• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
• /
• v.82 no.2
• /
• pp.280-297
• /
• 2021

International guidelines recommended screening with ultrasonography (US) every 6 months for patients at risk for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). However, US demonstrates low sensitivity for the early detection of HCC. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) plays an important role in the noninvasive diagnosis of HCC, but it is not suitable for surveillance due to its lengthy examination and high cost. Therefore, several studies have been using various abbreviated MRI strategies, including noncontrast abbreviated MRI, dynamic contrast-enhanced abbreviated MRI, and abbreviated MRI using hepatobiliary phase image for HCC surveillance. In this article, we aim to review these various strategies and explore the future direction of HCC surveillance considering the cost-effectiveness aspect.

• Progress in Medical Physics
• /
• v.19 no.2
• /
• pp.102-112
• /
• 2008

We developed a high-resolution micro-CT system based on rotational gantry and flat-panel detector for live mouse imaging. This system is composed primarily of an x-ray source with micro-focal spot size, a CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) flat panel detector coupled with Csl (TI) (thallium-doped cesium iodide) scintillator, a linearly moving couch, a rotational gantry coupled with positioning encoder, and a parallel processing system for image data. This system was designed to be of the gantry-rotation type which has several advantages in obtaining CT images of live mice, namely, the relative ease of minimizing the motion artifact of the mice and the capability of administering respiratory anesthesia during scanning. We evaluated the spatial resolution, image contrast, and uniformity of the CT system using CT phantoms. As the results, the spatial resolution of the system was approximately the 11.3 cycles/mm at 10% of the MTF curve, and the radiation dose to the mice was 81.5 mGy. The minimal resolving contrast was found to be less than 46 CT numbers on low-contrast phantom imaging test. We found that the image non-uniformity was approximately 70 CT numbers at a voxel size of ${\sim}55{\times}55{\times}X100\;{\mu}^3$. We present the image test results of the skull and lung, and body of the live mice.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
• /
• v.15 no.6
• /
• pp.737-747
• /
• 2012

Recently, in order to support automatic meter reading for conventional metering devices, an image processing-based approach of recognizing the number meter data in the captured meter images has attracted many researchers' interests. Numerical character segmentation is a very critical process for successful recognition. In this paper, we propose an efficient numeric character segmentation method which can segment numeric characters well for any metering device types under diverse illumination environments. The proposed method consists of two consecutive stages; detection of number area containing all numbers as a tight ROI(Region of Interest) and segmentation of numerical characters in the ROI. Detection of tight ROI is achieved in two steps: extraction of rough ROI by utilizing horizontal line segments after illumination enhancement preprocessing, and making the rough ROI more tight through clipping utilizing vertical and horizontal projection about binarized ROI. Numerical character segmentation in the detected ROI is stably achieved in two processes of 'vertical segmentation of each number region' and 'number segmentation in the each vertical segmented number region'. Through the experiments about a homegrown meter image database containing various meter type images of low contrast, low intensity, shadow, and saturation, it is shown that the proposed numeric character segmentation method performs effectively well for any metering device types under diverse illumination environments.

• Imaging Science in Dentistry
• /
• v.37 no.4
• /
• pp.211-215
• /
• 2007

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of the kV on fractal dimension of trabecular bone in digital radiographs. Materials and Methods: 16 bone cores were obtained from patients who had taken partial resection of tibia due to accidents. Each bone core along with an aluminum step wedge was radiographed with an occlusal film at 0.08 sec and with the constant film-focus distance (32 cm). All radiographs were acquired at 60, 75, and 90 kV. A rectangular ROI was drawn at medial part, distal part, and the bone defect area of each bone core image according to each kV. The directional fractal dimension was measured using Fourier Transform spectrum, and the anisotropy was obtained using directional fractal dimension. The values were compared by the repeated measures ANOVA. Results : The fractal dimensions increased along with kV increase (p < 0.05). The anisotropy measurements did not show statistically significant difference according to kV change. The fractal dimensions of the bone defect areas of the bone cores have low values contrast to the non-defect areas of the bone cores. The anisotropy measurements of the bone defect areas were lower than those of the non-defect areas of the bone cores, but not statistically significant. Conclusion: Fractal analysis can notice a difference of a change of voltage of x-ray tube and bone defect or not. And anisotropy of a trabecular bone is coherent even with change of the voltage of x-ray tube or defecting off a part of bone.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Surveying, Geodesy, Photogrammetry and Cartography
• /
• v.36 no.3
• /
• pp.127-134
• /
• 2018

Electric transmission towers are facilities to transport electrical power from a plant to an electrical substation. The towers are connected using power lines that are installed with a proper sag by loosening the cable to lower the tension and to secure the sufficient clearance from the ground or nearby objects. The power line sag may extend over the tolerance due to the weather such as strong winds, temperature changes, and a heavy snowfall. Therefore the periodical mapping of the power lines is required but the poor accessibility to the power lines limit the work because most power lines are placed at the mountain area. In addition, the manual mapping of the power lines is also time-consuming either using the terrestrial surveying or the aerial surveying. Therefore we utilized multiple overlapping images acquired from a low-cost drone to automatically reconstruct the power lines in the object space. Two overlapping images are selected for epipolar image resampling, followed by the line extraction for the resampled images and the redundant images. The extracted lines from the epipolar images are matched together and reconstructed for the power lines primitive that are noisy because of the multiple line matches. They are filtered using the extracted line information from the redundant images for final power lines points. The experiment result showed that the proposed method successfully generated parabolic curves of power lines by interpolating the power lines points though the line extraction and reconstruction were not complete in some part due to the lack of the image contrast.

• Journal of KIISE
• /
• v.44 no.3
• /
• pp.295-305
• /
• 2017

Facial appearance is greatly influenced by illumination conditions, and therefore illumination variation is one of the factors that degrades performance of face recognition systems. In this paper, we propose a robust method for face representation under varying illumination conditions, combining non-alpha Weberface (non-alpha WF) and histogram equalization. We propose a two-step method: (1) for a given face image, non-alpha WF, which is not applied a parameter for adjusting the intensity difference between neighboring pixels in WF, is computed; (2) histogram equalization is performed to non-alpha WF, to make a uniform histogram distribution globally and to enhance the contrast. $(2D)^2PCA$ is applied to extract low-dimensional discriminating features from the preprocessed face image. Experimental results on the extended Yale B face database and the CMU PIE face database show that the proposed method yielded better recognition rates than several illumination processing methods as well as the conventional WF, achieving average recognition rates of 93.31% and 97.25%, respectively.

• International Journal of Fuzzy Logic and Intelligent Systems
• /
• v.15 no.2
• /
• pp.102-110
• /
• 2015

The main source of noise in computed tomography (CT) images is a quantum noise, which results from statistical fluctuations of X-ray quanta reaching the detector. This paper proposes a neural network (NN) based hybrid filter for removing quantum noise. The proposed filter consists of bilateral filters (BFs), a single or multiple neural edge enhancer(s) (NEE), and a neural filter (NF) to combine them. The BFs take into account the difference in value from the neighbors, to preserve edges while smoothing. The NEE is used to clearly enhance the desired edges from noisy images. The NF acts like a fusion operator, and attempts to construct an enhanced output image. Several measurements are used to evaluate the image quality, like the root mean square error (RMSE), the improvement in signal to noise ratio (ISNR), the standard deviation ratio (MSR), and the contrast to noise ratio (CNR). Also, the modulation transfer function (MTF) is used as a means of determining how well the edge structure is preserved. In terms of all those measurements and means, the proposed filter shows better performance than the guided filter, and the nonlocal means (NLM) filter. In addition, there is no severe restriction to select the number of inputs for the fusion operator differently from the neuro-fuzzy system. Therefore, without concerning too much about the filter selection for fusion, one could apply the proposed hybrid filter to various images with different modalities, once the corresponding noise characteristics are explored.

• Journal of Korean Neurosurgical Society
• /
• v.59 no.6
• /
• pp.584-589
• /
• 2016

Objective : A rare subtype of meningioma, sclerosing meningioma is not included in the current World Health Organization classification of meningiomas and is classified into the category of other morphological variation subtypes. Sclerosing meningioma is often misdiagnosed to other non-benign meningioma or malignant neoplasm, so it is important to diagnose sclerosing type correctly. We analyzed the radiological and clinical characteristics of a series of sclerosing meningiomas. Methods : Twenty-one patients who underwent surgery in one institute with a histopathologically proven sclerosing meningioma were included from 2006 to 2014. Eighteen tumors were diagnosed as a pure sclerosing-type meningioma, and 3 as mixed type. Magnetic resonance image was taken for all patients including contrast enhancement image. Computed tomography (CT) scan was taken for 16 patients. One neuroradiologist and 1 neurosurgeon reviewed all images retrospectively. Results : In the all 16 patients with preoperative CT images, higher attenuation was observed in the meningioma than in the brain parenchyma, and calcification was observed in 11 (69%). In 15 of the 21 patients (71%), a distinctive very low signal intensity appeared as a dark color in T2-weighted images. Nine of these 15 tumors (60%) exhibited heterogeneous enhancement, and 6 (40%) exhibited homogeneous enhancement that was unlike the homogeneous enhancing pattern shown by conventional meningiomas. Ten patients had a clear tumor margin without peritumoral edema. Conclusion : Although these peculiar radiological characteristics are not unique to sclerosing meningioma, we believe that they are distinctive features that may be helpful for distinguishing sclerosing meningioma from other subtypes.

• Progress in Medical Physics
• /
• v.13 no.2
• /
• pp.90-97
• /
• 2002

The simulator which has a identical geometry with radiotherapy equipments, is a essential equipment to accomplish optimized radiotherapy plan through simulation by using diagnostic low energy X-ray. A Radiotherapy simulator has a combined technology from the therapeutic and diagnostic radiology and needs a periodical test for mechanical and optical properties, X-ray generator, image intensifier of simulator to keep the proper maintenance and radiation safety. Hence, tests were done and classified as i) mechanical and optical parameter for the gantry, collimator, and couch ii) key performance of the X-ray generator such as a kVp, mAs, and timer iii) performance of the image intensifier such as a resolution and contrast for three kinds of simulator, common use in clinic. The above result of tests will be applied to the acceptance test and periodical quality assurance procedure.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
• /
• v.34 no.1
• /
• pp.52-58
• /
• 2007

In this paper we propose a new robust method to extract accurate human silhouettes indoors with active stereo camera. A prime application is for gesture recognition of mobile robots. The segmentation of distant moving objects includes many problems such as low resolution, shadows, poor stereo matching information and instabilities of the object and background color distributions. There are many object segmentation methods based on color or stereo information but they alone are prone to failure. Here efficient color, stereo and image segmentation methods are fused to infer object and background areas of high confidence. Then the inferred areas are incorporated in graph cut to make human silhouette extraction robust and accurate. Some experimental results are presented with image sequences taken using pan-tilt stereo camera. Our proposed algorithms are evaluated with respect to ground truth data and proved to outperform some methods based on either color/stereo or color/contrast alone.