• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.215-221
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• 2023

Among brain CT scan conditions including the lens, the tube voltage was changed to 80, 100, and 120 kVp and applied. The change in dose was analyzed using lead, lead goggles and barium sulfate silicon shielding materials, and the degree of influence of the shielding materials on image quality was compared and analyzed by applying the SNR, CNR, and SSIM index analysis methods. As a result, it was analyzed that although the dose was reduced by applying all shielding materials, the difference in dose reduction was not large (P > 0.05). In addition, as for the change in image quality due to the application of the shielding material, SNR and CNR were the highest when lead goggles were applied, and the structural similarity was measured to be the best as it was closest to the reference value of 1 in SSIM analysis. Therefore, based on the results of this study, it is thought that if more diverse shielding materials and clinical test results are derived and applied, it will be helpful for the clinical application criteria in the case of shielding utilization inspection.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.11 no.7
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• pp.579-587
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• 2017

Although interventional procedures use very low tube currents, there is a high risk of exposure to radiation as well as the operator due to long-term radiation exposure. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of radiation dose on the quality of the operator by measuring the dose received by the operator in the interventional procedure of the cerebral vascular system and finding the shielding material and shielding method which can effectively shield the exposure from the medical radiation. And to find a way to minimize it to the extent that it does not. As a result, when the newly designed shielding system with Nano Tungsten material was used, it was confirmed that the mean dose was reduced by 7.95% on average by the operator. Also, the PSNR results were measured to be 38.44 dB when using the designed shielding material, and it was confirmed that Nano Tungsten does not affect the image quality. In conclusion, the Nano Tungsten shielding material proved to be capable of significantly reducing the operator radiation dose, without affecting the image quality. The use of the above materials is expected to solve the problems related to the harmfulness and economical efficiency of the human body and the environment, which have recently become an issue of shielding materials.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.481-487
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• 2019

Based on the scan conditions and algorithms that are generally applied during examinations during head CT examinations, the results of dose reduction through the application of algorithm changes were investigated through experiments. As a result, the dose reduction effect was more meaningful for the change of perfusion than for the tube voltage, and the quality evaluation using the brain phantom was relatively less reduced when the dose was reduced after the application of the Bone algorithm, especially for the application of the Bone algorithm, and the deviation of the mean CT number or Pixel value was measured relatively significantly. In other words, the conditions under which dose was reduced and quality was maintained to reduce the patient's exposure dose and obtain images of the same quality were obtained with the application of the Smooth algorithm and the resulting values of 120 kVp, 160 mA. At this point, doses were reduced by about 28%, and the mean CT number or Pixel value was also measured with relatively little error. If the results are applied to patients who visit the hospital for examination or follow-up after applying various algorithms and follow up scan conditions, the results are considered to be very useful in reducing patient exposure dose.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.44 no.2 s.314
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• pp.126-136
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• 2007

This paper presents an enhanced algorithm for compensating the visual quality in back-light image. Current cameras do not represent all details of scene into human's eye. Saturation and underexposure are common problems in back-light image. Retinex algorithm, derived from Land's theory on human visual perception is known to be effective in enhancing the contrast. However, its weaknesses are long processing time and low contrast of bright area in back-light scene because of compensating the details of dark area. In this paper, K-Retinex algorithm is proposed to reduce the processing time and enhance the contrast in both dark and bright area. To show the superiority of proposed algorithm, we compare the processing time, local standard deviation and contrast per pixel of each area above.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.19 no.7
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• pp.36-41
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• 2018

An image intensifying device is equipment that makes weak objects visible in a dark environment, such as making nighttime bright enough to let objects be visually observed. It is possible to obtain a clear image by amplifying the light in the presence of a certain amount of weak light. However, in an extremely low-light environment, where even moonlight is not present, there is not enough light to amplify anything, and the sharpness of the screen deteriorates. In this paper, a method is proposed to improve image quality by using multiple filters and anisotropic diffusion for output noise of the image-intensifying device in extreme low-light environments. For the experiment, the output of the image-intensifying device was obtained under extremely low-light conditions, and signal processing for improving the image quality was performed. The configuration of the filters for signal processing uses anisotropic diffusion after applying a median filter and a Wiener filter for effective removal of salt-and-pepper noise and Gaussian noise, which constitute the main noise appearing in the image. Experimental results show that the improvement visually enhanced image quality. Both peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and SSIM, which are quantitative indicators, show improved values.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.891-898
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• 2014

The DVC (Distributed Video Coding) provides a theoretical basis for the implementation of light video encoder. Conventionally, lots of studies have been focused on the codec scheme of Stanford University that has a feedback channel to control the bit rate finely. However, the codec scheme can not evaluate the qualities of the frames reconstructed by the received parity bits at the decoder side. This paper presents an efficient method of estimating distortion by correcting the virtual channel noises in side information and then facilitating the measurements of the visual qualities. Through several simulations, it is shown that the proposed method is very efficient in estimating the visual qualities of the reconstructed WZ frames.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.51 no.3
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• pp.105-111
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• 2014

Image resolution enhancement is a technique to generate high-resolution image through improving resolution of low-resolution obtained image. It is important to estimate correctly missing pixel value in low-resolution obtained image for image resolution enhancement. In this paper, multiple shortfall estimation method for image resolution enhancement is proposed. The proposed method estimate separate multiple shortfall by predictive degradation-restoration processing in sub-images of obtained image, and generate result image combining the estimated shortfall and interpolated obtained-image. Lastly, final reconstruction image is generated by deblurring of the result image. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has the best results of all compared methods in objective image quality index: PSNR, SSIM, and FSIM. The quality of reconstructed image is superior to all compared methods, and the proposed method has better lower computational complexity than compared methods. The proposed method can be useful for image resolution enhancement.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.51 no.6
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• pp.209-220
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• 2014

Compressive Sensing (CS) is a new signal acquisition paradigm which enables sampling under Nyquist rate for a special kind of signal called sparse signal. There are plenty of CS recovery methods but their performance are still challenging, especially at a low sub-rate. For CS recovery of natural images, regularizations exploiting some prior information can be used in order to enhance CS performance. In this context, this paper addresses improving quality of reconstructed natural images based on Dantzig selector and smooth filters (i.e., Gaussian filter and nonlocal means filter) to generate a new regularization called smooth residual error regularization. Moreover, total variation has been proved for its success in preserving edge objects and boundary of reconstructed images. Therefore, effectiveness of the proposed regularization is verified by experimenting it using augmented Lagrangian total variation minimization. This framework is considered as a new CS recovery seeking smoothness in residual images. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvement of the proposed framework over some other CS recoveries both in subjective and objective qualities. In the best case, our algorithm gains up to 9.14 dB compared with the CS recovery using Bayesian framework.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.45 no.2
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• pp.21-28
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• 2008

This paper proposes a novel reduced-reference assessment method for video quality assessment, in which one-dimensional (1-D) histograms of motion vectors (MVs) are used as features of videos. The proposed method is more efficient than the conventional methods in view of computation time, because the proposed quality metric decodes MVs directly from video stream in the parsing process instead of reconstructing the distorted video at the receiver. Moreover, in view of data size, the propose method is efficient because a sender transmits 1-D histograms of MVs accumulated over whole input video sequences. Here, we use 1-D histograms of MVs accumulated over the whole video sequences, which is different from the conventional methods that assessed each image independently. For testing the similarity between histograms, we use histogram intersection and histogram difference methods. We compare the proposed method with the conventional methods for 52 video clips, which are coded under varying bit rate, image size, and frame rate. Experimental results show that the proposed method is more efficient than the conventional methods and that the proposed method is more similar to the mean opinion score (MOS) than conventional algorithms.

• Journal of radiological science and technology
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• v.33 no.4
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• pp.355-362
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• 2010

This study determines a range of CT parameter values in Brain CT which are minimizing patient absorption dose without compromising the image quality and optimal exposure condition. We measured dose and image noise using conventional CT parameters in Brain CT. In additon, we evaluated dose, SNR and PSNR of head phantom images while changing kVp and rotation time. In this study, effectiveness of dose that was achieved from dose reproducible experiments in conventional head CT condition is determined by changing kVp and rotation time. Dose and PSNR is related to low dose-high resolution condition. In conclusion, we suggest that using proposed conditions is effective for imaging to compare with conditions proposed by the manufacturer.