• Progress in Medical Physics
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• v.30 no.1
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• pp.22-31
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• 2019

Purpose: To develop a new diffusion-based functional MRI (fMRI) sequence to generate apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) maps in single excitation and evaluate the contribution of b0 signal on neuronal changes. Materials and Methods: A diffusion-based fMRI sequence was designed with single measurement that can acquire images of three directions at a time, obtaining $b=0s/mm^2$ during the first baseline condition (b0_b), followed by 107 diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) with $b=600s/mm^2$ during the baseline and visual stimulation conditions, and another $b=0s/mm^2$ during the last activation condition (b0_a). ADC was mapped in three different ways: 1) using b0_b (ADC_b) for all time points, 2) using b0_a (ADC_a) for all time points, and 3) using b0_b and b0_a (ADC_ba) for baseline and stimulation scans, respectively. The fMRI studies were conducted on the brains of 16 young healthy volunteers using visual stimulations in a 3T MRI system. In addition, the blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) fMRI was also acquired to compare it with diffusion-based fMRI. A sample t-test was used to investigate the voxel-wise average between the subjects. Results: The BOLD data consisted of only activated voxels. However, ADC_ba data was observed in both deactivated and activated voxels. There were no statistically significant activated or deactivated voxels for DWI, ADC_b, and ADC_a. Conclusions: With the new sequence, neuronal activations can be mapped with visual stimulation as compared to the baseline condition in several areas in the brain. We showed that ADC should be mapped using both DWI and b0 images acquired with the same conditions.

• International Journal of CAD/CAM
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.105-115
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• 2006

Thickness is a commonly used parameter in product design and manufacture. Its intuitive definition as the smallest dimension of a cross-section or the minimum distance between two opposite surfaces is ambiguous for intricate solids, and there is very little reported work in automatic computation of thickness. We present three generic definitions of thickness: interior thickness of points inside an object, exterior thickness for points on the object surface, and radiographic thickness along a view direction. Methods for computing and displaying the respective thickness values are also presented. The internal thickness distribution is obtained by peeling or successive skin removal, eventually revealing the object skeleton (similar to medial axis transformation). Another method involves radiographic scanning along a viewing direction, with minimum, maximum and total thickness options, displayed on the surface of the object. The algorithms have been implemented using an efficient voxel based representation that can handle up to one billion voxels (1000 per axis), coupled with a near-real time display scheme that uses a look-up table based on voxel neighborhood configurations. Three different types of intricate objects: industrial (press cylinder casting), sculpture (Ganesha idol), and medical (pelvic bone) were used for successfully testing the algorithms. The results are found to be useful for early evaluation of manufacturability and other lifecycle considerations.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.9 no.5
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• pp.1102-1110
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• 2005

In this paper, we proposed a advanced approach to resolve the trade-off problem for the threshold value determining the photo-consistency in the previous algorithms. The threshold value for the surface voxel is substituted the photo-consistency value of the inside voxel. As iterating the voxel coloring process, the threshold is approached to the optimal value for the individual surface voxel. we present an energy minimization formulation of the binary labeling problem that surface voxels classify into opacity or transparency. The energy formula consists of the data term and the smoothness term. As considering neighboring voxels in the labeling problem, the unevenness of reconstructed surface is reduced. The labeling whose energy is the global minimum can be computed using a graph cut.

• Journal of Computational Design and Engineering
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.183-194
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• 2015

This paper proposes a novel method for visualizing the thickness and clearance of 3D objects in a polyhedral representation. The proposed method uses the distance field of the objects in the visualization. A parallel algorithm is developed for constructing the distance field of polyhedral objects using the GPU. The distance between a voxel and the surface polygons of the model is computed many times in the distance field construction. Similar sets of polygons are usually selected as close polygons for close voxels. By using this spatial coherence, a parallel algorithm is designed to compute the distances between a cluster of close voxels and the polygons selected by the culling operation so that the fast shared memory mechanism of the GPU can be fully utilized. The thickness/clearance of the objects is visualized by distributing points on the visible surfaces of the objects and painting them with a unique color corresponding to the thickness/clearance values at those points. A modified ray casting method is developed for computing the thickness/clearance using the distance field of the objects. A system based on these algorithms can compute the distance field of complex objects within a few minutes for most cases. After the distance field construction, thickness/clearance visualization at a near interactive rate is achieved.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartA
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• v.19A no.4
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• pp.169-174
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• 2012

We present an algorithm that computes a 3 dimensional Voronoi diagram for a protein molecule in this paper. The molecule is represented as a set of spheres with van der Waals radii. The Voronoi diagram is constructed in the 3D space by finding the voxels containing it. For the feasibility of the computation, we represent the molecule as a BVH (bounding volume hierarchy), and our system is accelerated by modern graphics hardware with CUDA programming support. Compared to single-core CPU implementations, experimental results show 323 times faster performance in the computation time, when the space is partitioned into $2^{24}$ voxels.

• Journal of the Korean Magnetic Resonance Society
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.93-102
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• 2005

Purpose: To develop an advanced non-linear curve fitting (NLCF) algorithm for dynamic susceptibility contrast study of brain. Materials and Methods: The first pass effects give rise to spuriously high estimates of $K^{trans}$ in voxels with large vascular components. An explicit threshold value has been used to reject voxels. Results: By using this non-linear curve fitting algorithm, the blood perfusion and the volume estimation were accurately evaluated in T2*-weighted dynamic contrast enhanced (DCE)-MR images. From the recalculated each parameters, perfusion weighted image were outlined by using modified non-linear curve fitting algorithm. This results were improved estimation of T2*-weighted dynamic series. Conclusion: The present study demonstrated an improvement of an estimation of kinetic parameters from dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE) T2*-weighted magnetic resonance imaging data, using contrast agents. The advanced kinetic models include the relation of volume transfer constant $K^{trans}\;(min^{-1})$ and the volume of extravascular extracellular space (EES) per unit volume of tissue $\nu_e$.

• The Journal of Korea Institute of Information, Electronics, and Communication Technology
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.471-476
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• 2022

In this paper, we propose an object detection using a 4D imaging radar, which developed to solve the problems of weak cameras and LiDAR in bad weather. When data are measured and collected through a 4D imaging radar, the density of point cloud data is low compared to LiDAR data. A technique for clustering objects and extracting the features of objects through voxels in the cluster is proposed using the characteristics of wide distances between objects due to low density. Furthermore, we propose an object detection using the extracted features.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 1993.10a
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• pp.423-427
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• 1993

An efficient 3-axis NC milling simulator is presented. The geometric simulation of milling is based on z-map structure and voxels. For the graphic simulation,dimetric projection is adopted. As a result, two faces of a voxel are exposed and they are overlapped. Visible faces are determined by using z-butter method. The simulation system is developed in IBM-PC compatible with satisfactory result.

• Korean Journal of Computational Design and Engineering
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.265-272
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• 2006

For the design and analysis of 3D object featuring complexity and irregularity in shape, sectional digital images measured by an industrial CT scanner are employed to generate a finite element model with uniform voxels. The voxel model plays a key role in developing an integrated reverse engineering system including geometric modeling, simulation and optimization. Design examples applied to topology optimization show that the proposed approach can provide a remarkable reduction in time cost at the conceptual and detail design stages.

• The Transactions of the Korea Information Processing Society
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• v.5 no.6
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• pp.1620-1632
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• 1998

This paper presents a fast parallel algorithm for volume rendering and its implementation using C language and MPI MasPar Programming Language) on the 4,096 processor MasPar MP-2 machine. This parallel algorithm is a parallelization hased on the Lacroute' s sequential shear - warp algorithm currently acknowledged to be the fastest sequential volume rendering algorithm. This algorithm reduces communication overheads by using the sheared space partition scheme and the load balancing technique using load estimates from the previous iteration, and the number of voxels to be processed by using the run-length encoded volume data structure.Actual performance is 3 to 4 frames/second on the human hrain scan dataset of $128\times128\times128$ voxels. Because of the scalability of this algorithm, performance of ]2-16 frames/sc.'cond is expected on the 16,384 processor MasPar MP-2 machine. It is expected that implementation on more current SIMD or MIMD architectures would provide 3O~60 frames/second on large volumes.