바이오 응용을 위한 초음파 및 광학 기반 다중 모달 영상 기술

이문환,박희연,이경수,김세웅,김지훈,황재윤 한국음향학회 2023 韓國音響學會誌 Vol.42 No.5

이 연구는 초음파 광학 영상 기반의 다중 모달 영상 기술에 대한 최신 연구 동향과 응용 가능성에 대해 조사하였다. 초음파 영상은 실시간 영상 기능을 가지고 있으며 인체에 상대적으로 안전한 특성으로 인해 의료 분야에서 다양한질병의 진단에 사용되고 있다. 그러나 초음파 영상은 해상도가 낮은 한계가 있어 진단 정확도를 향상시키기 위해 다른광학 영상과의 결합을 통한 다중 모달 영상 기술 개발 연구가 진행되고 있다. 특히 초음파 광학 영상 기반의 다중 모달영상 기술은 각각의 영상 기법의 장점을 극대화하고 단점을 보완함으로써 질병 진단 정확도를 향상시킬 수 있는 수단으로 사용되고 있다. 이러한 기술은 초음파의 실시간 영상 기능과 광간섭 단층 영상 융합 기술, 초음파 광음향 다중 모달영상 기술, 초음파 형광 다중 모달 영상 기술, 초음파 형광 시정수 다중 모달 영상 기술 및 초음파 분광 다중 모달 영상기술 등 다양한 형태로 제안되고 있다. 본 연구에서는 이러한 초음파 광학 영상 기반의 다중 모달 영상 기술의 최신 연구동향을 소개하고, 의학 및 바이오 분야에서의 응용 가능성을 조사하였다. 이를 통해 초음파와 광학 기술의 융합이 어떻게 진행되고 있는지에 대한 통찰력을 제공하고, 의료 분야에서의 진단 정확도 향상을 위한 새로운 접근 방식에 대한기반을 마련하였다. This study explores recent research trends and potential applications of ultrasound optical imaging-based multimodal technology. Ultrasound imaging has been widely utilized in medical diagnostics due to its real-time capability and relative safety. However, the drawback of low resolution in ultrasound imaging has prompted active research on multimodal imaging techniques that combine ultrasound with other imaging modalities to enhance diagnostic accuracy. In particular, ultrasound optical imaging-based multimodal technology enables the utilization of each modality's advantages while compensating for their limitations, offering a means to improve the accuracy of the diagnosis. Various forms of multimodal imaging techniques have been proposed, including the fusion of optical coherence tomography, photoacoustic, fluorescence, fluorescence lifetime, and spectral technology with ultrasound. This study investigates recent research trends in ultrasound optical imaging-based multimodal technology, and its potential applications are demonstrated in the biomedical field. The ultrasound optical imaging-based multimodal technology provides insights into the progress of integrating ultrasound and optical technologies, laying the foundation for novel approaches to enhance diagnostic accuracy in the biomedical domain.

INDUSTRIAL MATHEMATICS IN ULTRASOUND IMAGING

JAESEONG JANG,CHI YOUNG AHN 한국산업응용수학회 2016 Journal of the Korean Society for Industrial and A Vol.20 No.3

Ultrasound imaging is a widely used tool for visualizing human body’s internal organs and quantifying clinical parameters. Due to its advantages such as safety, noninvasiveness, portability, low cost and real-time 2D/3D imaging, diagnostic ultrasound industry has steadily grown. Since the technology advancements such as digital beam-forming, Doppler ultrasound, real-time 3D imaging and automated diagnosis techniques, there are still a lot of demands for image quality improvement, faster and accurate imaging, 3D color Doppler imaging and advanced functional imaging modes. In order to satisfy those demands, mathematics should be used properly and effectively in ultrasound imaging. Mathematics has been used commonly as mathematical modelling, numerical solutions and visualization, combined with science and engineering. In this article, we describe a brief history of ultrasound imaging, its basic principle, its applications in obstetrics/gynecology, cardiology and radiology, domestic-industrial products, contributions of mathematics and challenging issues in ultrasound imaging.

초음파 영상진단장치

이승우 韓國非破壞檢査學會 1999 한국비파괴검사학회지 Vol.19 No.3

The ability to see the internal organs of the human body in a noninvasive way is a powerful diagnostic tool of modern medicine. Among these imaging modalities such as X-ray. MRI, and ultrasound. MRI and ultrasound are presenting much less risk of undesirable damage of both patient and examiner. In fact, no deleterious effects have been reported as a result of clinical examination by using MRI and ultrasound diagnostic equipment. As a result, their market volume has been rapidly increased. MRI has a good resolution, but there are a few disadvantages such as high price, non-real-time imaging capability, and expensive diagnostic cost. On the other hand, the ultrasound imaging system has inherently poor resolution as compared with X-ray and MRI. In spite of its poor resolution, the ultrasound diagnostic equipment is lower in price and has an ability of real-time imaging as compared with the others. As a result, the ultrasound imaging system has become general and essential modality for imaging the internal organs of human body. In this review various researches and developments to enhance the resolution of the ultrasound images are explained and future trends of the ultrasound imaging technology are described.

Array-Based Real-Time Ultrasound and Photoacoustic Ocular Imaging

남승윤,Stanislav Y. Emelianov 한국광학회 2014 Current Optics and Photonics Vol.18 No.2

Although various ophthalmic imaging methods, including fundus photography and optical coherence tomography, have been applied for effective diagnosis of ocular diseases with high spatial resolution, most of them are limited by shallow imaging penetration depth and a narrow field of view. Also, many of those imaging modalities are optimized to provide microscopic anatomical information, while functional or cellular information is lacking. Compared to other ocular imaging modalities, photoacoustic imaging can achieve relatively deep penetration depth and provide more detailed functional and cellular data based on photoacoustic signal generation from endogenous contrast agents such as hemoglobin and melanin. In this paper, array-based ultrasound and photoacoustic imaging was demonstrated to visualize pigmentation in the eye as well as overall ocular structure. Fresh porcine eyes were visualized using a real-time ultrasound micro-imaging system and an imaging probe supporting laser pulse delivery. In addition, limited photoacoustic imaging field of view was improved by an imaging probe tilting method, enabling visualization of most regions of the retina covered in the ultrasound imaging.

초음파 조영제의 분자영상에의 응용

이학종,정진행,황성일 대한초음파의학회 2009 ULTRASONOGRAPHY Vol.28 No.3

초음파 조영제는 혈관형성에 대한 객관적인 영상을 제공할 수 있다는 점에서 임상적인 적용 뿐만 아니라 기초연구에서도 많은 역할을 할 수 있을 것으로 기대된다. 특히 초음파와 초음파 조영제의 상호반응에 의하여 생기는 작용이 세포막의 투과 성을 변화시켜 유전자나 약물의 치료에 영향을 줄 수 있다는 사실은 앞으로 초음파 조영제가 혈관형성에 관련된 다양한 분자영상 혹은 전임상 영상 관련 연구에 많은 기여를 할 수 있을것으로 기대된다. Microbubble contrast agent for ultrasound imaging has come of age, adding entirely new capabilities to real time ultrasound imaging. These new ultrasound imaging techniques exploit the nonlinear echoes that result from the unique interaction between ultrasound and microbubbles, which are readily distinguishable from the echoes of tissues. Contrast enhanced ultrasound can be used to quantify both flow rate and relative vascular volume of the microvasculature in solid lesions or organs, which makes it possible for it to be one of the modalities in molecular imaging. Angiogenesis is one of the important processes contributing to new blood vessel growth that occurs in a variety of physiologic and pathophysiologic states. It is essential for spread and growth of malignant tumors. The advantages of contrast enhanced ultrasound are that it is a noninvasive method for observing tumor angiogenesis. Sonoporation utilizes the interaction of ultrasound with ultrasound contrast agents to temporarily permeabilize the cell membrane allowing for the uptake of DNA, drugs, and other therapeutic compounds from the extracellular environment. Thus, sonoporation is a promising drug delivery and gene therapy technique, limited only by lack of understanding regarding the biophysical mechanism that results in the cell membrane permeability change. In conclusion, ultrasound contrast agent could have a role not only in the molecular imaging field with the advantage of noninvasive quantification of angiogenesis, but also in the field of drug treatment of cells using sonoporation.

초음파 영상 특성을 이용한 실시간 초음파 영역 추출방법

최성진,이민우 대한의용생체공학회 2019 의공학회지 Vol.40 No.5

In ultrasound telemedicine, it is important to reduce the size of the data by compressing the ultrasound image when sending it. Ultrasound images can be divided into image context and other information consisting of patient ID, date, and several letters. Between them, ultrasound context is very important information for diagnosis and should be securely preserved as much as possible. In several previous papers, ultrasound compression methods were proposed to compress ultrasound context and other information into different compression parameters. This ultrasound compression method minimized the loss of ultrasound context while greatly compressing other information. This paper proposed the method of automatic segmentation of ultrasound context to overcome the limitation of the previously described ultrasound compression method. This algorithm was designed to robust for various ultrasound device and to enable real-time operation to maintain the benefits of ultrasound imaging machine. The operation time of extracting ultrasound context through the proposed segmentation method was measured, and it took 311.11 ms. In order to optimize the algorithm, the ultrasound context was segmented with down sampled input image. When the resolution of the input image was reduced by half, the computational time was 126.84 ms. When the resolution was reduced by one-third, it took 45.83 ms to segment the ultrasound context. As a result, we verified through experiments that the proposed method works in real time.

Cardiovascular Molecular Imaging with Contrast Ultrasound: Principles and Applications

심지영,Jonathan R. Lindner 대한심장학회 2014 Korean Circulation Journal Vol.44 No.1

Methods for imaging the molecular or cellular profile of tissue are being developed for all forms of non-invasive cardiovascular imaging. It is thought that these technologies will potentially improve patient outcomes by allowing diagnosis of disease at an early-stage, moni-toring disease progression, providing important information on patient risk, and for tailoring therapy to the molecular basis of disease. Molecular imaging is also already assuming an important role in science by providing a better understanding of the molecular basis ofcardiovascular pathology, for assessing response to new therapies, and for rapidly optimizing new or established therapies. Ultrasound-based molecular imaging is one of these new approaches. Contrast-enhanced ultrasound molecular imaging relies on the detection ofnovel site-targeted microbubbles (MB) or other acoustically active particles which are administered by intravenous injection, circulatethroughout the vascular compartment, and are then retained and imaged within regions of disease by ligand-directed binding. The tech-nique is thought to be advantageous in practical terms of cost, time, and ease of use. The aim of this review is to discuss the molecularparticipants of cardiovascular disease that have been targeted for ultrasound imaging, general features of site-targeted MB, imaging pro-tocols, and potential roles of ultrasound molecular imaging in cardiovascular research and clinical medicine.

현장진단응용을 위한 스마트 폰 기반의 초음파 영상 시스템:프로토 타입 구현 및 평가

여선미,김민,김진현,임창현,계상범,송태경 한국비파괴검사학회 2018 한국비파괴검사학회지 Vol.38 No.1

There has been a recent increase in the need for point-of-care (POC) medical treatment in areas with poor diagnostic environments, such as emergency rooms, accident sites, and battlefields.  Thus, research is being actively conducted on ultra-small ultrasound imaging systems capable of POC diagnosis. In this paper, we present a smart-phone-based ultrasound imaging system to maximize the portability of ultrasound imaging. In order to minimize weight and volume, the proposed ultrasound imaging system consists of a smart transducer (including an analog front-end circuitry and 32-channel beamformer/mid signal processing units), and a smart-phone. In-phase and quadrature data from the smart transducer are transferred to the smart-phone via a general-purpose micro-USB communication system. In addition, we propose a back-end signal processing algorithm suitable for a mobile GPU. The developed system provides a B-mode image with a frame rate of 50 and USB 2.0 communication standard. The battery life is 1.5 h, on average. The weight of ultrasound imaging system is 203 g (excluding the battery), and the size is 173 mm×59 mm×28 mm (length×width×height), which is suitable for POC applications. The performance of the developed system was evaluated with phantom and in vivo experiments. 최근 응급실, 사고현장, 전장 등 진단 환경이 열악한 장소에서의 신속한 현장 진료의 필요성이 강조됨에 따라 Point-of-Care 진단이 가능한 초소형 초음파 영상 장비에 대한 연구가 활발히 진행되고 있다. 본 논문에서는 휴대용 초음파 영상 장비의 효율성을 극대화 할 수 있도록 스마트폰 기반의 초음파 영상 시스템에 대하여 제안한다. 제안한 초음파 영상 장치는 시스템의 무게 및 부피를 최소화하기 위하여 아날로그 회로 및 32 채널 초음파 전처리/중간 신호 처리부를 포함하는 스마트 변환자를 개발하였으며 범용 마이크로 USB 통신 방식을 이용하여 스마트폰과 연동하였다. 또한 스마트폰의 그래픽 프로세서 유닛(GPU)에 적합한 후단 신호처리 알고리즘을 제안한다. 개발된 시스템은 USB2.0통신 기준으로 최대 초당 50프레임의 속도를 갖는 B모드 영상을 제공하며, 배터리의 수명은 평균 1.5시간이며 초음파 영상 시스템의 무게는 배터리를 제외하고 203g, 크기는 173 mm×59 mm×28 mm(길이×폭×높이)으로 현장 진료에 적합한 크기와 성능을 가짐을 확인하였다.

초음파 영상 보정 기술이 적용된 증강현실 기반 영상 중재 시술 시스템 개발

김태호,박해준,백준민,김성민,이재원,서준호 제어·로봇·시스템학회 2019 제어·로봇·시스템학회 논문지 Vol.25 No.7

In a conventional ultrasound image-based biopsy procedure, the needle is inserted alternately between the patient’s body and the ultrasound imaging system; doing so requires a considerable amount of training to ensure accuracy. In this study, we developed an augmented reality-based ultrasound image intervention system that enables the simultaneous viewing of ultrasound images and the patient’s body in the same direction for a more-intuitive ultrasound-based biopsy. For an intuitive biopsy, the correlation between an ultrasound-guided breast biopsy phantom and the ultrasound image was visualized by overlapping ultrasound images with real-time images. In addition, the matching accuracy of the real objects and the augmented images was improved by 76% as compared to the previous system through ultrasound image calibration, and the idea of the proposed augmented reality-based ultrasound image intervention procedure system was verified.

Advances in ultrasound elasticity imaging

권성재,정목근 대한의용생체공학회 2017 Biomedical Engineering Letters (BMEL) Vol.7 No.2

The most troublesome of ultrasonic B-modeimaging is the difficulty of accurately diagnosing cancers,benign tumors, and cysts because they appear similar toeach other in B-mode images. The human soft tissue hasdifferent physical characteristics of ultrasound dependingon whether it is normal or not. In particular, cancers in softtissue tend to be harder than the surrounding tissue. Thus,ultrasound elasticity imaging can be advantageously usedto detect cancers. To measure elasticity, a mechanical forceis applied to a region of interest, and the degree of deformationmeasured is rendered as an image. Depending onthe method of applying stress and measuring strain, differentelasticity imaging modalities have been reported,including strain imaging, sonoelastography, vibro-acoustography,transient elastography, acoustic radiation forceimpulse imaging, supersonic imaging, and strain-rateimaging. In this paper, we introduce various elasticityimaging methods and explore their technical principles andcharacteristics.