• Physical Therapy Rehabilitation Science
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.75-80
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• 2013

Objective: The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of cold applied the night before or in the morning on pain and symptoms of plantar fasciitis. Design: Experimental study. Methods: Thirty subjects with plantar fasciitis were recruited for this study. Subjects with plantar fasciitis either had no intervention, cold applied (20 minutes) at night before bed, or 20 minutes in the morning upon wakening. Plantar fascia tenderness and pain were evaluated. There were ten subjects in each group. Measures included visual analog scale, plantar facial thickness via high resolution ultrasound, algometer measure, and range of motion of the ankle and foot. There were 3 groups of 10 subjects, control (no intervention), cold the night before bed, and cold in the morning before rising. Results: The greatest relief of symptoms was cold used at bedtime the night before the measurements. Cold used in the morning was not as effective as cold used in the evening before bed. Cold use reduced the thickness of the plantar fascia and irritation. There was a 13% reduction in plantar fascia thickness with cold the night before (p<0.05), a 44% reduction in pain and an 86 % increase in the force that could be applied to the bottom of the foot without pain (p<0.05). Conclusions: Cold applied for 20 minutes prior bedtime is effective for reduced symptomology caused by plantar fascia inflammation.

• International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.467-475
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• 2016

Ultrasonic propagation imaging (UPI) has shown great potential for detection of impairments in complex structures and can be used in wide range of non-destructive evaluation and structural health monitoring applications. The software implementation of such algorithms showed a tendency in time-consumption with increment in scan area because the processor shares its resources with a number of programs running at the same time. This issue was addressed by using field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) that is a dedicated processing solution and used for high speed signal processing algorithms. For this purpose, we need an independent and flexible block of logic which can be used with continuously evolvable hardware based on FPGA. In this paper, we developed an FPGA-based ultrasonic propagation imaging system, where FPGA functions for both data acquisition system and real-time ultrasonic signal processing. The developed UPI system using FPGA board provides better cost-effectiveness and resolution than digitizers, and much faster signal processing time than CPU which was tested using basic ultrasonic propagation algorithms such as ultrasonic wave propagation imaging and multi-directional adjacent wave subtraction. Finally, a comparison of results for processing time between a CPU-based UPI system and the novel FPGA-based system were presented to justify the objective of this research.

• Archives of Plastic Surgery
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• v.35 no.6
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• pp.729-734
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• 2008

Purpose: The evaluation and management of a completely transected tendon of the hand is relatively clear. In most cases, the integrity is assessed by physical examination(eg, broken normal cascade, motion loss) but occasionally, It happens in troubles. because of pain, limited patient cooperation(eg, child, unconscious patient), and other associated injuries(eg, fractures, foreign bodies). Methods: From september 2006 to August 2007, 28 patients were evaluated with real time ultrasonography preoperatively and postoperatively. Twenty eight patients with injured tendon were evaluated using an HDI 5000 Sono CT(Philips Medical Systems, Bothell, WA) machine with a high resolution, 7.5MHz hockey stick linear probe. Dynamic evaluation was performed in real time. Results: Surgery was performed after the ultrasonographic evaluation. Sonographic diagnosis and intraoperative findings were correlated. Ultrasonographic findings show tendon discontinuity, gaps, and fluid collection. Conclusion: We conclude that ultrasonography is helpful in evaluating and managing acute tendon injury. Especially, in cases of completely lacerated tendon, ultrasonography can identify the location of the proximal tendon stump and partial lacerated tendon, ultrasonographic diagnostic tool can decrease misdiagnosis.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.13 no.7
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• pp.117-126
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• 2008

Recent advances in medical imaging technologies have enabled the high-resolution data acquisition. Therefore visualization of such large data set on standard graphics hardware became a popular research theme. Among many visualization techniques, we focused on bricking method which divided the entire volume into smaller bricks and rendered them in order. Since it switches bet\W8n bricks on main memory and bricks on GPU memory on the fly, to achieve better performance, the number of these memory swapping conditions has to be minimized. And, because the original bricking algorithm was designed for regular volume data such as CT and MR, when applying the algorithm to ultrasound volume data which is based on the toroidal coordinate space, it revealed some performance degradation. In some areas near bricks' boundaries, an orthogonal viewing ray intersects the single brick twice, and it consequently makes a single brick memory to be uploaded onto GPU twice in a single frame. To avoid this redundancy, we divided the volume into bricks allowing overlapping between the bricks. In this paper, we suggest the formula to determine an appropriate size of these shared area between the bricks. Using our formula, we could minimize the memory bandwidth. and, at the same time, we could achieve better rendering performance.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.95-102
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• 2005

There are many tube and pipeline in nuclear power plant under high temperature and high pressure. Erosion and corrosion defects were expected on these tube and pipe-line by environmental and mechanical factors. These erosion and corrosion defects ran be evaluated by ultrasonic technique. In these study, Scanning Laser Source(SLS) technique was applied to detect defect and construct image. This technique also makes detection possible on rough and curved surfaces such as tube and pipe-line by scanning. Conventional ultrasonic scanning technique requires immersion of specimen or water jet for transferring ultrasonic wave between transducer and specimen. However, this SLS technique does not need contacting and couplant to generate surface wave and to get flaw images. Therefore, this SLS technique has several advantages, for complicated production inspection, non-contact, remote from specimen, and high resolution. In this study, SLS images were obtained with various conditions of generation laser ultrasound and receiving in order to enhance detectability of flaws on the tube. Stress corrosion cracks were produced on tube and images of stress corrosion cracks were constructed by using SLS technique.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.32 no.1
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• pp.14-21
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• 2013

The erosion, suspension, and transport of sediment frequently occur in the coastal waters and estuarine. These processes often generate the so-called fluid mud layer, which is defined as a high-concentration aqueous suspension of fine grained sediment (> 10 g/l), consisting mainly of silt and clay-size particles. Therefore the high-resolution ultrasound is mostly used to detect or monitor the fluid mud layer. Because the sound attenuation tends to increase rapidly with the suspended sediment concentration, it is necessary to consider the accurate attenuation correction to estimate the backscattering strengths from the suspended sediment layers. In this paper, the volume backscattering strengths with various suspended sediment concentrations were measured using 5-MHz ultrasound signal in a small-scale water tank. The sound attenuation due to the viscosity and scattering from suspended sediment particles was predicted by the Richard's model and applied to the sonar equation to estimate the volume backscattering strengths from the suspended sediment concentrations. For the case that the additional attenuation was not considered, the volume backscattering strengths increased to the concentration of 20 g/l, and over this point, the backscattering strengths were roughly constant. However, for the case that the attenuation due to the suspended sediment concentration was considered, the backscattering strengths increased with the concentration.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.391-399
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• 2005

Laser-generated ultrasonic inspection system is a non-contact scanning inspection device with high spatial resolution and wide bandwidth. The amplitude of laser-generated ultrasound is varied according to the energy of pulse laser and the surface conditions of an object where the CW measuring laser beam is pointing. In this paper, we correct the generating errors by measuring the energy of pulse laser beam and correct the measuring errors by extracting the gain information of laser interferometer at each time. h dynamic stabilizer is developed to stably scan on the surface of an object for an laser-generated ultrasonic inspection system. The developed system generates ultrasound after adaptively finding the maximum gain time of an laser interferometer and processes the signal in real time after digitization with high speed. In this paper, we describe hardware configuration and control algorithm to build a stable laser-generated ultrasonic inspection system. Also, we confirmed through experiments that the proposed correction method for the generating errors and measuring errors is effective to improve the performance of a system.

• Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases
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• v.42 no.4
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• pp.600-604
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• 1995

Lymphangioleiomyomatosis, a rare disease in women of childbearing age, is the result of benign nodular hypertrophy of the smooth muscle of the lypmhatics and other tissues of the abdomen and thorax. We report a 36-years-old woman with pulmonary and retroperitoneal lymphangioleiomyomat.osis who responded with hormone treatment. She developed vaginal pruritis and a pelvic ultraound was done given her significant past medical history. Ultrasound examination demonstrated a large mass in the right side of her pelvis. Therefore she was admitted to St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto for laparoscopy. Result of cytology was to be consistent with the diagnosis of retroperitoneal lymphangioleiomyomatosis. High resolution CT sacn of the thorax demonstrated multiple small cystic lesions, without associated nodularity compatible with a diagnosis of pulmonary lymphangioleiomyomatosis. She has been taking Provera tablets 100mg po tid since Dec. 15, 1993. We have given her a prescription for Depo provera 500mg IM monthly since she came back to Korea. and made arrangements for regular follow up monthly. We performed chest X-ray, CT of chest(high resolution), abdomen and pelvis, pulmonary function tests and arterial blood gas analysis. Chest X-ray and CT findings showed no significant change since July. 20, 1993.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.49-60
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• 2002

Receive dynamic focusing with an array transducer can provide near optimum resolution only in the vicinity of transmit focal depth. A customary method to increase the depth of field is to combine several beams with different focal depths, with an accompanying decrease in the frame rate. In this Paper. we Present a simultaneous multiple transmit focusing method in which chirp signals focused at different depths are transmitted at the same time. These chirp signals are mutually orthogonal in a sense that the autocorrelation function of each signal has a narrow mainlobe width and low sidelobe levels. and the crossorelation function of any Pair of the signals has values smaller than the sidelobe levels of each autocorrelation function. This means that each chirp signal can be separated from the combined received signals and compressed into a short pulse. which is then individually focused on a separate receive beamformer. Next. the individually focused beams are combined to form a frame of image. Theoretically, any two chirp signals defined over two nonoverlapped frequency bands are mutually orthogonal In the present work. however, a tractional overlap of adjacent frequency bands is permitted to design more chirp signals within a given transducer bandwidth. The elevation of the rosscorrelation values due to the frequency overlap could be reduced by alternating the direction of frequency sweep of the adjacent chirp signals We also observe that the Proposed method provides better images when the low frequency chirp is focused at a near Point and the high frequency chirp at a far point along the depth. better lateral resolution is obtained at the far field with reasonable SNR due to the SNR gain in Pulse compression Imaging .

• Korean Journal of Clinical Laboratory Science
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• v.49 no.3
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• pp.308-315
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• 2017

Carotid artery intima-media thickness (CIMT) test is a standardized ultrasound procedure that screens for and monitors atherosclerosis in a safe and non-invasive manner, even in individuals with no symptoms of heart disease. The purpose of this study was to research the relationship between CIMT, as measured by ultrasonography, and the degree of individual perceived stress. There was a total of 168 (male: 46, female: 122) university students in Suwon-si, Gyeonggi-do, Korea, without other diseases. Written informed consent was obtained from all participants. CIMT was measured in the right and left common carotid arteries 1 cm below the bifurcation, and internal carotid artery, using non-invasive high-resolution Medison Accuvix V20 prestige ultrasound equipment and perceived stress, was measured with the 10-item PSS (Perceived Stress Scale) questionnaire. This study indicates that PSS may be appropriate to estimate perceived stress levels and weight. Failure to control stress anxiety could lead to weight and CIMT soaring to dangerous levels, resulting in a myocardial infarction or cerebrovascular accident. There was a statistically significant difference between left CIMT (p<0.05) and weight (p<0.05) according to each stress classification. The results of this study suggest that the weight measurement is influenced in part by one's generalized stress levels. Future continuous studies should be conducted to test the influences of perceived stress and generalized anxiety on CIMT when these are many continuous variables.