The Heat Anisotropic Diffusion Method has shown very effective for the contour detection of 2-D echocardiogram. To implement this algorithm, we have to choose the parameter C, K, and the threshold level. The choice of C and K are not very sensitive for the good edge detection of the echocardiogram, however the choice of the threshold level is very critical. Until now the threshold level is chosen by the trial and error method. In this paper, we present an automatic threshold decision method from the histogram of the gradient of boundary-like pixels.

The first step implementation of a hospital-wide Picture Archiving Communications System (PACS) at a newly built hospital Samsung Medical Center (SMC), is described. Current clinical operation encompasses the fiber optics delivery of direct-interfaced magnetic resonance imager (LRI), X-ray computed tomography (CT). digital subtraction angiography (DSA) and computed radiography (CR) digital images via high performance file server to the departments of radiology, neurosurgery, orthopedics surgery, neurology, emergency room and the surgical intensive care unit.

This paper proposed signal decomposition and multiresolution representation through wavelet transform using wavelet orthonormal basis. And it suggested most appropriate filter for scaling function in multiresoltion representation and compared two compression method, arithmetic coding and Huffman coding. Results are as follows 1. Daub18 coefficient is most appropriate in computing time, energy compaction, image quality. 2. In case of image browsing that should be small in size and good for recognition, it is reasonable to decompose to 3 scale using pyramidal algorithm. 3. For the case of progressive transmittion where requires most grateful image reconstruction from least number of sampls or reconstruction at any target rate, I embedded the data in order of significance after scaling to 5 step. 4. Medical images such as information loss is fatal have to be compressed by lossless method. As a result from compressing 5 scaled data through arithmetic coding and Huffman coding, I obtained that arithmetic coding is better than huffman coding in processing time and compression ratio. And in case of arithmetic coding I could compress to 38% to original image data.

An automatic multi-threshold algorithm for segmentation of 2D ultrasound images based on average filtering and the characteristics of speckle noise in 2D ultrasound image is proposed. To do this, we investigate the histogram of difference between $7{\times}7$ averaging histogram and $3{\times}3$ averaging histogram. And, we find zero crossing points in the positive portion of the differenced histogram and select middle points of the zero crossing points. We assign these selected points to characteristic points. The thresholds are the center of two characteristic points. Then we segment 2D ultrasound image by using these thresholds and extract edges from applying edge operator to optimal segmented image. Experimental results show that the segmented regions are devided accurately around the homogeneous region.

A new spatial localization technique using high-order surface gradient coil (SGC) is proposed. Although the Spatial Selection with High-Order gradient (SHOT) can provide a 2-D selection with only one selective RF pulse, the high-order gradient produced by cylindrical-shape coils has not been clinically useful for clinical systems due to the large minimum selection size caused by the limited radial gradient intensity. However, by using the proposed high-order SGCs located near the imaging region, the size of volume selection can be reduced to a clinically useful 1-4 cm in diameter by applying stronger radial gradient with much less gradient driving power. A 40 cm-by-40 cm $r^{2}$ SGC has been designed and constructed, and phantom and volunteer studies have been performed. Experimental results using spatially localized MRI show good agreement to the theoretically predicted behavior.

In this paper we propose an algorithm to extract connected boundary with one-pixel thickness of chromosome, which has advantages as follows: easy to implement, low computational complexities, and ability to extract the boundary with either 4-pixel connectivity or 8-pixel connectivity

간 기능 진단에 초음파 영상이 가장 많이 이용되고 있다. 간이 나빠지면 간 표면의 입자가 굵어지고 이것이 영상에서는 밝기(intensity)와 입자의 거칠기(Coarseness)가 높아지는 등의 특성이 나타난다. 진단에 사용되는 인자는 표면의 거칠기와 밝기 외에도 소엽의 크기와 모양 그리고 문맥 혈관의 크기 등도 고려가 된다. 초음파상으로 이러한 크기와 모양의 구분은 그렇게 어렵지 않다. 그러나, 영상의 밝기와 거칠기의 미세한 변화는 구분하기가 어렵다. 본 연구는 밝기와 거칠기를 나타내는 변수를 제시하고 이를 기준으로 간 질환을 분류하였다. 간 조직의 거칠기에 따라 크게 정상(Normal), 만성 간염(Chronic), 간경변증(Cirrhosis) 세단계로 질환의 상태를 진단하고 영상의 밝기에 따라 다른 간질환과 지방간(fat liver)을 구별해 낸다. 본 분석에 이용된 임상 영상은 주로 만성 간염과 간경변증을 갖고 있는 환자들의 것과 약간의 지방간 영상들이다.

This paper describes the construction of an anisotropic three dimensional ventricular model based on the bidomain model. The cardiac artivation process in the normal cardiac cell and the myocardiac ischemic cell are simulated by the Huygen's principle. The depolarization process in the myocardial ischemia displays the delayed activation compared to the normal state. The repolarization process is simulated by the myocardial potential at the arbitrary ellapsed time after activation process.

In cementless total hip arthroplasty(THA), an initial stability of the femoral component is mandatory to achieve bony ingrowth and secondary long term fixation. Bone ingrowth depends strongly on relative micromotion and stress distributions at the interface. Primary stability of the femoral component can be obtained by minimizing the magnitude of relative micromotions at bone-prosthesis interface, Hence an accurate evaluation of interface behavior and stress/strain fields in the bone implant system may be relevant for better understanding of clinical situations and improving THA design. However, complete evaluation of load transfer in the bone remains difficult to assess experimentally, Hence, recently finite element method (FEM) was introduced in orthopaedic research field to fill the gap due to its unique capacity to evaluate stress in structure of complex shape, loading and material behavior. The authors developed the 3-dimensional numerical finite element model which is composed of totally 1179 elements off and 8 node blick. We also analyzed the micromotions at the bone-stem interface and mechanical behavior of existing bone prosthesis for a loading condition simulating the single leg stance. The result indicates that the values of relative motion for this well fit Multilock stem were $150{\mu}m$ in maximum, $82{\mu}m$ in minimum, and the largest relative motion developed in medial region of proximal femur with anterior-posterior direction. The proximal region of the bone was much larger in motion than the distal region and the stress pattern shows high stress concentration on the cortex near the tip of the stem. These findings indicates that the loading in the proximal femoral bone in the early postoperative situation can produce micromotions on the interface and clinically cementless TEA patient should not be allowed weight bearing strictly early in the postoperative period.

Clinically, proximal bone resorption in the femur is frequently seen postoperatively on the follow up X-rays after total hip replacement(THR). We developed the finite element model of cementless THR. The model is two dimensional side plate model, whereby the three dimensional structural integrity of the bone can be accounted for by a separate two dimensional mesh, a side plate. The subject of this article is the development and application of this two dimensional side plate FEM to study the reverse effect of the various degree of bone resorption of femur after THR. The results of this study indicates that two dimensional side plate model is good and simple alternative to complex three dimensional model and the severity of the proximal bone resorption has the effect of more increasing stress on the cortex at the level of femoral stem tip.

A clinically oriented EEG and EP mapping system was developed with user-friendly interface and easy interactive operations. The system was based on the graphical user interface developed with C/C++ and Software Development Kit (SDK) operated under Microsoft Windows 3.1. Continuous acquisition for the EEG signal and burst mode acquisition for EEG signal syncronized to the external stimuli arc implemented with real time display. A neural network based automatic artifact discrimation is developed and implemented with which examination time can be reduced by a factor of 3 or more. Several bands of spectral maps and spectrums arc displayed for EEG diagnosis. Amplitude maps of EP signal at specified times by operator are displayed together with cine mode of EP maps for dynamic study. Source localization and other statistical signal processing are also included.

In this paper, we present an object-oriented stereotactic radiosurgery planning system, which accepts medical images such as CT and angiography, transforms the coordinates to a reference frame coordinate, calculates dose distributions, and finally displays isodose curves over the images. The user finds an adequate one for radiosurgeries after performing computer simulations on different treatment parameter sets. The object-oriented design concept was fully applied to the system composed of seven manager objects of different classes: a patient information manager, a user-interface manager, a coordinate transformation manager, a blackboard manager, a dose calculation manager, an isodose curve display manager, and a report manager. All the user interactions are carried out through the use of mouse buttons. The performance of the system was verified by four physicians and two medical physicists, and now is being used in two clinical sites.

It is well known that multipoint and computerized intraoperative mapping systems improve the results of surgery for Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome and show tremendous potential for opening an entirely new era of surgical intervention for the more common and lethal types of supraventricular tachyarrhythmias such as atrial flutter and atrial fibrillation. In addition, the ability to map and ablate the sometimes fleeting automatic atrial tachycardia is greatly enhanced by computerized mapping systems. In this study, we have developed 64 channel computerized data analysis system using microcomputer (Macintosh IIx) for basic research of electrophysiology and electrical propagation. The bipolar electrogram information is acquired from 64 cardiac sites simultaneously at a sampling rate of 1ksamples/sec with continuous and total data storage of up to 30 seconds. When the reference electrogram is selected and reference point is picked up, delay time from the reference point in displayed on two dimensional diagram of the heart. System design permits easy expansion to almost 256 simultaneous sites, This system is expected to enable us to study pathophysiology of cardiac arrhythmia and to improve the results of diagnosis and surgical treatment for cardiac arrhythmia.

As computer systems to make medical practice easy are widely used, a special hardware system processing medical data fast becomes more important. To meet the urgent demand for high speed image processing, especially image compression and decompression, we designed and implemented the medical image CODEC (COder/BECoder) based on MISD(Multiple Instruction Single Data stream) architecture to adopt parallelism in it. Considering not being a standart scheme of medical mage compression/decompress ion, the CODEC is designed programable and general. In this paper, we use JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) algorithm to process images fast and evalutate it.

The film scanner that digitizes the conventional x-ray films is the necessary equipment in the transition period of going to the filmless hospital. We have developed the film scanner using laser. We have selected HeNe laser as light source. The polygonal mirror converts the point light source to line scanning light. In sensing part, the diffusing cylinder and 7 photo transistors converts the light signal which passing the film into the electric signal. With this scanner, we can scan successfully the conventional x-ray film by $1024\times1024$. Smaller the spot sire is, higher the resolution can be achieved.

Estimation of the evoked potential using the iterated bispectrum and cross-correlation (IBC) has been tried for both simulation and real clinical data. Conventional time average (TA) method suffers from synchronization error when the latency time of the evoked potential is random, which results in poor SNR distortion in the estimation of EP waveform. Instead of EP signal average in time domain, bispectrum is used which is insensitive to time delay. The EP signal is recovered by the inverse transform of the Fourier amplitude and phase obtained from the bispectrum. The distribution of the latency time is calculated using cross-correlation between EP signal estimated by the bispectrum and the acquired signal. For the simulation. EEG noise was added to the known EP signal and the EP signal was estimated by both the conventional technique and bispectrum technique. The proposed bispectrum technique estimates EP signal more accurately than the conventional technique with respect to the maximum amplitude of a signal, full width at half maximum(FWHM). signal-to-noise-ratio, and the position of maximum peak. When applied to the real visual evoked potential(VEP) signal. bispectrum technique was able to estimate EP signal more distinctively. The distribution of the latency time may play an important role in medical diagonosis.

수술 전 간 기능이 저하되어 있는 간암환자의 경우 너무 많은 간 조직을 절제하면 남아있는 조직의 기능만으로는 생존하기 어려울 때가 있다 그러므로 수술전 간 기능의 평가를 정확히 할 수 있고 간절제 후에 잔여세포의 기능을 정확히 측정하는 것은 매우 중요한 의미를 갖게 된다. 현재의 일반적인 간 기능 검사나 Indocyanine 등을 이용하는 방법으로는 수술 후 잔여 간세포의 기능을 예측할 수 없다. 그리하여 본 연구에서는 수학적 deconvolution 방법을 이용하여 Hepatic extraction fraction(HEF)를 구하여 수술 후 잔여 간세포의 기능을 정량적으로 예측할 수 있는 software를 개발하고자 한다. 그리하여 간암 환자의 수술여부 및 절제부위의 크기를 결정할 수 있으며 또한 HEF로 신생아 황달의 원인인 간염과 간담도 폐쇄를 식별할 수 있다.

손가락 움직임과 관련된 운동성 유발전위를 검출하기 위하여 컴퓨터를 이용하여 피검자에게 움직임 명령을 제시하고 명령에 따른 최종적인 피검자의 운동이 나타나는 과정까지의 뇌전위를 검출하는 시스템을 구성하였다. 위와 갊은 실험을 왼손 오른손에 대하여 자각 700번 정도 수행하여 average method를 이용하여 운동성 유발 전위를 검출하고, 신경전류 추적법을 이용하여 뇌의 흥분 뉴런군을 추정하였다.

A technique based on bispectrun averaging is described for generally recovering the signal waveform from a set of noisy signals with variable signal delay. The technique does not require explicit tune alignment of signals and any initial estimate of signal. The new method is suggested and is compared with other methods. This method are numerically investigated using computer generated-data and a physiological signal and noise Some experimental results for the evoked potential studios that demonstrate the technique are given. The results show the effectiveness of the technique: various potential applications of the technique might be expected.

뇌전위 측정에 의해 흥분 뉴런군의 위치를 추정하는 source localization problem은 Evoked Potential 해석법에 있어서 매우 중요한 의미를 갖는다. 이번 논문에서는 EEG실험에서의 전극 배치가 S/N(signal to noise ratio)과 추정 오차 사이에 어떤 영향을 미치는 가를 Monte Carlo 시뮬레이션으로 조사하였다. 머리 모델은 3중 구각 모델을 사용하였고 이론 이용하여 forward problem을 계산하였다. 쌍극자 파라미터를 minimization 하는 문제는 simplex method를 이용하여 계산하였다. 컴퓨터 시뮬레이션 결과, 특이한 점은 전극의 밀도와 입체각에 의해 쌍자 파라미터 오차가 변화했다는 사실이다. 이것은 곧바로 전극 배치와 연관이 된다. 실제 EEG 실험에서 전극 배치를 어떻게 했는가에 따라 그에 따른 오차가 변화한다. 이러한 오차의 원인을 제거하기 위해서 새로운 전극 배치를 모델링하여 기존의 전극 배치와 비교해 보았다. 그 결과 전극 밀도와 입체각에 대한 오차를 크게 줄일 수 있었다.

In this paper, we describe an approach to ECG data coding based on a fractal theory of iterated contractive transformations defined piecewise. The main characteristic of this approach is that it relies on the assumption that signal redundancy can be efficiently captured and exploited through piecewise self-transformability on a block-wise basis. The variable range size technique is employed to reduce the reconstruction error. Large ranges are used for encoding the smooth waveform to yield high compression efficiency, and the smaller ranges are used for encoding rapidly varying parts of the signal to preserve the signal quality. The suggested algorithm was evaluated using MIT/BIH arrhythmia database. A high compression ratio is achieved with a relatively low reconstruction error.

This paper proposes an fill-factor algorithm that determines embedding parameters which are needed in optimal attractor reconstruction. For reliability test, using this algorithm, we reconstructs the attractor of numerical chaotic data such as Duffing equation, Lorenz equation and Rossler equation whose embedding parameters are known. Also we reconstructs the attractor of experimental data and evaluates correlation dimension. Experimental data used in this paper are 38 ECG data of AHA(American Heart Association) ECG database. For numerical chaotic data, correlation dimension and Lyapunov exponent of reconstructed attractor are very close to those of attractor using original coordinate system.

To predict light propagation in biological tissues irradiated by laser, the optical properties such as absorption and scattering coefficients are required. There have been various techniques for measuring these coefficients. One method requires tissue samples, often a slab of thin tissue, is invasive. On the other hand, non-invasive method usually measures back-scattered light from a subject with no physical intervent ions. Advantages and disvantages of using different methods are investigated. A careful attention should be made in order to select the best method for a given experimental condition since, even either for invasive or non-invasive method, accuracy is subject to governing models and sample preparations.

An in vitro steady flow experiment was performed in order to test the accuracy of velocity measurement obtained through a pulsed Doppler echocardiography. A flow phantom was designed for the use in a wide velocity range at a given flow rate. The results showed that the pulsed Doppler velocity measurement obtained in this flow phantom is accurate at low flow rates. However, ultrasound velocity measurement should be performed under a careful considerations of PRF and Doppler gain settings, especially at higher flow rates.

We proposed a new model of neural network, called Time Delay Counter-Propagation Neural network (TDCPN). This model is combined properly by the merits of Time Delay Neural Network (TDNN) structure and those of Counter - Propagation Neural network (CPN) learning rule, so that increase recognition rate but decrease total teaming time. And we use this model to simulate classification of EMG signals, and compare the recognition rate and teaming time with those of another neural network model. As a result of simulation, the proposed model is proved to be very effective.

This paper is to find out more reliable analyzing method of heart rate variability. Heart rate variability analysis is to evaluate cardiovascular stability and also have used as an indicator of autonomic nervous system activity. In this study, time domain analysis, spectral analysis and state space analysis method are applied to analyze heart rate variability. Because of nonlinear characteristics of heart rate, we need not only spectral analysis, but also state space analysis. Fractal dimension of spectral estimation is useful indicator of autonomic nervous activity.

The wear corrosion behaviour of a nitrogen ion implanted super stainless steel (S.S.S, 22Cr - 20Ni - 6Mo - 0.25N) was compared with those of S.S.S, 316L SS and TiN coated 316L SS. The Cr and Ni amounts won out from the materials were investigated using an electrothermal atomic absorption spectrometry. We observed that the Cr dissolution rate of the S.S.S was similar to that of 316L SS, however, the Ni release of the S.S.S was feater than 316L SS. The metal ions released from the nitrogen ion implanted S.S.S surface were significantly reduced. The wear corrosion behaviour of the stainless steels was not correlated with the results shown by a static metal ion release test.

We developed a prototype force plate equipped with five load cells, a 12-bit analog-to-digital converter and three integrated circuits. The force plate displays the center of foot pressure, the magnitude and two (vertical and anterior-posterior) directions of the ground reaction force on a personal computer monitor. Although the force plate data are valid only for two directions, it can be a preliminary version of a more versatile 3 dimensional force plate in terms of the resolution and reliability.