin echo (FSE) and echo planar imaging (EPI). These high-speed imaging techniques reduce measurement time, however, usually intensify artifact if there is any systematic phase error or jitter in the synchronization between the transmitter, receiver, and gradients.

• Korean Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences
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• v.49 no.2
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• pp.214-223
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• 2016

Joint time-frequency images of the broadband acoustic echoes of six fish species were obtained using the smoothed pseudo-Wigner-Ville distribution (SPWVD). The acoustic features were extracted by changing the sliced window widths and dividing the time window by a 0.02-ms interval and the frequency window by a 20-kHz bandwidth. The 22 spectrum amplitudes obtained in the time and frequency domains of the SPWVD images were fed as input parameters into an artificial neural network (ANN) to verify the effectiveness for species-dependent features related to fish species identification. The results showed that the time-frequency approach improves the extraction of species-specific features for species identification from broadband echoes, compare with time-only or frequency-only features. The ANN classifier based on these acoustic feature components was correct in approximately 74.5% of the test cases. In the future, the identification rate will be improved using time-frequency images with reduced dimensions of the broadband acoustic echoes as input for the ANN classifier.

• International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.475-483
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• 2015

We propose a numerical scheme to simulate the time-domain echo signals at tracking radar for a realistic scenario where an EAD (expendable active decoy) and an airborne target are both in dynamic states. On various scenarios where the target takes different maneuvers, the trajectories of the EAD ejected from the target are accurately calculated by solving 6-DOF (Degree-of-Freedom) equations of the motion for the EAD. At each sampling time of the echo signal, the locations of the EAD and the target are assumed to be fixed. Thus, the echo power from the EAD can be simply calculated by using the Friis transmission formula. The returned power from the target can be computed based on the pre-calculated scattering matrix of the target. In this paper, an IPO (iterative physical optics) method is used to construct the scattering matrix database of the target. The sinc function-interpolation formulation (sampling theorem) is applied to compute the scattering at any incidence angle from the database. A simulator is developed based on the proposed scheme to estimate the echo signals, which can consider the movement of the airborne target and EAD, also the scattering of the target and the RF specifications of the EAD. For applications, we consider the detection probability of the target in the presence of the EAD based on Monte Carlo simulation.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Machine Tool Engineers Conference
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• 2005.05a
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• pp.216-227
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• 2005

The head penetrations for control rod drive mechanism and instrumentation systems are installed at the reactor pressure vessel head of PWRs. Primary coolant water and the operating conditions of PWR plants can cause cracking of these nickel-based alloy through a process called primary water stress corrosion cracking (PWSCC). Inspection of the head penetrations to ensure the integrity of the head penetrations has been interested since reactor coolant leakages were found at U. S. reactors in 2000 and 2001. The complex geometry of the head penetrations and the very low echo amplitude from the fine, multiple flaws due to the nature of the see made it difficult to detect and size the flaws using conventional pulse-echo UT methods. Time-of-flight-diffraction technique, which utilizes the time difference between the flaw tips while pulse-echo does the flaw response amplitude from the flaw, has been selected for this inspection for it's best performance of the detection and sizing of the head penetration see flaws. This study defines the limits of the detectable and accurately sizable minimum flaw size which can be detected by the General TOFD and the Delta TOFD techniques for circumferentially and axially oriented flaws respectively. These results assures the reliability of the inspection techniques to detect and accurately size for various kind of flaws, and will also be utilized for the future development and qualifications of the TOFD techniques to enhance the detecting sensitivity and sizing accuracy of the flaws of the reactor head penetrations in nuclear power plants.

• Investigative Magnetic Resonance Imaging
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.141-155
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• 2021

Purpose: To develop a 3D magnetic resonance fingerprinting (MRF) method for application in high resolution knee cartilage PD, T₁, T₂ mapping. Materials and Methods: A novel 3D acquisition trajectory with golden-angle rotating radial in k_xy direction and interleaved echo planar imaging (EPI) acquisition in the k_z direction was implemented in the MRF framework. A centric order was applied to the interleaved EPI acquisition to reduce Nyquist ghosting artifact due to field inhomogeneity. For the reconstruction, singular value decomposition (SVD) compression method was used to accelerate reconstruction time and conjugate gradient sensitivity-encoding (CG-SENSE) was performed to overcome low SNR of the high resolution data. Phantom experiments were performed to verify the proposed method. In vivo experiments were performed on 6 healthy volunteers and 2 early osteoarthritis (OA) patients. Results: In the phantom experiments, the T₁ and T₂ values of the proposed method were in good agreement with the spin-echo references. The results from the in vivo scans showed high quality proton density (PD), T₁, T₂ map with EPI echo train length (N_ETL = 4), acceleration factor in through plane (R_z = 5), and number of radial spokes (N_spk = 4). In patients, high T₂ values (50-60 ms) were seen in all transverse, sagittal, and coronal views and the damaged cartilage regions were in agreement with the hyper-intensity regions shown on conventional turbo spin-echo (TSE) images. Conclusion: The proposed 3D MRF method can acquire high resolution (0.5 mm³) quantitative maps in practical scan time (~ 7 min and 10 sec) with full coverage of the knee (FOV: 160 × 160 × 120 mm³).

• Investigative Magnetic Resonance Imaging
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.108-116
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• 2006

Purpose : High-resolution spiral-scan imaging is performed at 3 Tesla MRI system. Since the gradient waveforms for the spiral-scan imaging have lower slopes than those for the Echo Planar Imaging (EPI), they can be implemented with the gradient systems having lower slew rates. The spiral-scan imaging also involves less eddy currents due to the smooth gradient waveforms. The spiral-scan imaging method does not suffer from high specific absorption rate (SAR), which is one of the main obstacles in high field imaging for rf echo-based fast imaging methods such as fast spin echo techniques. Thus, the spiral-scan imaging has a great potential for the high-speed imaging in high magnetic fields. In this paper, we presented various high-resolution images obtained by the spiral-scan methods at 3T MRI system for various applications. Materials and Methods : High-resolution spiral-scan imaging technique is implemented at 3T whole body MRI system. An efficient and fast higher-order shimming technique is developed to reduce the inhomogeneity, and the single-shot and interleaved spiral-scan imaging methods are developed. Spin-echo and gradient-echo based spiral-scan imaging methods are implemented, and image contrast and signal-tonoise ratio are controlled by the echo time, repetition time, and the rf flip angles. Results : Spiral-scan images having various resolutions are obtained at 3T MRI system. Since the absolute magnitude of the inhomogeneity is increasing in higher magnetic fields, higher order shimming to reduce the inhomogeneity becomes more important. A fast shimming technique in which axial, sagittal, and coronal sectional inhomogeneity maps are obtained in one scan is developed, and the shimming method based on the analysis of spherical harmonics of the inhomogeneity map is applied. For phantom and invivo head imaging, image matrix size of about $100{\times}100$ is obtained by a single-shot spiral-scan imaging, and a matrix size of $256{\times}256$ is obtained by the interleaved spiral-scan imaging with the number of interleaves of from 6 to 12. Conclusion : High field imaging becomes increasingly important due to the improved signal-to-noise ratio, larger spectral separation, and the higher BOLD-based contrast. The increasing SAR is, however, a limiting factor in high field imaging. Since the spiral-scan imaging has a very low SAR, and lower hardware requirements for the implementation of the technique compared to EPI, it is suitable for a rapid imaging in high fields. In this paper, the spiral-scan imaging with various resolutions from $100{\times}100$ to $256{\times}256$ by controlling the number of interleaves are developed for the high-speed imaging in high magnetic fields.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.360-365
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• 2014

There are many types of advanced devices for weather prediction process such as weather radar, satellite, radiosonde, and other weather observation devices. Among them, the weather radar is an essential device for weather forecasting because the radar has many advantages like wide observation area, high spatial and time resolution, and so on. In order to analyze the weather radar observation result, we should know the inside structure and data. Some non-precipitation echoes exist inside of the observed radar data. And these echoes affect decreased accuracy of weather forecasting. Therefore, this paper suggests a method that could remove line-shaped non-precipitation echo from raw radar data. The line-shaped echoes are distinguished from the raw radar data and extracted their own features. These extracted data pairs are used as learning data for naive bayesian classifier. After the learning process, the constructed naive bayesian classifier is applied to real case that includes not only line-shaped echo but also other precipitation echoes. From the experiments, we confirm that the conclusion that suggested naive bayesian classifier could distinguish line-shaped echo effectively.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.29 no.2C
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• pp.291-297
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• 2004

In this paper, a new structure for the AEC(Acoustic Echo Canceller) is proposed in which echo signal components that can be created in mobile communications is effectively eliminated. Block Data Flow Architecture is a parallel architecture that achieves high performance, high efficiency, high throughput, and almost linear speed up. The proposed architecture employs AEC and is implemented using the TMS320C6711 for real-time applications. The proposed AEC shows improved performance by eliminating echoes at 55ms delay path. Since the proposed AEC can also be implemented in Firmware, it is believed to effectively work on various types of echoes if it is applied on CDMA mobile devices. The TMS320C6711 shows much better performance comparing to previous DSPs. For experimental verifications, filtering operation using adaptive algorithm is performed on TMS320C6711 board and error signals resulted from computations are monitored on PC, and then the performance of the implemented AEC is verified through ERLE computation. According the results of simulation, good characteristic of 100dB are shown after 500 sampling data.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.19 no.6
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• pp.421-430
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• 2003

The extraction technique for Doppler information(Doppler centroid frequency(f$_{dc}$) and it's rate(f$_{r}$) is very important to make an image from the radar echo signal data. Clutterlock and auto-focusing techniques have been widely used to extract accurate Doppler information. But both techniques are not easy to implement in SAR processor and need quite lots of time to calculate accurate f$_{dc}$ and f$_{r}$ because they are generally based on echo signal data only. In this paper we suggest hybrid method for Doppler extraction using both of echo signal data and orbital and attitude information of satellite. In this method CDE(Correlation Doppler Estimation) technique is only used to estimate exact modular f$_{dc}$ using received echo signal data and rest of other algorithms are based on simple mathematical model of geometry between satellite and ground targets as well as the Doppler frequency ambiguity resolving problem. The experimental results using Radarsat-1 signal data shows that the proposed method can be effectively used for the extraction of Doppler information.

• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.247-255
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• 2010

Bonding strength of shotcrete is a significant influential factor which plays the role of collapse prevention of tunnel crown and of debonding prevention of shotcrete induced by the blasting vibration. Thus, the evaluation of the shotcrete bonding state is one of the core components for shotcrete quality control. In this study, the peak particle velocities induced by blasting were measured on the shotcrete in a tunnel construction site and its effect on the bonding state of shotcrete is investigated. Drilling and blasting technique was used for the excavation of intersection tunnel connecting the main tunnel with the service tunnel. Blast-induced vibrations were monitored at some points of the main tunnel and the service tunnel. The shotcrete bonding state was evaluated by using impact-echo test coupled with the time-frequency domain analysis which is called short-time Fourier transformation. Analysis results of blast-induced vibrations and the time-frequency domain impact-echo signals showed that the blasting condition applied to the excavation of intersection tunnel hardly affects on the tunnel shotcrete bonding state. The general blasting practice in Korea was evaluated to have a minor negative impact on shotcrete quality.