• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.41 no.5
• /
• pp.557-563
• /
• 2022

The cortical bone thickness of the tibia is related to fracture risk and overall bone status. The present study aims to investigate the feasibility of two different ultrasonic methods for measuring the cortical bone thickness in bovine tibia in vitro. In the reflection technique, the tibial cortical thickness was determined from ultrasonic reflections from the periosteum and the endosteum producing specific peaks in the signal envelope. In the axial transmission technique, the tibial cortical thickness was determined from ultrasonic guided wave velocities measured along the axial direction of the tibia. The cortical bone thickness determined by using the reflection technique correlated significantly with that measured by using a caliper, with a Pearson's correlation coefficient of r = 0.97 (p < 0.0001). In contrast, the correlation coefficients for the axial transmission technique were r = 0.92 (p < 0.0001) for the first arriving signal method and r = 0.89 (p < 0.0001) for the slow guided wave method. Clinical feasibility should be demonstrated with an in vivo application to address the question whether the ultrasonic methods presented here could be useful as a screening tool for osteoporosis and potentially could be applied to other skeletal sites such as the femur and the radius.

• Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences
• /
• v.20 no.5
• /
• pp.682-692
• /
• 2007

This study presents an automatic system to predict parturition time in the crated sows. The system relies on ultrasonic transducers mounted from above along the length of the crate. Using a 40 kHz time of flight (TOF) single envelope wave, the momentary distances between the sensors are measured. Therefore, the local momentary height of the sow and the momentary posture, i.e. standing posture (SDP), kneeling posture (KP), sitting posture (STP) and lateral lying posture (LLP) are determined. Crated sows change their postures from standing to lying and vice versa which follows a characteristic pattern. As parturition approaches, sows exhibit uneasiness, restlessness and the stand up sequence (SUS, the posture transition from LLP to SDP) rate increases because of labor pains. In time series, the SUS rate demonstrates a peak and it happens approximately 0-12 h before parturition. In this paper, the basic parturition threshold value method (BPTVM) and the same hour method (SHM) are proposed for predicting parturition, both of which are based on the SUS rate. The BPTVM mainly detects the peak of the SUS rate. As the SUS rate exceeds the threshold value, the parturition becomes predictable. Moreover, the SHM calculates the difference in the SUS rates between a particular time of day and the corresponding time of the preceding day. Compared to the BPTVM, the SHM can eliminate the circadian rhythm of the SUS rate influenced by feeding behavior. Using the SHM the parturition can be approximately predicted within hours. In an attempt to define the threshold parameters of predicting parturition, a data set with 32 sows of the SUS rate are used to estimate assumable predicting probability. The results show the assumable probability of the parturition prediction within 9 h is 96.9% for the SHM and 84.4% for the BPTVM. Moreover, the SHM can even reach a 75% probability of prediction within three hours of parturition. We conclude that the SHM is more accurate and is more useful for parturition time prediction. When parturition is detected, the proposed algorithm generates a warning signal which can inform human personnel to protect the mother and newborn piglets.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
• /
• v.23 no.7
• /
• pp.1797-1806
• /
• 1998

Future satellite communication systems will be developed at Ka-band (20/30 GHz) owing to the relatively wide frequency allocation and current freedom from terrestrial interference for multimedia services. A serious disadvantage of the Ka-band, however, is the very high atmospheric attenuation in rainy weather. Synchronous CDMA drastically redces the effect of self-noise with several interesting features of CDMA for mobile communications such as fixible freuqncy rese, the capability of performin soft-handover and a lower sensitivity to interference. This paper evaluates the performance of a synchronous CDMA reture link for a Ka-band geostationary satellite communication system. For a fixed satellite channel whose characteristics depend on weather conditions, the signal envelope and phase for this channel is modelled as Gaussian. The bit error and outage probability, and the detection loss due to imperfect chip timing synchronization is analytically evaluated and the system capacity degaradation due to the weather condition is estimated. The two cases consist of the general case in which all users are affected by rain condition, and the worst case in which the reference user is only affected by rain attenuation. the results for two cases of rain condition clearly show that synchronous CDMA eases the power control requirements and has less sensitivity to imperfect power control.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Electromagnetic Engineering and Science
• /
• v.23 no.4
• /
• pp.475-483
• /
• 2012

This paper presents new type of the hybrid supply modulator for the next reconfigurable transmitters. The efficiency of the hybrid supply modulator is one of the most important performance. For enhancement the efficiency, multi-switching structure in the hybrid supply modulator is employed. Additionally, input envelope signal sensing stage is employed for implementation multi-mode operation. To compare the performance of the proposed hybrid supply modulator, the conventional hybrid supply modulator is also designed. The measured efficiency of the proposed hybrid supply modulator is 85 %/84 %/79 % for EDGE/WCDMA/LTE signals which have 384 kHz/3.84 MHz/5 MHz bandwidth, respectively. The efficiency of the proposed hybrid supply modulator is higher than the conventional hybrid supply modulator. Therefore, this structure shows good candidate for the reconfigurable transmitters.

• Geophysics and Geophysical Exploration
• /
• v.18 no.4
• /
• pp.181-196
• /
• 2015

A 3.5 kHz or chirp sub-bottom profiling survey is widely used in the marine geological and engineering purpose exploration. However, swells in the sea degrade the quality of the survey data. The horizontal continuity of profiler data can be enhanced and the quality can be improved by correcting the influence of the swell. Accurate detection of sea bottom location is important in correcting the swell effect. In this study, we tried to pick sea bottom locations by finding the position of crossing a threshold of the maximum value for the raw data and transformed data of envelope or energy ratio. However, in case of the low-quality data where the sea bottom signals are not clear due to sea wave noise, automatic sea bottom detection at the individual traces was not successful. We corrected the mispicks for the low quality data and obtained satisfactory results by picking a sea bottom within a range considering the previous average of sea bottom, and excluding unreliable big-difference picks. In case of trace by trace picking, fewest mispicks were found when using energy ratio data. In case of picking considering the previous average, the correction result was relatively satisfactory when using raw data.

• Geophysics and Geophysical Exploration
• /
• v.16 no.4
• /
• pp.240-249
• /
• 2013

The seismic data quality of marine geological and engineering survey deteriorates because of the sea swell. We often conduct a marine survey when the swell height is about 1 ~ 2 m. The swell effect correction is required to enhance the horizontal continuity of seismic data and satisfy the resolution less than 1 m. We applied the swell correction to the 8 channel high-resolution airgun seismic data and 3.5 kHz subbottom profiler (SBP) data. The correct sea bottom detection is important for the swell correction. To detect the sea bottom, we used maximum amplitude of seismic signal around the expected sea bottom, and picked the first increasing point larger than threshold value related with the maximum amplitude. To find sea bottom easily in the case of the low quality data, we transformed the input data to envelope data or the cross-correlated data using the sea bottom wavelet. We averaged the picked sea bottom depths and calculated the correction values. The maximum correction of the airgun data was about 0.8 m and the maximum correction of two kinds of 3.5 kHz SBP data was 0.5 m and 2.0 m respectively. We enhanced the continuity of the subsurface layer and produced the high quality seismic section using the proper methods of swell correction.