• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.12 no.7
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• pp.801-806
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• 2018

Germanium crystals have a dead layer that causes efficiency deterioration because the layer is not useful for detection but strongly weakens the photons. Thus, when the data provided by the manufacturer is used in the detector simulation model, there is a slight difference between the calculated efficiency and the measured efficiency.The shape and dimensions of the high purity germanium (HPGe) detector were determined by CT scans to accurately characterize the shape for the Monte Carlo roll simulation. It is found that the adjustment of the dead layer is a good match with the relative deviation of ${\pm}3%$ between the measurement efficiency and the simulation efficiency at the energy range of 50 - 1500 keV. Simulation data were compared by varying the thickness of the dead layer. The new Monte Carlo simulations were compared with the experimental results to obtain new blank layer thicknesses. The difference in dead layer results for the 1.5 mm thick end cap simulation model in 1.4 and 1.6 mm thick End Cap simulation models was a systematic error due to the accuracy of the end cap dimensions. After considering all errors including statistical errors and systematic errors, the thickness of the detector was calculated as $1.02{\pm}0.14mm$. Therefore, it was confirmed that the increase in the thickness of the dead layer causes the effect to be effected on the efficiency reduction.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.283-290
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• 2019

The purpose of this study is to suggest a quantitative supplementary index for patients with suspected Raynaud phenomenon. The subjects were 99 patients with suspected Raynaud phenomenon, 48 patients with low likelihood, 16 patients with middle range and 35 patients with high range. The test was instilled in ice water at $15.2{\pm}0.8^{\circ}C$ for 10 minutes of both hands and then venous injected of 99m-Tc 370 Mbq(10 mCi). After 5, 10 and 20 minutes, temperature changes of both fingers were measured. As a result, the temperature of the fingers was $32.6{\pm}4.9^{\circ}C$ in patients with a low diagnostic probability of Raynaud syndromes and $22.7{\pm}6.0^{\circ}C$ for those with a high diagnostic probability(p<0.05). In conclusion, we could confirm the difference of Raynaud phenomenon and finger temperature, and confirmed the possibility of secondary diagnosis as a quantitative index of Raynaud's diagnosis.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.629-635
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• 2019

In term of the factors affecting psychosocial adjustment of breast cancer patients, their quality of life after surgical operation, radiation, and chemotherapy were systematically meta-analyzed. As a result, their qualities of life of the patients that had radiation therapy was the lowest right after the therapy, and gradually increased after the end of the therapy. However, after six months, their quality of life failed to reach the same level before the therapy. They had depression and side effects the most right after the therapy, and somewhat reduced them after the end of the therapy. In case of surgical operation, the more they were educated, the more they had psychosocial adjustment, and the more they had a medical examination and took out an insurance policy, the more they had psychosocial adjustment. In case of chemotherapy, their cognitive function is influenced so that they have impairments in memory, learning, and thinking stages. Since subjective cognitive impairment has a relationship with depression, it is necessary to monitor depression of chemotherapy patients. Given the results of this systematic meta-analysis, when three types of therapies (surgical operation, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy) are applied to patients with breast cancer, it is necessary to recognize their psychosocial adjustment, depression, anxiety, and quality of life in the nursing and radiation therapy fields and thereby to introduce an intervention program for a holistic approach.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.257-263
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• 2022

In intracavitary radiotherapy, it is essential to verify the correct location of radiation source among quality control items because an incorrect location will irradiate an unnecessary dose to normal tissues. As a basic study of digital line dosimeters, this study fabricated a unit cell dosimeter based on polycrystalline mercury (II) iodide (HgI₂) and compared its performance with a diode. The study result showed that for reproducibility, the relative standard deviation (RSD) was 1.21%, satisfying the RSD evaluation criterion of within 1.5%. Considering linearity, the coefficient of determination R² showed an excellent result of 0.9997. Regarding the evaluation of distance dependence, it showed a similar trend in general with a difference of 0.035 cm for intensity 50% when compared with the inverse square value. This study suggests the applicability of a digital dosimeter for brachytherapy quality control by evaluating the performance of the HgI₂ dosimeter. This study on dosimeter for candidate photoconductor materials can be used as basic data in all areas using radiation.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.281-288
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• 2022

In this study, four algorithms (Soft, Standard, Detail, Bone) were used for general CT scan (Before MAR) images and MAR (After MAR) images for patients with metal implants inserted into the hip joint. was applied to compare and analyze Noise, SNR, and CNR to find out the optimal algorithm for quantitative evaluation. As the analysis method, Image J program, which can calculate image analysis and area and pixel values on the image reconstructed with four algorithms, was used. In order to obtain Noise, SNR, and CNR, the HU mean value and HU SD value were obtained by designating the bone (ischium) closest to the metal implant in the image for the measurement site, and the background noise was the surrounding muscle. The region of interest (ROI) was equally designated as 15 × 15 mm in consideration of the size of the bone, and the values of SNR and CNR were calculated according to the given equation. As a result, for noise, After MAR and Soft algorithms showed the lowest noise, and SNR and CNR showed the highest for Before MAR and Soft algorithms. Therefore, the soft algorithm is judged to be the most appropriate algorithm for metal implant hip joint CT.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.61-66
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• 2022

The purpose of this study is to derive photon energy fluence and mass energy absorption coefficient for 1 Gy of absorbed dose of water in brachytherapy using an Ir¹⁹² source. From the radiotherapy physics written by Khan, the half-value of lead for the gamma ray beam of the Ir¹⁹² source was obtained. The linear attenuation coefficient and the mass attenuation coefficient were calculated from the obtained half-value layer of lead. By matching the calculated lead mass attenuation coefficient with the NIST mass attenuation coefficient data, the photon energy of the matching mass attenuation coefficient was determined as the effective energy. By matching the determined effective energy with the photon energy of the NIST data on the mass energy absorption coefficient of water, the mass energy absorption coefficient of water was obtained as 0.03273 cm²/g(32.73 cm²/kg). The photon energy fluence was calculated as 0.03055 J/cm² by dividing the obtained mass energy absorption coefficient (32.73 cm²/kg) by the absorbed dose of water 1 Gy.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.411-417
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• 2022

This study aimed to learn and evaluate the effectiveness of VGGNet in the detection of pulmonary emphysema using low-dose chest computed tomography images. In total, 8000 images with normal findings and 3189 images showing pulmonary emphysema were used. Furthermore, 60%, 24%, and 16% of the normal and emphysema data were randomly assigned to training, validation, and test datasets, respectively, in model learning. VGG16 and VGG19 were used for learning, and the accuracy, loss, confusion matrix, precision, recall, specificity, and F1-score were evaluated. The accuracy and loss for pulmonary emphysema detection of the low-dose chest CT test dataset were 92.35% and 0.21% for VGG16 and 95.88% and 0.09% for VGG19, respectively. The precision, recall, and specificity were 91.60%, 98.36%, and 77.08% for VGG16 and 96.55%, 97.39%, and 92.72% for VGG19, respectively. The F1-scores were 94.86% and 96.97% for VGG16 and VGG19, respectively. Through the above evaluation index, VGG19 is judged to be more useful in detecting pulmonary emphysema. The findings of this study would be useful as basic data for the research on pulmonary emphysema detection models using VGGNet and artificial neural networks.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.679-684
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• 2023

Venous puncture is widely used to obtain blood samples for pathological examination. Because the invasive venipuncture method using a needle is repeatedly performed, the pain suffered by the patient increases, so our research team pre-developed a miniaturized near-infrared (NIR) imaging system in advance. To improve the image quality of the acquired NIR images, this study aims to model the non-local means (NLM) algorithm, which is well known to be efficient in noise reduction, and analyze its applicability in the system. The developed NIR imaging system is based on the principle that infrared rays pass through dichroic and long-pass filters and are detected by a CMOS sensor module. The proposed NLM algorithm is modeled based on the principle of replacing the pixel from which noise is to be removed with a value that reflects the distances between surrounding pixels. After acquiring an NIR image with a central wavelength of 850 nm, the NLM algorithm was applied to segment the final vein area through histogram equalization. As a result, the coefficient of variation of the NIR image of the vein using the NLM algorithm was 0.247 on average, which was an excellent result compared to conventional filtering methods. In addition, the dice similarity coefficient value of the NLM algorithm was improved by 62.91 and 9.40%, respectively, compared to the median filter and total variation methods. In conclusion, we demonstrated that the NLM algorithm can acquire accurate segmentation of veins acquired with a NIR imaging system.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.17 no.7
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• pp.1133-1138
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• 2023

This study analyzed the relationship between image parameters and specific absorption rate (SAR) in various sequence environments to optimize SAR. For this purpose, image parameters were adjusted for T2, T1, STIR, T1 FLAIR, and T2 FLAIR sequences in a 3.0T MRI, and the whole body (WB) SAR and head SAR calculated by the device were measured. Then, the SAR was evaluated by adjusting the number of images and the flip angle (FA) of the refocusing RF. As a result, SAR increased as the number of image increased in all sequences. T1 and T1 FLAIR had correlation coefficients (r) of 0.876, 0.876 (WB SAR, head SAR), 0.867, 0.867 (WB SAR, head SAR), respectively, and STIR had the highest correlation with 0.898 and 0.899 (WB SAR, head SAR). showed (p<0.05). When applied by increasing the refocusing FA, WB SAR and head SAR increased overall in all sequences. The T1 and T2 sequences showed high correlation with correlation coefficients (r) of 0.897, 0.898 (WB SAR, head SAR) and 0.914, 0.915 (WB SAR, head SAR), respectively, while the sequences to which the inversion recovery technique was applied had relatively low FA, showed less sensitivity to increase. Therefore, in a sequence with a relatively low TR, minimizing the number of image and applying the fast spin echo to reduce the refocusing FA in a sequence with a high duty cycle are effective in reducing SAR.

• Korean Journal of Radiology
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• v.23 no.10
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• pp.986-997
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• 2022

Objective: Whether metabolic redistribution occurs in patients with white matter hyperintensities (WMHs) on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is unknown. This study aimed 1) to propose a measure of the brain metabolic network for an individual patient and preliminarily apply it to identify impaired metabolic networks in patients with WMHs, and 2) to explore the clinical and imaging features of metabolic redistribution in patients with WMHs. Materials and Methods: This study included 50 patients with WMHs and 70 healthy controls (HCs) who underwent ¹⁸F-fluorodeoxyglucose-positron emission tomography/MRI. Various global property parameters according to graph theory and an individual parameter of brain metabolic network called "individual contribution index" were obtained. Parameter values were compared between the WMH and HC groups. The performance of the parameters in discriminating between the two groups was assessed using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). The correlation between the individual contribution index and Fazekas score was assessed, and the interaction between age and individual contribution index was determined. A generalized linear model was fitted with the individual contribution index as the dependent variable and the mean standardized uptake value (SUV_mean) of nodes in the whole-brain network or seven classic functional networks as independent variables to determine their association. Results: The means ± standard deviations of the individual contribution index were (0.697 ± 10.9) × 10^-3 and (0.0967 ± 0.0545) × 10^-3 in the WMH and HC groups, respectively (p < 0.001). The AUC of the individual contribution index was 0.864 (95% confidence interval, 0.785-0.943). A positive correlation was identified between the individual contribution index and the Fazekas scores in patients with WMHs (r = 0.57, p < 0.001). Age and individual contribution index demonstrated a significant interaction effect on the Fazekas score. A significant direct association was observed between the individual contribution index and the SUV_mean of the limbic network (p < 0.001). Conclusion: The individual contribution index may demonstrate the redistribution of the brain metabolic network in patients with WMHs.