Nanchang Hangkong University

About: Nanchang Hangkong University is a education organization based out in Nanchang, China. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Microstructure & Alloy. The organization has 7004 authors who have published 5270 publications receiving 62162 citations. The organization is also known as: Nanchang Aviation University.

Automatic thickness estimation for skeletal muscle in ultrasonography: evaluation of two enhancement methods

Abstract: Ultrasonography is a convenient technique to investigate muscle properties and has been widely used to look into muscle functions since it is non-invasive and real-time. Muscle thickness, a quantification which can effectively reflect the muscle activities during muscle contraction, is an important measure for musculoskeletal studies using ultrasonography. The traditional manual operation to read muscle thickness is subjective and time-consuming, therefore a number of studies have focused on the automatic estimation of muscle fascicle orientation and muscle thickness, to which the speckle noises in ultrasound images could be the major obstacle. There have been two popular methods proposed to enhance the hyperechoic regions over the speckles in ultrasonography, namely Gabor Filtering and Multiscale Vessel Enhancement Filtering (MVEF). A study on gastrocnemius muscle is conducted to quantitatively evaluate whether and how these two methods could help the automatic estimation of the muscle thickness based on Revoting Hough Transform (RVHT). The muscle thickness results obtained from each of the two methods are compared with the results from manual measurement, respectively. Data from an aged subject with cerebral infarction is also studied. It’s shown in the experiments that, Gabor Filtering and MVEF can both enable RVHT to generate comparable results of muscle thickness to those by manual drawing (mean ± SD, 1.45 ± 0.48 and 1.38 ± 0.56 mm respectively). However, the MVEF method requires much less computation than Gabor Filtering. Both methods, as preprocessing procedure can enable RVHT the automatic estimation of muscle thickness and MVEF is believed to be a better choice for real-time applications.

The high-energy particle package onboard CSES

Abstract: The China Seismo-Electromagnetic Satellite (CSES) aims to monitor space electromagnetic fields, ionospheric plasma, high-energy charged particles and other features of the global space environment. The high-energy particle package (HEPP), which can effectively detect the energy spectrum, flux and pitch angle distribution of space electrons and protons, and soft X-ray emission from solar flares, is one of the main payloads of CSES. In this study, we designed, developed and calibrated the high-energy particle package and launched it into orbit with CSES. HEPP consists of the high-energy detector (HEPP-H), the low-energy detector (HEPP-L), and the solar X-ray monitor (HEPP-X). The three sub-detectors mainly use silicon detector and crystal calorimeter detection technology. Before launching, we calibrated the three sub-detectors in detail by using radiation source and accelerator beam. All the three sub-detectors have good energy linearity. After launching into orbit, the space energetic particles and X-ray distribution detected by HEPP are consistent with expectations. The performance indices of the detector reach the advanced level of the same kind of detector in the world. HEPP has a wide energy detection range, good energy resolution and high angular resolution ability for electrons and protons. It will play an important role in the study of space particle response and space physics of seismic activity.