• Korean Journal of Psychosomatic Medicine
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.130-137
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• 2014

Objectives : Obsessive-compulsive(OC) symptoms have yet to be directly studied in neurodegenerative conditions involving behavioral changes. To examine regional abnormalities in the brains of dementia patients with OC symptoms, we assessed the gray matter density using voxel-based morphometry(VBM). Methods : We performed brain magnetic resonance imaging(MRI) with VBM analysis in 106 dementia patients with OC behaviors. In this study, OC behaviors were investigated in patients with neurodegenerative disease using the modified Manchester Behavior Questionnaire. Results : The OC behavior scores were correlated with structural brain volume using VBM. The total OC symptom score correlated negatively with the volume of both putamens, the right middle orbitofrontal gyrus, both anterior cingulate cortices, and the left insula(p<0.001, uncorrected). No gray matter reductions were associated specifically with the OC symptom sub-categories. Conclusions : Our results suggest that abnormalities in these brain regions may play an important role in the pathophysiology of OCD in neurodegenerative disease. This is the first lesion study to investigate the neural basis of OCD behaviors in neurodegenerative disease.

• Investigative Magnetic Resonance Imaging
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.164-171
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• 2021

Purpose: Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a prodromal stage of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Brain atrophy in this disease spectrum begins in the medial temporal lobe structure, which can be recognized by magnetic resonance imaging. To overcome the unsatisfactory inter-observer reliability of visual evaluation, quantitative brain volumetry has been developed and widely investigated for the diagnosis of MCI and AD. The aim of this study was to assess the prediction accuracy of quantitative brain volumetry using a fully automated segmentation software package, NeuroQuant^®, for the diagnosis of MCI. Materials and Methods: A total of 418 subjects from the Korean Brain Aging Study for Early Diagnosis and Prediction of Alzheimer's Disease cohort were included in our study. Each participant was allocated to either a cognitively normal old group (n = 285) or an MCI group (n = 133). Brain volumetric data were obtained from T1-weighted images using the NeuroQuant software package. Logistic regression and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analyses were performed to investigate relevant brain regions and their prediction accuracies. Results: Multivariate logistic regression analysis revealed that normative percentiles of the hippocampus (P < 0.001), amygdala (P = 0.003), frontal lobe (P = 0.049), medial parietal lobe (P = 0.023), and third ventricle (P = 0.012) were independent predictive factors for MCI. In ROC analysis, normative percentiles of the hippocampus and amygdala showed fair accuracies in the diagnosis of MCI (area under the curve: 0.739 and 0.727, respectively). Conclusion: Normative percentiles of the hippocampus and amygdala provided by the fully automated segmentation software could be used for screening MCI with a reasonable post-processing time. This information might help us interpret structural MRI in patients with cognitive impairment.

• Dementia and Neurocognitive Disorders
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.95-106
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• 2024

Background and Purpose: Ventricle enlargement has been implicated in the pathophysiology of Alzheimer's disease (AD). We studied the relationship between ventricular size and cognitive function in patients with AD. We focused on the effect of the initial ventricle size on the rate of cognitive decline in patients with AD. Methods: A retrospective analysis of probable clinical AD participants with more than 2 magnetic resonance imaging images was performed. To measure ventricle size, we used visual rating scales of (1) Cardiovascular Health Study (CHS) score and (2) conventional linear measurement method. Results: Increased clinical dementia rating (CDR) was correlated with a decreased Mini-Mental Status Examination (MMSE) score, and increased medial temporal lobe atrophy (MTLA) and global ventricle size (p<0.001, p<0.001, p=0.021, respectively). There was a significant correlation between the change in cognitive function in the group (70%-100%ile) with a large initial ventricle size (p=0.021 for ∆CDR, p=0.01 for ∆MMSE), while the median ventricle size (30%-70%ile) showed correlation with other brain structural changes (MTLA, frontal atrophy [FA], and white matter) (p=0.036 for initial MTLA, p=0.034 for FA). Conclusions: In this study, the initial ventricle size may be a potential new imaging biomarker for initial cognitive function and clinical progression in AD. We found a relationship between the initial ventricle size and initial AD-related brain structural biomarkers.

• Korean Journal of Biological Psychiatry
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.57-62
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• 2016

Criminology has been understood within a sociological framework until the emergence of neurocriminology, which describes, understands and predicts criminal behaviors from a neurobiological point of view. Not only using biological factors including genes and hormones to understand criminal behaviors, but also using neuroimaging techniques, the field of neurocriminology aims to delve into both structural and functional differences in the brain of individuals with aggression, antisocial personalities, and even the criminals. Various studies have been conducted based on this idea, however, there still are limitations for the knowledge from these studies to be used in the court. In this review article, we provide an overview of the various research in neurocriminology, and provide insight into the future direction and implication of the field.

• Investigative Magnetic Resonance Imaging
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.110-122
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• 2011

Purpose : The purpose of this study is to establish the method generating human brain anatomical connectivity from Korean children and evaluating the network topological properties using small-world network analysis. Materials and Methods : Using diffusion tensor images (DTI) and parcellation maps of structural MRIs acquired from twelve healthy Korean children, we generated a brain structural connectivity matrix for individual. We applied one sample t-test to the connectivity maps to derive a representative anatomical connectivity for the group. By spatially normalizing the white matter bundles of participants into a template standard space, we obtained the anatomical brain network model. Network properties including clustering coefficient, characteristic path length, and global/local efficiency were also calculated. Results : We found that the structural connectivity of Korean children group preserves the small-world properties. The anatomical connectivity map obtained in this study showed that children group had higher intra-hemispheric connectivity than inter-hemispheric connectivity. We also observed that the neural connectivity of the group is high between brain stem and motorsensory areas. Conclusion : We suggested a method to examine the anatomical brain network of Korean children group. The proposed method can be used to evaluate the efficiency of anatomical brain networks in people with disease.

• Journal of radiological science and technology
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.31-41
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• 2004

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder(ADHD)is one of the most common psychiatric disorders in childhood, especially school age children and persisting into adult. ADHD is affected 7.6% in our children, Korea. and persisting into $15{\sim}20%$ in adult. And it is characterized by hyperactivity, inattention and impulsivity. Brain imaging is one of way to diagnosis for ADHD. Brain imaging studies may be provide information two types - structural and functional imaging. Structural and functional images of the brain play an important role in management of neurologic and psyciatric disorders. Brain SPECT, with perfusion imaging radiopharmaceuticals is one of the appropriate test to diagnosis of neurologic and psychiatric diseases. Ther are a few studies about separated analysis between boys and girls ADHD SPECT brain images. Selection of Probability level(P-value) is very important to determind the abnormalities when analysis a data by SPM. SPM is a statistical method used for image analysis and determine statistical different between two groups-normal and ADHD. Commonly used P-value is P<0.05 in statistical analysis. The purpose of this study is to evaluation of blood flow clusters distribution, between boys and girls ADHD. The number of normal boys are 8(6-7y, average : $9.6{\pm}3.9y$) and 51(4-11y, average : $9.0{\pm}2.4$) ADHD patients, and normal girls are 4(6-12y, average : $9{\pm}2.4y$) and 13(2-13y, average $10{\pm}3.5y$) ADHD patiens. Blood flow tracer $^{99m}Tc-ethylcysteinate$ dimer(ECD) injected as rCBF agent and take blood flow images after 30 min. during sleeping by SPECT camera. The anatomical region of hyperperfusion of rCBF in boys ADHD group is posterior cingulate gyrus and hyperperfusion rate is 15.39-15.77% according to p-value. And girls ADHD group appears at posterior cerebellum, Lt. cerbral limbic lobe and Lt. Rt. cerebral temporal lobe. These areas hyperperfusion rate are 24.68-31.25%. Hypoperfusion areas in boys ADHD,s brain are Lt. cerebral insular gyrus, Lt. Rt. frontal lobe and mid-prefrontal lobe, these areas decresed blood flow as 15.21-15.64%. Girls ADHD decreased blood flow regions are Lt. cerebral insular gyrus, Lt. cerebral frontal and temporal lobe, Lt. Rt. lentiform nucleus and Lt. parietal lobe. And hypoperfusion rate is 30.57-30.85% in girls ADHD. The girls ADHD group's perfusion rate is more variable than boys. The studies about rCBF in ADHD, should be separate with boys and girls.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.10 no.5
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• pp.2197-2204
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• 2015

In recent years, medical image diagnosis has growing significant momentous in the medicinal field. Brain and lung image of patient are distorted with salt and pepper noise is caused by moving the head and chest during scanning process of patients. Reconstruction of these images is a most significant field of diagnostic evaluation and is produced clearly through techniques such as linear or non-linear filtering. However, restored images are produced with smaller amount of noise reduction in the presence of huge magnitude of salt and pepper noises. To eliminate the high density of salt and pepper noises from the reproduction of images, a new efficient fuzzy based median filtering algorithm with a moderate elapsed time is proposed in this paper. Reproduction image results show enhanced performance for the proposed algorithm over other available noise reduction filtering techniques in terms of peak signal -to -noise ratio (PSNR), mean square error (MSE), root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), image enhancement factor (IMF) and structural similarity (SSIM) value when tested on different medical images like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computer tomography (CT) scan brain image and CT scan lung image. The introduced algorithm is switching filter that recognize the noise pixels and then corrects them by using median filter with fuzzy two-sided π- membership function for extracting the local information.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.16 no.5
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• pp.575-583
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• 2022

Magnetic resonance diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) has revealed the disruption of brain white matter microstructure in normal aging and alcoholism undetectable with conventional structural MR imaging. we plan to analyze the FA measurements of the ROI of dangerous drinkers selected from Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) and Tract-Based Spatial Statics (TBSS) tool was used to extract FA values in the ROI from the image acquired through the pre-processing process. TBSS has a higher sensitivity of the FA value and MD value in the white matter than the brain gray matter, and has the advantage of quantitatively deriving the unlimited degree of brain nerve fibers, and more specialized in the brain white matter. We plan to analyze the fractional anisotropy (FA) measurement value for damage by selecting the center of the anatomical structure of the white matter region of the brain with high anisotropy among the brain neural networks that are particularly vulnerable to alcohol as the region of interest (ROI). In this study, we expected that alcohol causes damage to the brain white matter microstructure from FA value in various areas including both Choroid plexus. Especially, In the case of the moderate drunker, the mean value of FA in Lt, Rt. Choroid plexus was 0.2831 and 0.2872, whereas, in the case of the severe drunker, the mean value of FA was 0.1972 and 0.1936. We found that the higher the score on the AUDIT scale, the lower the FA value in ROI region of the brain white matter. Using the AUDIT scale, the guideline for the FA value of DTI can be presented, and it is possible to select a significant number of potentially severe drinkers. In other words, AUDIT was proved as useful tool in screening and discrimination of severe drunker through DTI.

• The Korean Journal of Nuclear Medicine
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.360-364
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• 1992

Treatment for the brain tumors consist of surgery, chemotherapy, and a variety of methods of irradiation. Therapy is aimed to destroy the tumor, but necrosis and edema occur concurrently. Conventional structural imaging techniques such as CT or MRI are unable to reliably distinguish persistent and recurrent tumor from necrosis or edema. T1-201 has been shown to be useful in the evaluation of the myocardial viability by comparing the early uptake and redistribution image. The aim of this study is to evaluate the clinical usefulness of the early uptake and delayed washout images of the T1-201 brain SPECT in the brain tumors. In the pathologically diagnosed various brain tumor patients, brain SPECT was done with rotating gamma camera 15 minutes and 3 hours after T1-201 injection, and the T1-201 uptake in the tumor was compared with the skull and scalp activity. In the glioblastoma multiforme, meningioma and metastatic tumor, the T1-201 uptake was higher than low grade glioma in both 15 minute and 3 hour images (p<0.02). In the low grade glioma,3 hour T1-201 uptake was significantly lower than 15 minute uptake (p<0.05) but in the glioblastoma, meningioma and metastatic tumor there was no significant difference. There was no significant difference in the T1-201 uptake among the glioblastoma, meningioma and metastatic tumors. In one matastatic tumor, T1-201 uptake was decreased after radiation therapy. T1-201 brain SPECT could distinguish the benign and malignancy, and seems to be useful in the follow-up after treatment. But one of the early or delayed SPECT seems not to be necessary for these purposes.

• Investigative Magnetic Resonance Imaging
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.10-18
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• 2015

Background and Purpose: The association between the low emotional regulation and the brain structural change of major depressive disorder (MDD) has been proposed, but the voxel-based morphometry (VBM) studies on female MDD are rare. The purpose of the present study was to show the regional volume changes of gray matter (GM) in female patients with MDD by optimized VBM. Methods: To control subjects homogeneity, twenty female MDD patients and age, sex matched 21 normal controls were included for the VBM analysis. To identify the change of regional gray matter volume (GMV), the optimized VBM was performed with T1 MRIs. The amounts of gray/white matter and intracranial cavity volumes (ICV) were measured. The analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) and partial correlation analyses covariate with age and ICV were applied for VBM. Results: The age and ICV distributions were similar between the two groups. In the ANCOVA, the total GMV of MDD was smaller than that of normal controls. In the VBM, regional GMV was relatively decreased in the limbic system (amygdalae, ambient gyri, hippocampi heads, subiculum, posterior parahippocampal gyri, pulvinar nuclei, dorsal posterior cingulate gyri, and left pregenual cingulate gyrus). The lingual gyri, short insular gyri, right fusiform gyrus, and right inferior frontal gyrus were also showed decreased regional GMV. Conclusion: The results of this study indicate that the female MDD is mainly associated with the structural deficits of the limbic system and limbic system related cortices, which were known to the center of emotions.