• Archives of Plastic Surgery
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• v.33 no.2
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• pp.233-236
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• 2006

Merkel cell carcinoma is rare skin malignancy originated from epidermal mechanoreceptor of neural origin. The tumor usually affects older individuals at sun exposed area such as head, neck and extremity. Subclinical involvement of regional lymph node is reported frequently at the time of initial treatment. Thus even asymptomatic patients who present with clinically localized tumor should undergo evaluation with computed tomography and lymphangiography. Positron emission tomography(PET) scans can imaging the metabolic difference of malignant tumors. Increased glucose uptake of malignant tumor cells are detected by PET scanner. PET scans can provide qualitative and quantitative informations about systemic metastasis of tumors. Although there are no data that define the efficacy of PET scans in the initial diagnostic evaluation of head and neck cancer, they could be considered. Current standards of treatment of Merkel cell carcinoma is wide surgical excision and regional lymphadenectomy if there are suspicious lymph nodes. The author reported a patient with Merkel cell carcinoma of cheek. Wide surgical excision and postoperative PET/CT was done for evaluation of regional lymph node and distant metastasis. There were two hot-uptakes in patient's neck, so they were considered as metastatic node, but finally they were proved to be tuberculosis lymphadenitis after excision.

• Journal of radiological science and technology
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• v.43 no.4
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• pp.259-264
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• 2020

Radiation causes radiation hazards in the human body. In Korea, a case of radiation necrosis occurred in 2014. In this study, the scatter and shielding efficiency according to lead shielding were classified into epidermis and dermis for 0.511 MeV used in nuclear medicine. In this study, experiments were conducted using the slab phantom that represents calibration and the dose of human trunk. Experimental results showed that the shielding rate of 0.25 mmPb was 180% in the epidermis and 96% in the dermis. Shielding at 0.5mmPb showed shielding rates of 158%in the epidermis and 82% in the dermis. As a result of measuring the absorbed dose by subdividing the thickness of the dermis into 0.5 mm intervals, when the shielding was carried out at 0.25 mmPb, the dose appeared to be about 120% at 0.5 mm of the dermis surface, and the dose was decreased at the subsequent depth. Shielding at 0.5 mmPb, the dose appeared to be about 101% at the surface 0.5 mm, and the dose was measured to decrease at the subsequent depth. This result suggests that when lead aprons are actually used, the scattering rays would be sufficiently removed due to the spaces generated by the clothes and air, Therefore, the scattered ray generated from lead will not reach the human body. The ICRU defines the epidermis (0.07), in which the radiation-induced damage of the skin occurs, as the dose equivalent. If the radiation dose of the dermis is considered in addition, it will be helpful for the evaluation of the prognosis for radiation hazard of the skin.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.305-311
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• 2019

In this study, present the most useful delay scan time by statistical analysis of SUVm data for 30 suspected pancreatic cancer patients. Two statistical analysis and a mathematical model was applied to the theoretical formula by glucose and insulin mechanics, and a mathematical model was created. Statistical analysis was performed via Metlab p/g. Optimal delay scan time was suggested by Metlab p/g for the change of SUV value over time.In this study, for diagnosis pancreatic cancer by dual time point PET/CT, propose optimal delay scan time 131.5 minuts. The proposed delay scan time showed statistical reliability applicable to the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer (p<0.05). Delayed scanning with the suggested delay scan time of 131.5 minutes is considered to be useful for the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer compared to general PET / CT scan.hen the delayed test is performed with the proposed delay scan time 131.5 minuts, Compared with general PET/CT scans.

• Applied Chemistry for Engineering
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• v.31 no.6
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• pp.585-590
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• 2020

Successful early diagnosis of cancer diseases such as lung, prostate, liver and adrenocortical carcinoma is a key step in determining the cost of treatment, survival rate, and cure rate. Most of current cancer diagnosis systems including biopsy, computed tomography (CT), positron emission tomography (PET)-CT, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), ultrasonography, etc., require expensive and complicated equipment with highly trained human resources. Global medical and scientific communities have thus made numerous efforts on developing effective but rapid disease management system via introducing a wide spectrum of point-of-care medical diagnosis devices. Among them, a lateral flow immunoassay strip technique has gained a great attention due to many advantages such as cost-effectiveness, short inspection time, and user friendly accessibility. In this mini-review, we will highlight recent research trend on the development of colorimetry based LFIA strips for cancer diagnosis and discuss the future research direction and potential applications.

• Journal of radiological science and technology
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• v.43 no.6
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• pp.453-460
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• 2020

The price of the Brain phantom (Hoffman 3D brain phantom) used in nuclear medicine is quite expensive, it is difficult to be purchased by a medical institution or an educational institution. Therefore, the purpose of present research is to produce a low-price 3D brain phantom and evaluate its usefulness by using a 3D printer capable of producing 3D structures. The New 3D brain phantom consisted of 36 slices 0.7 mm thick and 58 slices 1.5 mm thick. A 0.7 mm thick slice was placed between 1. 5 mm thick slices to produce a composite slice. ROI was set at the gray matter and white matter scanned with CT to measure and compare the HU, in order to verify the similarity between PLA which was used as the material for the New 3D brain phantom and acrylic which was used as the material for Hoffman 3D brain phantom. As a result of measuring the volume of each Phantom, the error rate was 3.2% and there was no difference in the signal intensity in five areas. However, there was a significant difference in the average values of HU which was measured at the gray and white matter to verify the similarity between PLA and acrylic. By reproducing the previous Hoffman 3D brain phantom with a 100 times less cost, I hope this research could contribute to be used as the fundamental data in the areas of 3D printer, nuclear medicine and molecular imaging and to increasing the distribution rate of 3D brain phantom.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.525-531
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• 2021

The detector of the positron emission tomography (PET) is composed using a plurality of scintillation pixels and photo sensors. The use of multiple photo sensors increases cost and complicates signal processing. In this study, a detector with reduced cost and simple signal processing was designed using a small number of photo sensors. A scintillation pixel and a small number of photo sensors were used, and a optical guide was used to deliver light to all the photo sensors. A reflector is applied to the scintillation pixel and the optical guide to transmit the maximum amount of light to the photo sensor. A diffuse reflector and a specular reflector were used for the reflector, and a flood image was obtained by applying different thicknesses of the optical guide. An optimal combination was selected through comparative analysis of the acquired flood images. As a result, when specular reflectors were used for both the scintillation pixel and the optical guide, excellent flood images were obtained from optical guides of all thicknesses. For the optical guide, the optimal image was obtained when using a 3 mm thickness in consideration of the size of the image and the analysis of the point where the image of the scintillation pixel was formed.

• Journal of radiological science and technology
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• v.44 no.6
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• pp.655-661
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• 2021

Positron emission tomography (PET) images is affected by acquisition time, short acquisition times results in low gamma counts leading to degradation of image quality by statistical noise. Noise2Void(N2V) is self supervised denoising model that is convolutional neural network (CNN) based deep learning. The purpose of this study is to evaluate denoising performance of N2V for PET image with a short acquisition time. The phantom was scanned as a list mode for 10 min using Biograph mCT40 of PET/CT (Siemens Healthcare, Erlangen, Germany). We compared PET images using NEMA image-quality phantom for standard acquisition time (10 min), short acquisition time (2min) and simulated PET image (S2 min). To evaluate performance of N2V, the peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), normalized root mean square error (NRMSE), structural similarity index (SSIM) and radio-activity recovery coefficient (RC) were used. The PSNR, NRMSE and SSIM for 2 min and S2 min PET images compared to 10min PET image were 30.983, 33.936, 9.954, 7.609 and 0.916, 0.934 respectively. The RC for spheres with S2 min PET image also met European Association of Nuclear Medicine Research Ltd. (EARL) FDG PET accreditation program. We confirmed generated S2 min PET image from N2V deep learning showed improvement results compared to 2 min PET image and The PET images on visual analysis were also comparable between 10 min and S2 min PET images. In conclusion, noisy PET image by means of short acquisition time using N2V denoising network model can be improved image quality without underestimation of radioactivity.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Computer Information Conference
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• 2023.07a
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• pp.63-65
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• 2023

본 논문에서는 FDG-PET 영상을 사용하는 딥러닝 네트워크를 이용하여 직장암 환자의 치료 후 완치를 예측하는 연구를 수행하였다. 직장암은 흔한 악성 종양 중 하나이지만 병리학적으로 완전하게 치료되는 가능성이 매우 낮아, 치료 후의 반응을 예측하고 적절한 치료 방법을 선택하는 것이 중요하다. 따라서 본 연구에서는 FDG-PET 영상에 합성곱 신경망(CNN)모델을 활용하여 딥러닝 네트워크를 구축하고 직장암 환자의 치료반응을 예측하는 연구를 진행하였다. 116명의 직장암 환자의 FDG-PET 영상을 획득하였다. 대상군은 2cm 이상의 종양 크기를 가지는 환자를 대상으로 하였으며 치료 후 완치된 환자는 21명이었다. FDG-PET 영상은 전신 영역과 종양 영역으로 나누어 평가하였다. 딥러닝 네트워크는 2차원 및 3차원 영상입력에 대한 CNN 모델로 구성되었다. 학습된 CNN 모델을 사용하여 직장암의 치료 후 완치를 예측하는 성능을 평가하였다. 학습 결과에서 평균 정확도와 정밀도는 각각 0.854와 0.905로 나타났으며, 모든 CNN 모델과 영상 영역에 따른 성능을 보였다. 테스트 결과에서는 3차원 CNN 모델과 종양 영역만을 이용한 네트워크에서 정확도가 높게 평가됨을 확인하였다. 본 연구에서는 CNN 모델의 입력 영상에 따른 차이와 영상 영역에 따른 딥러닝 네트워크의 성능을 평가하였으며 딥러닝 네트워크 모델을 통해 직장암 치료반응을 예측하고 적절한 치료 방향 결정에 도움이 될 것으로 기대한다.

• The Korean Journal of Nuclear Medicine Technology
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.74-79
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• 2017

Purpose Proton therapy can deliver an optimal dose to tumor while reducing unnecessary dose to normal tissue as compared the conventional photon therapy. As proton beams are irradiated into tissue, various positron emitters are produced via nuclear fragmentation reactions. These positron emitters could be used for the dose verification by using PET. However, the short half-life of the radioisotopes makes it hard to obtain the enough amounts of events. The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of off-line PET imaging scan time on the PET image quality. Materials and Methods The various diameters of spheres (D=37, 28, 22 mm) filled with distilled water were inserted in a 2001 IEC body phantom. Then proton beams (100 MU) were irradiated into the center of the each sphere using the wobbling technique with the gantry angle of $0^{\circ}$. The modulation widths of the spread out bragg peak were 16.4, 14.7 and 9.3 cm for the spheres of 37, 28 and 22 mm in diameters respectively. After 5 min of the proton irradiation, the PET images of the IEC body phantom were obtained for 50 min. The PET images with different time courses (0-10 min, 11-20 min, 21-30 min, 31-40 min and 41-50 min) were obtained by dividing the frame with a duration of 10 min. In order to evaluate the off-line PET image quality with the different time courses, the contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) of the PET image calculated for each sphere. Results The CNRs of the sphere (D=37 mm) were 0.43, 0.42, 0.40, 0.31 and 0.21 for the time courses of 0-10 min, 11-20 min, 21-30 min, 31-40 min and 41-50 min respectively. The CNRs of the sphere (D=28 mm) were 0.36, 0.32, 0.27, 0.19 and 0.09 for the time courses of 0-10 min, 11-20 min, 21-30 min, 31-40 min and 41-50 min respectively. The CNR of 37 mm sphere was decreased rapidly after 30 min of the proton irradiation. In case of the spheres of 28 mm and 22 mm, the CNR was decreased drastically after 20 min of the irradiation. Conclusion The off-line PET imaging time is an important factor for the monitoring of the proton therapy. In case of the lesion diameter of 22 mm, the off-line PET image should be obtained within 25 min after the proton irradiation. When it comes to small size of tumor, the long PET imaging time will be beneficial for the proton therapy treatment monitoring.

• The Korean Journal of Nuclear Medicine Technology
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.65-69
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• 2011

Purpose: Normal pancreas has low uptake rate in $^{18}F$-FDG PET scan. However, it is possible to diagnose malignancy of pancreatic cancer which has high uptake rate. Many studies approve a high prevalence of diabetes in pancreatic cancer and if the blood glucose level (BGL) is over the normal range, FDG uptake will be decreased and there will be inconvenience for patients from the delay time to reduce the high BGL or could cause difficulty to arrange the schedule. Therefore, we studied the relation of BGL and image quality in pancreatic cancer on PET. Materials and Methods: A hundred patients had PET scan. The prevalence of pancreatic cancer and diabetes were evaluated using SPSS ver. 17. The fasting BGL of patients were examined and sorted as diabetes mellitus (DM) group and Non-DM group. For the evaluation, patients were divided into 3 groups (Non-DM, DM; BGL${\geq}7.0mmol/L$, and DM; BGL<7.0 mmol/L). The ROI was drown on Liver and Lung for the PET imaging analysis. Results: Fifty three male and forty seven female were in the patients. The average age was $60.1{\pm}13.5$. There were 36 patients (male: 22, female: 14, 36%) who had pancreatic cancer with DM. There were 15 patients who showed over 7.0 mmol/L in their fasting BGL and 85 patients who showed under 7.0 mmol/L in their fasting BGL. Among the Non-DM, DM; BGL${\geq}7.0mmol/L$, and DM; BGL<7.0 mmol/L, there was not a statistical significance (p>0.05). Conclusion: The prevalence of pancreatic cancer was comparatively high in this study. If the fasting BGL was slightly over the normal BGL, we believe it will not give a severe disturbance when the patients have PET scan. Furthermore, the examination schedule doesn't need to change and the inconvenience from the delay of patients preparation will be reduced.