• Investigative Magnetic Resonance Imaging
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• 제2권1호
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• pp.50-57
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• 1998

MR acoustic sound or noise due to gradient pulsings has been one of the problems in MRI, both in patient scanning as well as in many areas of psychiatric and neuroscience research, such as brain fMRI. Especially in brain fMRI, sound noise is one of the serious noise sources which obscures the small signals obtainable from the subtle changes occurring in oxygenation status in the cortex and blood capillaries. Therfore, we have studied the effects of acoustic or sound noise arising in fMR imaging of the auditory, motor and visual cortices. The results show that the acoustical noise effects on motor and visual responses are opposite. That is, for the motor activity, it shows an increased total motor activation while for the visual stimulation, corresponding(visual) cortical activity has diminished substantially when the subject is exposed to a loud acoustic sound. Although the current observations are preliminary and require more experimental confirmation, it appears that the observed acoustic-noise effects on brain functions, such as in the motor and visual cortices, are new observations and could have significant consequences in data observation and interpretation in future fMRI studies.

• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
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• 제3권1호
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• pp.28-34
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• 2014

Recently, ultrasound therapy has become a new and effective treatment for many brain diseases. Therefore, skull-mimicking phantoms have been developed to simulate the skull and brain tissue of a human and allow further research into ultrasound therapy. In this study, the suitability of various skull-mimicking materials(HDPE, POM C, Acrylic) for studies of brain-tumor treatments was evaluated using focused ultrasound. The acoustic properties of three synthetic resins were measured. The skull-mimicking materials were then combined with an egg white phantom to observe the differences in the ultrasound beam distortion according to the type of material. High-intensity polyethylene was found to be suitable as a skull-mimicking phantom because it had acoustic properties and a denatured-area shape that was close to those of the skull,. In this study, a skull-mimicking phantom with a multi-layer structure was produced after evaluating several skull-mimicking materials. This made it possible to predict the denaturation in a skull in relation to focused ultrasound. The development of a therapeutic protocol for a range of brain diseases will be useful in the future.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• 제27권5호
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• pp.229-236
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• 2006

The acoustic field analysis method is the superior calibration method for rectifying the ultrasonic probe sensitivity. This method also can be applied to evaluate the probe performance in clinical fields without numerical analysis and precise measurements. In this paper, we propose the method of acoustic field pattern analysis with probe channel division for the evaluation of diagnostic ultrasound probe characterization. In order to verify our purpose, we performed a set of experiments. We measured the acoustic-field pattern of the three inferiority probes by channel division to evaluate an acoustic field distribution and impulse response characteristics. By comparing the results of acoustic field measurement method with that of conventional method such as impulse response and live image test for linear array probes, it is demonstrated that the ultrasound field measurement method is more effective then conventional method in detection of defective elements.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• 한국음향학회 2004년도 추계학술발표대회논문집 제23권 2호
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• pp.351-352
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• 2004

본 논문에서는 초음파 영상 진단기용 선형어레이 변환기를 장착할 수 있는 수조 와 128 채널의 스위칭 회로를 제작하여 변환기의 각 채널별 음향파워를 측정하였다. 실험은 128 채널 중 하나의 채널이 불량인 어레이 프로브를 대상으로 수행되었다. 측정 결과, 불량 채널의 음향 파워가 다른 채널에 비해 현저히 작게 나타남을 확인하였다.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• 제59권12호
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• pp.2349-2351
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• 2010

Photo Acoustic Tomography (PAT) is a hybrid imaging modality which combines high contrast of optical imaging and spatial resolution of ultrasound imaging, thus it is suitable to image biological tissue noninvasively. Laser-induced photoacoustic signals were measured from a sample by means of an unfocused ultrasound transducer, then PAT image was reconstructed based on a universal back-projection algorithm. To evaluate the feasibility of our system, phantom test was performed, consequently, the PAT images obtained using our system showed highly analogous shape and volume with those of the phantom. This result demonstrated that our system can provide a powerful tool for imaging the substructure of biological tissue in non-invasive manner.

• Journal of KSNVE
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• 제7권2호
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• pp.255-260
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• 1997

This paper describes 3-dimensional volume array of 4 microphones including a reference microphone which is capable of imaging wideband noise source position in 2-dimensional image plane. The cross correlation function and corresponding imaging function between a reference microphone and other microphone, are derived as a function of noise source position. The magnitude of the imaging function gives noise source mapping in image plane. Since the image plane is selective from a rectangular and a cylindrical plane, noise source position information such as range and bearing relative to the array is identified very much easily. Simulation results for typical source configurations confirms the applicability of the proposed array in noise control field.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• 한국음향학회 1984년도 추계학술발표회 논문집
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• pp.96-99
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• 1984

In this study, the underwater acoustic images were obtained by ultrasonicwave. The experiment was performed in the anechoic watertank, using a passive sonar array for one and two sound source respectively by X-Y scanning technique. The receiving array was consist of 8 disc type transducers with 1.5cm diameter at 25KHz resonance frequency. The scanned data were processed by the FORTRAN IV algorithm for the reconstruction of image, and the image had some noise due to the surface reflected waves. As the result, it was found that the acoustic imaging by electrical deflection and dynamic focusing technique is applicable to SONAR with the suppression of surface reflected wave.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• 제29권6호
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• pp.355-364
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• 2010

Considering biological safety, it is very important to measure acoustic power from ultrasonic array probe for diagnostic ultrasound imaging applications. In this paper, to measure acoustic power from each element on array probe for ultrasonic diagnostic equipment, we reconstruct and automate the acoustic power measurement system. The acoustic power from linear, phased and curved array were measured and analyzed. As a result of measurement, the effects caused by directivity of sound beam from curved array were founded. To remove these effects, we developed and applied the correction model. The proposed system is useful to evaluate characteristics of the acoustical output power of array probe.

• Transactions of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering
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• 제14권6호
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• pp.528-535
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• 2004

Ultrasonic Vibrator is designed to achieve the maximum vibration amplitude at 30 kHz by in-cluding a horn (diameter, 40 mm), mechanical vibration amplifier at the top of the ultrasonic vibrator in the system and making the complete system resonate. In addition, it is experimentally visualized by particle imaging velocimetry (PIV) that the acoustic streaming velocity in the gap is at maximum when the gap between the ultrasonic vibrator and stationary plate agrees with the multiples of half-wavelength of the ultrasonic wave. This fact results from the resonance of the sound wave and the theoretical analysis of that is also accomplished and verified by experiment. It is observed that the magnitude of the acoustic streaming dependent upon the gap between the ultrasonic vibrator and stationary plate possibly changes due to the measurement of the average velocity fields of the acoustic streaming induced by the ultrasonic vibration at resonance and non-resonance. There exists extremely small average velocity at non-resonant gaps while the relatively large average velocity exists at resonant gaps compared with non-resonant gaps. It also reveals that there should be larger axial turbulent intensity at the hub region of the vibrator and at the edge of it in the resonant gap where the air streaming velocity is maximized and the flow phenomena is conspicuous than that at the other region. Because the variation of the acoustic streaming velocity at resonant gap is more distinctive than that at non-resonant gap, shear stress increases more in the resonant gap and is also maximized at the center region of the vibrator except the local position of center (r〓0). At the non-resonant gap there should be low values of vorticity distribution, but in contrast to the non-resonant gap, high and negative values of it exist at the center region of the vibrator with respect to the radial direction and in the vicinity of the middle region with respect to the axial direction. Acoustic streaming is noise-free due to the ultrasonic vibration and maintenance-free because of the absence of moving parts. Moreover, the proposed method by acoustic streaming can be utilized to the nano and micro-electro mechanical systems as a driving mechanism in addition to the augmentation of the streaming velocity.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• 제27권1호
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• pp.22-29
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• 2006

This paper proposes an efficient array beamforming method using spatial matched filtering for ultrasound imaging. In the proposed method, ultrasound waves are transmitted from an array subaperture with fixed transmit focus as in conventional array imaging. At receive, radio frequency (RF) echo signals from each receive channel are passed through a spatial matched filter that is constructed based on the system transmit-receive spatial impulse response. The filtered echo signals are then summed. The filter remaps and spatially registers the acoustic energy from each element so that the pulse-echo impulse response of the summed output is focused with acceptably low side lobes. Analytical beam pattern analysis and simulation results using a linear array show that the proposed spatial filtering method can provide more improved spatial resolution and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) compared with conventional dynamic receive focusing (DRF) method by implementing two-way dynamically focused beam pattern throughout the field.