Biomedical subjects

Jong Beom Ra

Publications and source records attributed to Jong Beom Ra.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

A rate-constrained fast full-search algorithm based on block sum pyramid.

This paper presents a fast full-search algorithm (FSA) for rate-constrained motion estimation. The proposed algorithm, which is based on the block sum pyramid frame structure, successively eliminates unnecessary search positions according to rate-constrained criterion. This algorithm provides the identical estimation performance to a conventional FSA having rate constraint, while achieving considerable reduction in computation.

Algorithms↗

PubMed2005

A new path planning algorithm for maximizing visibility in computed tomography colonography.

In virtual colonoscopy, minimizing the blind areas is important for accurate diagnosis of colonic polyps. Although useful for describing the shape of an object, the centerline is not always the optimal camera path for observing the object. Hence, conventional methods in which the centerline is directly used as a path produce considerable blind areas, especially in areas of high curvature. Our proposed algorithm first approximates the surface of the object by estimating the overall shape and cross-sectional thicknesses. View positions and their corresponding view directions are then jointly determined to enable us to maximally observe the approximated surface. Moreover, by adopting bidirectional navigations, we may reduce the blind area blocked by haustral folds. For comfortable navigation, we carefully smoothen the obtained path and minimize the amount of rotation between consecutive rendered images. For the evaluation, we quantified the overall observable area on the basis of the temporal visibility that reflects the minimum interpretation time of a human observer. The experimental results show that our algorithm improves visibility coverage and also significantly reduces the number of blind areas that have a clinically meaningful size. A sequence of rendered images shows that our algorithm can provide a sequence of centered and comfortable views of colonography.

Algorithms↗

PubMed2004

Digital subtraction CT angiography based on efficient 3D registration and refinement.

A novel method for fast, automatic 3D digital subtraction CT angiography (DS-CTA) is presented to generate artifact-free angiograms. The proposed method consists of two steps: 3D registration to align a CT image to the CT angiography (CTA) image and subtraction-and-refinement to extract blood vessels only. For efficient and accurate 3D registration in the first step, an normalized mutual information (NMI) based algorithm is adopted, and its fast version is developed by introducing a new measure. To further improve the subtracted image quality in the second step, a novel 3D refinement algorithm is suggested to effectively remove unwanted residuals. Experimental results of seven clinical CT/CTA head datasets demonstrate that cerebral vessels are well extracted from CTA images with almost no loss. The typical processing time is 3-9 min depending on the image size in a PC with a 2.4 GHz CPU.

Algorithms↗

PubMed2002

Fast surface and volume rendering based on shear-warp factorization for a surgical simulator.

Fast simultaneous visualization of 3D medical images and medical instruments is necessary for a surgical simulator. Because unconstrained motion of a medical instrument is more frequent than that of the patient, the visualization of medical instruments is performed in real time using surface rendering. However, volume rendering is usually used for realistic visualization of the 3D medical image. We have developed an algorithm to combine a volume-rendered image and a surface-rendered image using a Z-buffer for depth cueing, which is applied to a surgical simulator. Surface rendering is used for visualization of a medical instrument, whereas 3D medical images such as CT and MRI are usually visualized by volume rendering, because segmentation of the medical image is difficult. In this study, when the volume-rendered image is combined with the surface-rendered image, the amount of computation is reduced by early ray termination and instrument-region masking in the sheared image space. Using these methods, a fast combination of volume-rendered and surface-rendered images is performed with high image quality. The method is appropriate for real-time visualization of 3D medical images and medical instrument motion in the images, and can be applied to image-guided therapy and surgical simulators.

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