Much happened in Honolulu too.

I delivered three talks on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. The Wednesday talk was as a substitute speaker for Prof. Jang-Yeon Park, on the basics of MRI, in particular on the k-space. The talks are all recorded for later views for the meeting registrants. For example, the educational talk is at https://ismrm2025.blazestreaming.com/sessions/ismrm-2025-w-04 (Starting at 40 min mark).

Thanks to the remote registration option, even on-site attendees can now watch most oral sessions from the hotel room, with the benefit of unobstructed, high-resolution view of all the slides. So if one is not particularly interested in seeing the speaker, nor in asking live questions, this was a handsome option not only for convenience but also for quick hopping among many parallel sessions.

One caveat for my future reference: Uploaded talk slides may have automatic slide advance turned on -- make sure this be turned off. 

On the exhibition floor, Chinese companies are clearly gaining ground, with one company displaying an impressive model of rotating whole-body 1.5 T scanner for multi-orientation scans. Notably, Hyperfine missed the show, presumably for financial reasons. To all who I met in person in Honolulu this week, thank you for your kind greetings, and my best wishes!

Much happened before Honolulu

In a busy, dynamic month, we now have the compact 3T scanner working again in Mayo Clinic, and have obtained the first ever -- in history of MRI -- images out of the low-cryogen human head 7T scanner. The former is significant because of the near-continuous operation of the world's only low-cryogen 3T high-performance head scanner for nearly 10 years. The project was meant to last for about 5 years at the beginning. This feels like a Mars rover outliving its planned operation time. The second, compact 7T images, will be much discussed in the upcoming ISMRM meeting in Honolulu. I wish the scanner were a bit more compact physically, but both compact 3T and 7T systems show the direction of MRI that I think is right for its future. That is, to maintain its unique, non-invasive high-resolution imaging, while reducing the footprint and operation cost in order for better access and new applications. Let there be no peers and don't compete with low resolution imaging devices.

I had travelled to Mayo Clinic for a week last week, to see a good weather there in a very busy schedule. Mayo Clinic is thriving, with many expansion constructions on display on the streets.

11.7T in Korea in superconductor science & technology journal

Well, so it was published, finally, last month (SUST article, Feb 2025). A few facts according to the paper: The magnet warm bore is 70 cm in diameter, the magnet runs in persistent mode and has been stable in the last 2+ years. In comparison with the Iseult magnet in France, passive shielding (requiring massive shielding walls) and persistent mode (as opposed to driven mode) appear to be the main differences in addition to the magnet bore size (90 cm for Iseult). I could not find gradient coil specification, but from my visit to Gachon a few years ago, the coil's small thickness is unlikely to allow windings with high gradient amplitudes. The paper included a 3D gradient-echo image of an ex-vivo monkey brain with 12.8 cm FOV and 0.5 mm isotropic resolution. This shows the imaging system is operational but the authors certainly would want more images to meet the magnet's high expectation. So, congratulations to the team, and let's hope more is coming.

Compact 3T service visit to Mayo Clinic

February 2025 marks the 9th anniversary of the delivery of Compact 3T scanner to Mayo Clinic. This year, the week of February 17th was a frigid one, not best for air travel, but a service visit to Rochester, Minnesota was made to replace and renew the magnet's cooling system. Thanks to the hard work of the GE HealthCare colleagues and help from the Mayo Clinic support team, the week's task was completed in time. The work will continue until the end of March, with more service visits to ramp the magnet and calibrate the scanner. Hopefully the refreshed 3T system, still the world's only high-performance compact 3T MRI scanner for humans, will serve the research community for many years to come. 

ISMRM 2025 Abstract Announcement

In my counting, 35 x 151 + 23 = 5308 abstracts are accepted, of which 851 (16%) are oral, and 549 are power pitches. Two submissions of mine were both accepted as an oral presentation, which is not a common event based on the probability (0.16^2 = 2.6%). In addition, Lydia's implanted lead heating work, from Mayo Clinic and where I am the second author, was also accepted as an oral. So apparently you don't have to do low-field or machine learning to get invited to speak in the conference. Now whether I will actually fly to the conference and present in person is another question. I wish remote presentation option was still available after the pandemic. 

Duke university visit

Early this month, an informal research meeting was held at Prof. Allen Song's laboratory at Duke University in North Carolina. Three people from GE Healthcare met with Allen, Prof. Dean Darnell, and a graduate student Devon Overson, to talk about MRI systems engineering to realize wireless receiver coils. This was a second visit in about two years. In 2022, when we were still wearing masks (picture on the left), we had a meeting on the "iPRES" coil, an RF receiver coil that doubles as a multi-channel shim array. The meeting this month, as before, was very productive. The Duke team has worked on wireless signal transmission for peripheral devices control for a number of years. It remains to be seen whether wire-free, battery-powered MRI RF coil can be realized without sacrificing the sensitivity to replace the traditional signal reception architecture.

ISMRM Abstracts, 2025

The meeting next year will be in Hawaii, a popular place, and the ISMRM organizers are sifting through more than 8000 abstracts submitted for presentation there. I have been critical to the abstract's HTML format, and a recently introduced sectioned Synopsis (in fact the presence of Synopsis at all). However, from an abstract reviewer's point of view, I must say these changes are helpful, to quickly get to know the work, and inspect details of selected figures. The organizers also did a good job in summarizing the review progress graphically in real time. This allows a reviewer to stay "normalized", by observing how the score distribution changes from start to finish as more than 50 assigned abstracts are scored. Certainly a lot of change has happened in ISMRM abstract processing since the early 2010s. I still hold up two things as suggestions to the Society: (1) The scores should be made available to the authors, and (2) All rejected abstracts should be given a chance to be archived, if not presented, on-line. That is democratization, not giving out low-performance MRI to those who deserve better.