Talk at Yale conference

               

From what I read (link), the Yale School of Medicine founded a new research center in 2025, named Yale Biomedical Imaging Institute. The institute, apparently having a PET and MR focus, held the first conference on Biomedical Imaging Technology & Translational Science (BITTS) earlier this week. On Tuesday, I gave a presentation on 7T MRI at the GE lunch symposium, to the (mostly) Yale audience, along with one of my senior GE-HTIC colleague, a CT expert. Throughout the session, the audience was engaged and their questions were sincere. It was a good event, and I am very grateful to my colleagues who organized the team, invited me, and gladly provided transportation from upstate New York.

I cannot help but thinking, exactly 10 years ago, I was on the faculty of biomedical engineering, helping to establish a brand-new imaging institute in Korea, at Sungkyunkwan university. As I was travelling at that time, the researchers here had travelled to GE and Siemens headquarters to compare their 7T MRI offerings. As in that other place, YBII had young and experienced researchers presenting on their animal imaging, fMRI analysis, multimodal imaging, and MRI physics research. Do the worlds repeat themselves? ... in which people take turns to act different roles? 

I wish every success of the people and the institute of YBII. 

Two upcoming conferences

This week Yale university will hold its first ever Biomedical Imaging Technology and Translational Science (BITTS) conference in its west haven campus. The conference will feature different medical imaging modalities and be sponsored by major industry partners including GE HealthCare. Link: BITTS Conference | Yale Biomedical Imaging Institute.

In November, University of Iowa will host the 5th high-performance neuroimaging workshop, with focus on applications of MAGNUS 3T head-only MRI, which is expanding its research user base and will be commercially available next year. GE HealthCare and Magtron Inc. co-sponsor the meeting. Link: https://mri.medicine.uiowa.edu/5th-high-performance-neuroimaging-symposium.

Back to the basics on 2D line scan and DIANA

Prof. Jang-Yeon Park and his graduate student Jae-Youn Keum at SKKU published a two-author paper (link) in MRM on the theoretical analysis and experimental mitigation of image artifacts caused by so-called pseudo-steady-state (PSS) in gradient-echo based 2D line scan. The PSS has plagued Direct Imaging of Neuronal Activity since its inception through insidious artifacts that mimicked neuronal excitation signals. The new publication addresses the problem head-on, and can help control or eliminate such artifacts to make the line scan method more reliable. Kudos to the team of Prof. Park, whose incessant pursuit of the holy grail of MR neuroimaging continues to stimulate the field and refine methodology.

7th installation of MAGNUS in June

Somewhere in Texas, another research-dedicated 3T MAGNUS scanner was installed in June. This is the 7th in the world, and 5th in the USA. At least one more will come this year, continuing the trend of growing adoption of high-performance gradient systems for brain research. 

Helium-free MRI on the rise, and GE's compact 7T scanner

Helium-free MRI is on the rise, spurred by high helium cost as well as general awareness of resource conservation needs around the globe. GE had a very early technical lead on this front, but it is only very recent that it is devoting full efforts to commercialization of the technology for mainstream MRI scanners. In this week's ISMRM meeting, "Freelium" 1.5 T scanners were announced (again) as products-to-be of GE HealthCare. For research, a low-helium highlight was GE's Compact 7T scanner, presented by Tom Foo in a scientific oral session, as an Annual Meeting Program Committee-selected talk.

Combining high-field (7T), strong & fast gradients, and compact geometry is technically very difficult for even conventional liquid helium-filled magnets. Doing this on a helium-free system is almost insane because of the difficulty in magnet heating control. Making human 7T compact is therefore a very high-risk proposal.

The world's first such system was announced in the talk with impressive 7T brain images, achieved with minimal tailored hardware or processing for image quality. The technology might meaningfully change the 7T research landscape in the coming decade.

ISMRM annual meeting in two weeks

This year the attendance to the ISMRM annual meeting, at least from the northern Asia-Pacific region, is expected to be low. Many from the US as far as I can tell are not travelling to Cape Town, South Africa. I have two posters to present, but they will instead be covered by two of my colleagues who do travel. The way digital posters are uploaded has been changed (again!), and has received criticism. The word limitation of 750 is unreasonable, and many will simply upload ppt slides as figures, to defeat the limits. In order to make contents visible in small-screen phones, posters are now forced to be partitioned into small pieces, and while they are thus made more fluid and amorphous, it is being done in a rigid and restrictive way. At one point more attention should be paid and efforts be devoted to the picture, not the frame.

[Note added during the Conference week] As feared, many digital posters were very hard to read because many authors just uploaded their ppt slides in small figure spaces, or they did not know what to do with the word limit so the poster contents were badly fragmented and all bullet-ized. Something has to be done here.

Farewell to Dr. John Schenck

John Schenck Obituary--https://www.simplechoicescremation.com/obituaries/john-schenck-md-phd

John was a great mentor and friend to many who worked in the General Electric MRI Laboratory since its inception in the 1980s. As the obituary above describes it well, he was a true pioneer of modern MRI who invented the fingerprint gradient coils, co-invented the birdcage coil, and advocated for patient safety. His comprehensive review of the role of magnetic susceptibility in MRI (https://aapm.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1118/1.597854) is one of the most highly regarded and frequently consulted papers on magnet safety and MRI engineering. He was the early champion of high-performance head-only MRI scanners that are now blooming within and outside the GE company. Having first met him in GE in late 2008, I perhaps only saw a late glimpse of his celebrated career. I was impressed by how he did not look like an authority that he was in the profession; being genuinely nice and approachable, considerate and sensitive, he did not impose himself to push, intercept or hijack conversations as many people in his status (e.g. certain society gold medalist) might do. I was particularly enamored by his phenomenal memory and engaging story-telling when it came to lunch time (and cake club!) gossips and small talks. I wrote a grant proposal with him in 2015, which, unfortunately, did not succeed with NIH. I nevertheless pushed for the research, on habenular imaging, when I was in Korea, and published the results in 2020 (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-75733-y) with John. After I came back to GE, John had retired but I published a belated paper on the general theory of fingerprint coil design, with John as the second and only coauthor. When it was published in Journal of Applied Physics in 2023, I wondered if this may be his last appearance in research publication. From a quick search this unfortunately appears to be the case. Thank you John for all you did and all you were! I was honored to cross paths with you!