Respiration measurement method using an ultrasound sensor is influenced very little by an error of inertia and pressure. This device measures the amount and flow of respiration using a delivery speed difference of the ultrasound waves that are a return format by the pneumatic stream that is a flogging of ultrasound waves during transmission and receipt as having used a characteristic of ultrasound waves. This paper examines improving the sensor's sensitivity during transmission and receipt of the signal. Because the measurement must be performed on patients, clinicians need to be sure that it is accurately measuring even very weak breathing.

Active contour models have been extensively used to segment, match, and track objects of interest in computer vision and image processing applications, particularly to locate object boundaries. With conventional methods an object boundary can be extracted by controlling the internal energy and external energy based on energy minimization. However, this still leaves a number of problems, such as initialization and poor convergence in concave regions. In particular, a contour is unable to enter a concave region based on the stretching and bending characteristic of the internal energy. Therefore, this study proposes a method that controls the internal energy by moving the local perpendicular bisector point of each control point on the contour, and determines the object boundary by minimizing the energy relative to the external energy. Convergence at a concave region can then be effectively implemented as regards the feature of interest using the internal energy, plus several objects can be detected using a multi-detection method based on the initial contour. The proposed method is compared with other conventional methods through objective validation and subjective consideration. As a result, it is anticipated that the proposed method can be efficiently applied to the detection of the pulmonary parenchyma region in medical images.

Topology optimization method has a great advantage and capability over a conventional shape optimization technique because it optimizes a topology as well as a shape and size of structure. The purpose of the present study, using topology optimization method with an objective function of minimum compliance as a mechanism of bone remodeling, is to examine which shape factors of femur is strongly related with the curvature of femoral shaft. As is expected, the optimized curvature increased definitely with neck angle among the shape factors and showed a similar trend with the measured curvature to neck angle. Therefore, the topology optimization method can be successfully applied in the analysis of bone remodeling phenomenon in the subsequent studies.

The respiratory and heart beat signals are the fundamental physiological signals for sleep monitoring in the home. Using the air mattress sensor system, the respiration and heart beat movements can be measured without any harness or sensor on the subject's body which makes long term measurement difficult and troublesome. The differential measurement technique between two air cells is adopted to enhance the sensitivity. The concept of the balancing tube between two air cells is suggested to increase the robustness against postural changes during the measurement period. With this balancing tube, the meaningful frequency range could be selected by the pneumatic filter method. The mathematical model for the air mattress and balancing tube was suggested and the validation experiments were performed for step and sinusoidal input. The results show that the balancing tube can eliminate the low frequency component between two cells effectively. This technique was applied to measure the respiration and heart beat on the bed, which shows the potential applications for sleep monitoring device in home. With the analysis of the waveform, respiration intervals and heart beat intervals were calculated and compared with the signal from conventional methods. The results show that the measurement from air mattress with balancing tube can be used for monitoring respiration and heart beat in various situations.

Age-related White Matter Changes (WMC) on Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) are known to appear frequently in Multiple sclerosis (MS) and Alzheimer's disease and to be related to cognitive impairment. The characterization of these WMC is very important to the study of psychology and aging. These changes consist of periventricular and subcortical types, however it is difficult to detect and segment WMC using only intensity-based methods, because their intensity, level IS similar to th~t of the gray matter (GM). In this paper, we propose a new method of segmenting periventricular WMC using K-means clustering and morphological features.

An electromechanical type is the most useful mechanism in the various pumping mechanisms. It, however, requires a movement converting system including a ball screw, a helical cam, or a solenoid-beam spring, which makes the device complex and may lessen reliability. Thus, the authors have hypothesized that an electromagnetic actuator mechanism can eliminate the movement converting system and that thereby enhance the mechanical reliability and operative simplicity of an electro­pneumatic pump. The purpose of this study was to show a novel application of electromagnetic actuator mechanism in pulsatile pump and to provide preliminary data for further evaluations. The electromagnetic actuator consists of stators with a single winding excitation coil and movers with a high energy density neodymium-iron-boron permanent magnet. A 0.5mm diameter wire was used for the excitation coil, and 1000 turns were wound onto the stators core with parallel. A prototype of extracorporeal electro-pneumatic pump was constructed, and the pump performance tests were performed using a mock system to evaluate the efficiency of the electromagnetic actuator mechanism. When forward and backward electric currents were supplied to the excitation coil, the mover effectively moved back and forth. The nominal stroke length of the actuator was 10mm. The actuator dimension was 120mm in diameter and 65mm in height with a mass of 1.4kg. The prototype pump unit was 150mm in diameter, 150mm in thickness and 4.5kg in weight. The maximum force output was 70N at input current of 4.5A and the maximum pump rate was 150 beats per minute. The maximum output was 2.0 L/minute at a rate of 80bpm when the afterload was 100mmHg. The electromagnetic actuator mechanism was successfully applied to construct the prototype of extracorporeal electro­pneumatic pump. The authors provide the above results as a preliminary data for further studies.

In these days, HIS(Hospital Information System) raise the quality of medical services by effective management of medical records. As computing environment was developed, it is possible to search information quickly. But, standard medical data exchange is not completed between medical clinic and another organ so far. In case of patient transfer, past medical record was not efficiently transmitted. It be feasible treatment delay or medical accident. It is trouble that medical records is transferred by a person and communicate with each other. Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a simple, very flexible text format derived from SGML. Originally designed to meet the challenges of large-scale electronic publishing, XML is also playing an increasingly important role in the exchange of a wide variety of data on the Web and elsewhere. Form in system of company product, relative organs that handle bio-signal data is each other dissimilar and integration and to transmit to supplement bottleneck this research uses XML. In this study, it is discussed about sharing of medical data using XML web technology to standard medical record between hospital and relative organization The data structure model was designed to manage bio-signal data and patient record. We experimented about data transmission and all-in-one between different systems (one make use of MS-SQL database system and the other manage existent bio-signal data in itself form in file in this research). In order to search and refer medical record, the web-based system was implemented. The system that can be shared medical data was tested to estimate the merits of XML. Implemented XML schema confirms data transmission between different data system and integration result.

Convenience is one of the most important factors in medical image segmentation. Convenience is defined by compiling opinions from radiologists, and can be described as controllable maximum automation on the condition of producing only accurate results. The components of convenience are inclusive automation and inclusive modification. Inclusive modification consists of verify-and-confirm, undo-redo, exchange of segmentation methods, and intelligent modification tools. Inclusive automation is composed of automatic selection of a method, automatic selection of a confident segment, and automated chores. The convenient segmentation tool has been developed to segment X-ray images for orthopedic surgery, and has received an excellent evaluation from radiologists.