• Proceedings of the KSME Conference
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• 2001.06b
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• pp.53-58
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• 2001

In this paper, a low price ultrasound image processing system is developed using DSP and PC. Ultrasound for image is generated by the 32-channel transducer. Ultrasound image is captured by DSP instead of the private image grabber board. Display of image and image processing algorithms are performed by PC. The image processing algorithms based on GUI are realized by software. So users without knowledge of image processing can perform the image enhancement more easily.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.40 no.5
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• pp.179-188
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• 2019

In ultrasound telemedicine, it is important to reduce the size of the data by compressing the ultrasound image when sending it. Ultrasound images can be divided into image context and other information consisting of patient ID, date, and several letters. Between them, ultrasound context is very important information for diagnosis and should be securely preserved as much as possible. In several previous papers, ultrasound compression methods were proposed to compress ultrasound context and other information into different compression parameters. This ultrasound compression method minimized the loss of ultrasound context while greatly compressing other information. This paper proposed the method of automatic segmentation of ultrasound context to overcome the limitation of the previously described ultrasound compression method. This algorithm was designed to robust for various ultrasound device and to enable real-time operation to maintain the benefits of ultrasound imaging machine. The operation time of extracting ultrasound context through the proposed segmentation method was measured, and it took 311.11 ms. In order to optimize the algorithm, the ultrasound context was segmented with down sampled input image. When the resolution of the input image was reduced by half, the computational time was 126.84 ms. When the resolution was reduced by one-third, it took 45.83 ms to segment the ultrasound context. As a result, we verified through experiments that the proposed method works in real time.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.33-42
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• 1996

A multimedia remote ultrasound image transfer system for tole-medical services was implemented. The image data of the ultrasound scanner system of the slave is compressed using image compression system. It is transferred to the master PC via ISDN UNI(User-Network Interface) and decompressd by image decompression system. The total system is composed of three parts; first, the image capture card which transfers bidirection- al data between ultrasound scanner system and PC, second, image compression and decompression card, finally, ISDN TA(Terminal Adaptor) card for transferring the image. This system has a easy user interface because it is executed on the basis of MS-WINDOWS. So it is capable of serving medical services at a remote place.

• The Journal of the Society of Korean Medicine Diagnostics
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.37-44
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• 2016

Ultrasonic imaging is the most widely modality among modern imaging device for medical diagnosis. Nevertheless, medical ultrasound images suffer from speckle noise and low contrast. In this paper, we propose probabilistic edge map for ultrasound image edge enhancement using automatic alien algorithm. The proposed method used applied speckle reduced ultrasound imaging for edge improvement using sequentially acquired ultrasound imaging. To evaluate the performance of method, the similarity between the reference and edge enhanced image was measured by quantity analysis. The experimental results show that the proposed method considerably improves the image quality with region edge enhancement.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.294-299
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• 2007

For efficient and accurate diagnosis of ultrasound images, appropriate time gain compensation(TGC) and dynamic range(DR) control of ultrasound echo signals are important. TGC is used for compensating the attenuation of ultrasound echo signals along the depth, and DR controls the image contrast. In recent ultrasound systems, these two factors are automatically set by a system and/or manually adjusted by an operator to obtain the desired image quality on the screen. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to find the optimized parameter values far TGC and DR automatically. In TGC optimization, we determine the degree of attenuation compensation along the depth by dividing an image into vertical strips and reliably estimating the attenuation characteristic of ultrasound signals. For DR optimization, we define a novel cost function by properly using the characteristics of ultrasound images. We obtain experimental results by applying the proposed algorithm to a real ultrasound(US) imaging system. The results verify that the proposed algorithm automatically sets values of TGC and DR in real-time such that the subjective quality of the enhanced ultrasound images may be sufficiently high for efficient and accurate diagnosis.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 1995.10a
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• pp.248-251
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• 1995

Nowadays, the internal images of a human body can be easily provided by the ultrasound imaging, the X-ray CT, or the MRI device, among which the ultrasound imaging device has good resolution for soft tissues of a human body compared with the other devices. Furthermore, the use of ultrasound imaging devices will increase in future especially in the obstetrics, territory, since it does not give harm to the human body. Although several techniques have been investigated until now in order to extract organs from ultrasound images, very few of them have achieved satisfactory results because of low contrast and high noise nature of images. This paper proposes a technique for automatic extraction of the gall bladder area from ultrasound images. The proposed technique first extracts a small reliable area of a gall bladder from an ultrasound image employing smoothing, binarization, expanding and shrinking, and labeling, and then expands the area referring to the binarized version of the original image. The technique is examined its performance by real ultrasound images of a gall bladder and satisfactory results are obtained. Some problems to be solved are discussed finally.

• Journal of radiological science and technology
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• v.46 no.1
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• pp.15-21
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• 2023

This study was purpose to assessment of the resolution characteristics by using ATS 535H Basic quality assurance (QA) phantom for ultrasound. The ultrasound equipment was used Logiq P6 (Ultrasound, GE Healthcare System, Chicago, IL, USA). And the ultrasound transducer were used Convex 4C (4~5.5 MHz), Linear 11L (10~13 MHz), Sector 3SP (3~5.5 MHz) probe. As for the noise power spectrum (NPS) comparison results by using ATS 535H Basic QA ultrasound phantom and Convex 4C, Linear 11L, Sector 3SP probe. The NPS value of the Convex 4C probe image was 0.0049, Linear 11L probe image was 0.0049, Sector 3SP probe image was 0.1422 when the frequency is 1.0 mm^-1. The modulation transfer function (MTF) comparison results by using ATS 535H Basic QA ultrasound phantom and Linear 11L probe the MTF value of the 3 cm focus image was 0.7511 and 4 cm focus image was 0.9001 when the frequency is 1.0 mm^-1. This study was presented characteristics of spatial resolution a quantitative evaluation methods by using ultrasound medical images for QA of ultrasound medical QA phantom. The quality control (QC) for equipment maintenance can be efficiently used in the clinic due to the quantitative evaluation of the NPS and MTF as the standard methods. It is meaningful in that it is applied mutatis mutandis and presented the results of physical resolution characteristics of the ultrasound medical image.

• Biomedical Engineering Letters
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.355-364
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• 2018

When focusing using an ultrasonic transducer array, a main lobe is formed in the focal region of an ultrasound field, but side lobes also arise around the focal region due to the leakage. Since the side lobes cannot be completely eliminated in the focusing process, they are responsible for subsequent ultrasound image quality degradation. To improve ultrasound image quality, a signal processing strategy to reduce side lobes is definitely in demand. To this end, quantitative determination of main and side lobes is necessary. We propose a theoretically and actually error-free method of exactly discriminating and separately computing the main lobe and side lobe parts in ultrasound image by computer simulation. We refer to images constructed using the main and side lobe signals as the main and side lobe images, respectively. Since the main and side lobe images exactly represent their main and side lobe components, respectively, they can be used to evaluate ultrasound image quality. Defining the average brightness of the main and side lobe images, the conventional to side lobe image ratio, and the main to side lobe image ratio as image quality metrics, we can evaluate image characteristics in speckle images. The proposed method is also applied in assessing the performance of side lobe suppression filtering. We show that the proposed method may greatly aid in the evaluation of medical ultrasonic images using computer simulations, albeit lacking the use of actual experimental data.

• The Journal of Korean Physical Therapy
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.83-94
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• 2006

Purpose: This study conducts quantitative evaluation or structural and functional characteristics or normal skeletal muscle with ultrasound image and surface electromyography, and is to provide basic materials for utilizing ultrasound image analysis in physical therapy diagnosis and assessment of skeletal muscle. Methods: Measurement of three stages was conducted with 88 normal adults between their twenties and seventies, correlations and differences using collected data according to age and gender were compared and correlations among measured items were analyzed and then the following conclusions were obtained. Results: Analysis of ultrasound image of normal skeletal muscle showed that density, median frequency had the closest relations with age. In addition, it was found that there were high correlations between density explaining structural characteristics of skeletal muscle and median frequency explaining functional characteristics. Conclusion: Analysis of ultrasound image makes complex evaluation of structure and function of skeletal muscle possible when it is connected with functional evaluation method using physical measurement surface electromyography as well as quantitative evaluation of structural changes of skeletal muscle and is effective in complementing physical therapy diagnosis centering around functionality evaluation.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.74-82
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• 2008

The objective of this paper is to remove noises of image based on the heuristic noises filter and to extract a tumor region by using morphology techniques in breast ultrasound image. Similar objective studies have been conducted based on ultrasound image of high resolution. As a result, efficiency of noise removal is not fine enough for low resolution image. Moreover, when ultrasound image has multiple tumors, the extraction of ROI (Region Of Interest) is not accomplished or processed by a manual selection. In this paper, our method is done 4 kinds of process for noises removal and the extraction of ROI for solving problems of restrictive automated segmentation. First process is that pixel value is acquired as matrix type. Second process is a image preprocessing phase that is aimed to maximize a contrast of image and prevent a leak of personal information. In next process, the heuristic noise filter that is based on opinion of medical specialist is applied to remove noises. The last process is to extract a tumor region by using morphology techniques. As a result, the noise is effectively eliminated in all images and a extraction of tumor regions is possible though one ultrasound image has several tumors.