• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.22 no.8
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• pp.1107-1113
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• 2018

Ultrasonography and photodynamic therapy have been proposed as useful tools as a treatment for inducing necrosis of cells using reactive oxygen species. Apoptosis is an internal mechanism necessary for cells regardless of damage. Ultrasound has the effect of inducing the apoptosis of these cells, and the frequency of 1 MHz is the most applicable area for medical use. The laser which is generally used in photodynamic therapy has a heat reaction and the treatment is limited. However, as a small light emitting diode is developed, it shows possibility to minimize the equipment and reduce heat reaction. On the other hand, there are relatively few researches on direct effects of light compared with studies using photosensitizers, and the area is also limited. Therefore, in this paper, we have developed a cancer cell proliferation control module using ultrasonic and light emitting diodes, which have relatively few side effects, and quantitatively analyze the effect of the module to propose an optimal suppression technique.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.158-166
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• 2008

Medical ultrasound has benefits in mobility and safety than any other medical techniques such as X-ray, CT and MRI but has speckle noise which decrease the ability of an observer to distinguish the fine details in diagnostic examination. But simple removing of speckle often causes losing boundary information. Then, in this paper, we presented a novel neuro-fuzzy method which could remove speckle efficiently without loss of boundary information. Proposed method consists of image clustering by fuzzy algorithm and image processingby neural networks which was learned by back propagation. From the experiments for simulation image and real ultrasound image, we could verify the proposed method.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.30 no.3
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• pp.233-240
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• 2009

Using a spatial compound imaging technique in a medical ultrasound imaging system, the average speed of sound in a medium of interest is measured, and imaging of its distribution is implemented. When the brightness reaches the highest level in an ultrasonic image obtained as the speed of sound used in focusing is varied, it turns out that the focusing has been accomplished satisfactorily and that the speed of sound which has been adopted becomes the sought-after average speed of sound. Because spatial compound imaging provides many different views of the same object, the adverse effect of erroneous speed-of-sound estimation tends to be more severe in compound imaging than in plain B-mode imaging. Thus, in compound imaging, the average speed of sound even in the case of speckled images can be accurately estimated by observing the brightness change due to different speeds of sound employed. Using this new method that offers spatial diversity, we can construct an image of the speed of sound distribution in a phantom embedded with a 10-mm diameter plastic cylinder whose speed of sound is different from that of the background. The speed of sound in the cylinder is found to be different from that of the surrounding medium.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Bioinformatics Conference
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• 2002.06a
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• pp.89-104
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• 2002

유전체연구사업단은 국내에서 발병 및 사망빈도가 가장 높은 위암과 간암의 퇴치를 목적으로 국가적 특목전략사업으로 연구를 추진하고 있다. 이와 별도로 보건복지부에서는 22개의 중요 질병별 유전체 연구센터를 전국적으로 추진하고 있다. 따라서, 연구가 성공적으로 진행되면 각 연구소에서 독자적으로 개발하여 제공하는 생명정보의 양은 거의 무한에 이를 것이다. 그러나 생명정보는 환자진료에 도움을 주기 위해서는 궁극적으로 임상정보와 함께 유기적으로 통합되어야 한다. 임상정보와의 통합을 위해서는 의료기관의 진료정보와 연구소의 생명정보가 연계되어 엄밀한 임상실험이 추가적으로 실시되어야 한다. 뿐만 아니라 생명정보학의 발전을 위해서는 연구대상의 임상정보가 공유되어야 한다. 유전체정보를 이용하는 생명정보학(Bioinformatics)은 각 국가마다 전략사업으로 간주하여 막대한 투자가 이루어지는 새로운 분야이다. 현재 선진국에서 개발 사용 중인 시스템의 연간 사용료가 고가이므로 국내 도입은 거의 불가능하거나 또는 매우 비효율적이다. 유전체 또는 생명정보의 임상활용 및 생명정보연구를 위한 임상정보 공유를 위해서는 우선 다음의 사항이 개발되어야 한다. 1) 다음과 같은 개별환자의 정보를 각 의료기관에서 제공 받아 저장 활용한다. - 진찰 및 임상소견, 수술기록, 경과기록, 검사결과 (임상병리, 해부병리, 방사선 등), - 영상정보 (X-ray, CT, MRI, 초음파, 전자현미경, 그래픽 등), - 환자개인기록(병력, 과거력, 가족력, 알러지 등), - 예방접종 기록 2) 각 연구소에서 첨단기술을 이용하여 개발되는 생명정보를 임상에 활용하기 위해서는 유전체연구센타와 병원간에 임상정보와 유전체 분석정보의 공유가 필수적으로 발생하게 됨으로, 유전체 정보와 임상정보의 통합은 미래 의료환경에 필수기능이 될 것이다. 3) 각 생명공학 연구소에서 사용하는 첨단 분석 장비와 생명공학 정보시스템의 자동 연계가 필요하다. 현재 국내에는 전국적인 초고속정보망이 가동되어 웹을 기반으로 하는 생명정보의 공유는 기술적으로 문제가 될 수 없으나 임상정보의 유전체연구에 그리고 유전체연구정보의 임상활용은 다양한 문제를 내포하고 있다. 이에 영상을 포함한 환자정보의 유전체연구센터와 병원정보시스템과의 효율적인 연계통합 운영을 위해 국내에서는 초기 도입단계에 있는 국제적인 보건의료정보의 표준인 Health Level 7 (textural information 공유), DICOM (image 및 wave 공유), 관련 ISO표준, WHO의 ICD9/10 (질병분류), LOINC (검사 및 관련용어), SNOMED International (의학용어) 등을 활용하여야 한다.

• Journal of Advanced Navigation Technology
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.115-122
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• 2013

Disease diagnostics based on medical imaging is getting popularity day by day. Presence of the atherosclerosis is one of the causes of narrowing of carotid arteries which may block partially or fully blood flow into the brain. Serious brain strokes may occur due to such types of blockages in blood flow. Early detection of the plaque and taking precautionary steps in this regard may prevent from such type of serious strokes. In this paper, we present an automatic image segmentation technique for carotid artery ultrasound images based on active contour approach. In our experimental study, we assume that ultrasound images are properly aligned before applying automatic image segmentation. We have successfully applied the automatic segmentation of carotid artery ultrasound images using snake based model. Qualitative comparison of the proposed approach has been made with the manual initialization of snakes for carotid artery image segmentation. Our proposed approach successfully segments the carotid artery images in an automated way to help radiologists to detect plaque easily. Obtained results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.34 no.3
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• pp.210-218
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• 2015

When the driving voltage of an ultrasound transducer is increased to improve the quality of ultrasound images, heat is generated inside the transducer that can cause patient's skin burn and degradation of transducer performance. Hence, in this paper, a method to disperse the heat of the transducer has been studied. The phased array transducer having 3 MHz center frequency and 32 channels was selected for analyses of the thermal dispersion. First, mechanism of the heat generation was investigated in relation to the transducer operation through theoretical analysis, and material damping and sound pressure amplitude were confirmed to be influential on the heat generation. Further, we investigated the effects of the properties of the materials constituting the transducer on the thermal dispersion through finite element analysis. Based on the analysis results, we determined the thermal properties of the constituent materials that could facilitate the thermal dispersion inside the transducer. The determined thermal properties were applied to the finite element model, and the results showed that the maximum temperature at an acoustic lens contacting with a patient was decreased to 51 % of its initial value.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.35 no.6
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• pp.452-465
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• 2016

In this study, the structure of a concave annular array transducer was optimized to generate high intensity focused ultrasound for medical therapeutic application. The transducer has a phased array structure composed of several concentric channels that have 40 mm as the radius of curvature. We derived theoretical equations to analyze the sound field of the transducer and verified the validity of the equations by comparing the results calculated by the equations with those from finite element analyses. We also checked the possibility of dynamic focusing at around the geometric focal point. Further, the level of a grating lobe occurring at an unwanted position in the transducer sound field was confirmed to be reducible through the relation between the number of channels and the frequency of the transducer. Hence, the structure of the transducer was optimized to place the main lobe within a specific range from the zenith while systematically reducing the level of the maximum sidelobe including the grating lobe. The designed structure showed the performance better than that targeted at all the focal points.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.419-431
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• 2000

In this paper, a new beamforming technique is proposed, which can completely eliminate all the artifacts caused by digital scan converter. In the proposed method, named display-pixel-based focusing(DPBF) by the authors, ultrasound waves are focused directly at the display pixels instead of sampling points on the polar coordinate. Consequently. the DPBF system does not require the digital scan converter. To verify the proposed method, we modified a commercial scanner and performed experiments with a 3.5 MHz convex array and a 7.5 MHz linear array. We also defined and measured ICRA/B(Image Coarseness Ratio) to compare the image quality quantitatively. The experimental results with in vivo and in vitro data show that the proposed method improves the ICRA/B considerably, resulting in much smoother and finer images.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.27-35
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• 2022

This paper proposes an ultrasound vessel-pattern imaging algorithm with low computational complexity. The proposed imaging algorithm reconstructs blood-vessel patterns by only detecting blood flow, and can be applied to a real-time signal processing hardware that extracts an ultrasonic finger-vessel pattern. Unlike a blood-flow imaging mode of typical ultrasound medical imaging device, the proposed imaging algorithm only reconstructs a presence of blood flow as an image. That is, since the proposed algorithm does not use an I/Q demodulation and detects a presence of blood flow by accumulating an absolute value of the clutter-filter output, a structure of the algorithm is relatively simple. To verify a complexity of the proposed algorithm, a simulation model for finger vessel was implemented using Field-II program. Through the behavioral simulation, it was confirmed that the processing time of the proposed algorithm is around 54 times less than that of the typical color-flow mode. Considering the required main building blocks and the amount of computation, the proposed algorithm is simple to implement in hardware such as an FPGA and an ASIC.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.27 no.5
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• pp.215-220
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• 2008

The kerfs between arrayed piezoelectric elements in a medical ultrasonic transducer or a piezoelectric composite transducer are generally filled by polymeric materials. The boundary condition of the elements for lateral mode vibration is changed according to the kerf-filling materials, so that the resonance frequency for longitudinal mode of the transducer is also varied. In this study, to investigate the resonance frequency variation for an arrayed transducer experimentally, the piezoelectric vibration elements of $14mm{\times}0.22mm{\times}0.44mm$ were fabricated and those were linearly arrayed. And, the resonance frequencies were measured for three cases of kerf-filling condition, non-filling and two different kinds of epoxy filling. Conclusively, it is confirmed that the resonant frequency variation shows the similar tendency with the theoretical one for the longitudinal mode.