In this paper, the rationale and contents of the special issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea regarding comprehensive reviews on past, present and future of biomedical ultrasound are described. Brief descriptions of invited articles are given, and efforts by all contributing authors are gratefully acknowledged.

Three-dimensional ultrasound imaging is a new, exciting technology that allows physicians to use ultrasound to view pathology as a volume, thereby enhancing comprehension of patient anatomy. In this paper, a brief history of the 3-D ultrasound imaging is described in accordance with the development of transducer technology. Then, two representative types of 3-D imaging transducers are reviewed with description of the concept and operation principle of each type: mechanical transducer and matrix array transducer. The mechanical transducer is detailed into free-hand scanning and sequential scanning types. Advantages of each transducer over the other and the technical issues for further performance enhancement are also presented.

Extracorporeal shock wave therapy (ESWT) is simply evolved from extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy known as a revolutionary non-invasive technique for treating kidney stone diseases. Since ESWT was approved for treating plantar fasciitis by FDA in 2000, it has been rapidly accepted into various clinical practices. Its indication includes chronic tendinitis and pseudoarthrosis, and has been widened to various applications other than orthopeadics. Little has been reported on their acoustic properties, yet, even if a number of clinical ESWT systems are readily available. This article reviews the acoustical aspects of ESWT and discusses critical issues towards acoustic exposure optimization and shock wave dosimetry.

This paper proposes a novel spectral hole substitution technique for low bit-rate audio coding. The spectral holes frequently occurring in relatively weak energy bands due to zero bit quantization result in severe quality degradation, especially for harmonic signals such as speech vowels. The enhanced aacPlus (EAAC) audio codec artificially adjusts the minimum signal-to-mask ratio (SMR) to reduce the number of spectral holes, but it still produces noisy sound. The proposed method selectively predicts the spectral shapes of hole bands using either intra-band correlation, i.e. harmonically related coefficients nearby or inter-band correlation, i.e. previous frames. For the bands that have low prediction gain, only the energy term is quantized and spectral shapes are replaced by pseudo random values in the decoding stage. To minimize perceptual distortion caused by spectral mismatching, the criterion of the just noticeable level difference (JNLD) and spectral similarity between original and predicted shapes are adopted for quantizing the energy term. Simulation results show that the proposed method implemented into the EAAC baseline coder significantly improves speech quality at low bit-rates while keeping equivalent quality for mixed and music contents.

In the present study, tubular polyvinyl chloride (PVC) cortical bone mimics that simulate the cortical shell of long bones were used to validate the axial transmission technique for assessing the cortical thickness by measuring the ultrasonic velocities along the cortical shell of long bones. The ultrasonic velocities in the 9 PVC cortical bone mimics with wall thicknesses from 4.0 to 16.1 mm and inner diameters from 40 to 300 mm were measured as a function of the thickness by using a pair of custom-made transducers with a diameter of 12.7 mm and a center frequency of 200 kHz. In order to clarify the measured behavior, they were also compared with the predictions from a theory of guided waves in thin plates. This phantom study using the PVC cortical bone mimics provides useful insight into the dependencies of ultrasonic velocities on the cortical thickness in human long bones.