Wrapping up the semester

Now we are finally up to the last week of the academic year 2016. The Fall semester officially ends on Wednesday 21st, and many classes are over with final exams or reports due already, or very soon. Below are a few events that happened in the first half of December.
- Prof. Woo EJ from Kyung Hee University gave a very interesting talk on Electrical Impedance Tomography on the last Department Colloquium of the year, on 12/8.
- Through the proposal and encouragement of Prof. Woo, Dr. Lee JS and I agreed to host a mini-symposium in an annual IEEE EMB conference in Jeju Island in July next year.
- A year-end party was held on Saturday 12/16 for the CNIR members and families. PhD candidate Mr. Park Jinil was given the best student publication award of the year.
- Dr. Lee Hwan ("Sean") from Max Planck Institute in Frankfurt joined the CNIR for the winter to conduct research on non-human primates.
- A new faculty is set to join the BME department and CNIR from Univ. Colorado from March 2017. He will do research on human fMRI from cognition standpoint.

Now off to the new year - the winter recess will be a valuable time to reflect on the past year's experiences and shape ideas to steer and define the MR research direction in the coming years.

End of November

We are now moving toward the last month of the year. The MRI engineering class is now only a couple of lecture weeks away from the closing. The two graduate classes I ran this year were relatively successful. The course material could grow into a small textbook, or, at least will certainly be useful for future course designs. Here are the updates from the past few weeks:
- There was the 6th Joint Symposium between SKKU and Nagoya University of Japan, at our building. I delivered a 25 min talk on MR-based tissue susceptibility measurement.
- Yesterday, the undergraduate students and the teaching faculty members of the BME department had a social get-together, with recreational bowling games in a local place and informal lunch in small groups.
- Seulki Yoo was officially accepted as an incoming graduate student in the BME department. She also got a school scholarship. Congratulations to Seulki!
- Undergraduate research on MR susceptometry on phantoms is making slow progress. JY Heo is in the process of preparing a gelatin phantom for B0 mapping.

ISMRM 2017

For the MRI community the last few days were the time of the year when preliminary and unpublished research contents are hurriedly written into a 1 page document and submitted to compete for the poster and oral presentation slots in the Annual Meeting of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. This time, the conference of 2017 will be held in Honolulu, Hawaii, a favored place by many, which likely will make the competition a bit tougher than this year. I managed to write up two abstracts in time, and co-author one more. If successful, this will be the time to introduce the nuclear spin induced B0 shift as "NSS", the Nuclear Susceptibility Shift. And with some luck, the work on habenula QSM could have a chance to be presented as my lab's first clinically oriented research piece.

A few first impressions that I got out of the submission process this year:
- I cannot say I prefer the HTML format. For submission it is a pain to edit equations twice, once for drafting in a word processor, and then again during submission.
- Adding authors and authors' affiliations was a confusing process. It was good to allow copying affiliations from other authors but the click buttons didn't make it clear where in the process I was.
- 30 minutes before the closure, my abstract (2nd) number was 6969. I imagine the total submission count being well over 7000.

Visit from Julich

Drs. Jon Shah and CH Choi visited CNIR on Monday 10-17 on their way to attend a meeting at KAIST. They are from the Juelich Research Center in western Germany. Dr. Jon Shah is the Director of the Institute for Neuroscience and Medicine and had considerable background in physics and novel MRI experiments that interested me. Indeed one of his research focuses, which he presented in a seminar in the afternoon on Monday, was titled Quantitative MRI. His research encompassed a wide array of MR experiments, most notably ultra-high (9.4T) field human MRI combined with PET (in progress), as well as compact, Hallbach-magnet based MRI instrumentation. A close working relationship with Siemens appeared to have been a contributing factor in his Institute's accomplishments over the years. Dr. Choi studied in University of Aberdeen, UK, the place of Dr. Hugh Seton who I remember from the Clarke group collaboration more than 10 years ago. A small world indeed.

Farewell to Mr. Anup Bidesi and the week of Oct. 10-14

Mr. Anup Bidesi is leaving us to take a job offer in Sydney, Australia. A farewell dinner with him and HW Jung on Oct. 7 was a small but good one. I feel that I, the Center, and the School have just made a new friend abroad. The rest of the week was busy but less hectic than the past few weeks. Finally I have some time to work on the revision of the nuclear susceptibility shift paper in MRM. I also can take some time to look after the undergraduate students' research, and think about putting up an ad for Mr. Anup's replacement.

Reflections from the QSM workshop

The 4th International Workshop on MRI Phase Contrast and QSM was held in Graz, Austria, from September 25th to 28th. I arrived at Graz at night on Sunday 9/25, presented a poster on Monday, a talk on Wednesday, and promptly flew back to Incheon airport overnight. The conference was attended by about 100 people. They said that the number of posters presented, which was about 60, was higher than before. A few interesting things that I recall:

1. There was a break-out session to discuss current issues in QSM. The four topics were: Use of a reference tissue in QSM, Unmet/unsolved needs in QSM, Best pulse sequence in QSM, and SWI vs QSM for clinical impact. No clear conclusions were drawn, of course, which provided a valuable insider's look on what is still to be done.
2. The conference booklet was marked with "Confidential", with note that the abstracts could be for publication elsewhere, in an obvious effort to protect authors' choice to publish in a more official way.
3. South Korean participation was counted as 8, which was noted by the organizers as being high. Presentations from the three Korean speakers on the 3rd day, from me, Prof. Dong-hyun Kim, and Prof. Jongho-Lee, were all strong. After all, Prof. Jongho Lee spearheaded the decision to hold a 2019 QSM workshop in Korea.

For the scientific contents, the following were noteworthy.
1. No follow-up work presentation was made on some of the novel MREPT methods, including CSI(contrast source inversion)-EPT and cr(convection-reaction)-EPT.
2. Dr. Bilgic presented fast QSM acquisition which appeared very powerful.
3. SQUID susceptometer was used to characterize magnetic properties of tissue iron including ferritin at low temperature. Prof. Heinz Krenn from Graz presented on SQUID and low-field MRI. Of course I introduced myself and chatted with him.
4. Nothing on Habenula either.
5. Karin Shmueli from UCL, UK showed that localized QSM results are not very sensitive to whether the whole-brain is covered.
I would say that the Workshop was a success overall, although there was not really a major breakthrough.

IBS Conference

Today was the second day of the IBS Conference on Systems Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, held at the SKKU Suwon campus. There were 4 speakers in the morning, and 5 in the afternoon. The talks were delivered by MRI celebrities, with focus on basic science, including: Seiji Ogawa, Joseph Ackerman, Alan Koretzsky, Ralph Freeman, Zang-Hee Cho, John Gore, Robert Turner, and Eliot Stein. There were maybe 100 to 150 in the audience. The turnout was not great but those who attended looked engaged and satisfied. A few things I learned from today's sessions were:

- Dr. Ogawa is interested in looking at fMRI studies on the effect of education, including musical training.
- Dr. Cho showed his radius-adjustable and wobbling PET detector system.
- Dr. Gore discussed neuronal tracking using Mn particles (Mn oxide moves along the axon and across a synapse); Prof. Kim Hyung later explained to me that its physical mechanism is unknown.
- Dr. Turner mentioned that current psychology studies are skewed by the dominant white population in the industrialized countries. Dr. Turner also showed a couple of slides on high-field (7T I believe) QSM in human brain.

The most intriguing to me was the discussion of Dr. Gore about white matter tractography based on functional correlation between neighboring voxels. This appeared very elegant, and I wonder why I never heard about this before.

Fall Semester began!

Easy to remember, the academic calendar for the 2nd semester of 2016 follows very closely the one for the 1st with a 6 month delay. The start of the semester was therefore 9/1, and the end of it will be on 12/21. The week of September 1st was another busy and interesting one for the BME friends and colleagues. We had

- An opening ceremony for the BICS institute in the N Center, with a nice buffet dinner in the gallery area, open to the BME students,
- A research introduction seminar with the Founding director of BICS, Prof. Kataoka, followed by a nice dinner at an upscale restaurant,
- And of course all the hustles and bustles of the start of a semester with undecided students and panicking professors over course registrations.

Also, we have hired a Lab technician to operate the Machine shop on the 1st floor. Welcome to Mr. Cheon, Jin Whan!

Week of August 15-19

Last week was a short one, with the 15th being a national holiday, and it was also a very busy one. I had several businesses where I had to handle a pair of things -- I interviewed two candidates for the Lab Technician position, submitted two 1-page Abstracts to the QSM workshop, prepared two graduate class syllabuses, and worked on editing two manuscripts. One of the two manuscripts was submitted this Monday to MRM. The other one, on projection reconstruction, is still some time away before submission. The class plans took time to come up with, and they turned out okay, but I now learn that one of them will likely not have enough registered students to stay open next semester. The candidate interviews went smoothly, and now we know who to hire. The QSM workshop, in Austria, will happen on a week where there will be (1) IBS symposium, (2) (I learned today) a visit to Queensland, Australia by high University officials including the Chancellor.
Good progress, and we sent off Seul-ki, the summer intern student, to where she currently goes to school with a good lunch on Friday.

Summer in SKKU

Summer is still in full swing! The heat and humidity of the past several days were very uncomfortable. The forecast is not promising for those waiting for cool air. The campus is markedly quieter, with many undergraduate students out of town, summer programs largely wrapped up, and faculty and staff members having days off from work. In CNIR, the new, air-conditioned building is  providing a good shelter for those who would rather sit and type and read in the summer, with no better place to be in. The 3 T MR scan room on the 1st floor is particularly inviting, with constant temperature and humidity control, and not much usage by external users. Well, what about a summer retreat to MRI? 

Summer research

Summer is in full swing. Today was the hottest of the days so far this year. Four weeks have passed since the start of the summer vacation on campus, and the Center's first Summer Intern Program ended today with a great success. Success in terms of the engagement of the participating students, logistics, publicity, communication, and future recruiting.
It so happened that my lab was the only one (out of 7) with two separate research projects for the two students. Four weeks is not a long time for a research with any level of completeness. I like the summer program name "Summer Immersion" of Cornell - it is an intensive activity with much focus required, from decision making to execution. The two research topics, one on in-vivo brain R2* and the other on phantom susceptibility, were well digested by the students and the time spent was well worth it. 

Summer School - Workshop on MRI at CNIR

Since my first Korean public lecture at Aju University in March, I have felt that interest in neuroscience and MRI in Korea is significant and growing. This summer, for example, there are multiple public/academic events on neuroscience, at Aju Univ., and Korea Institute for Science and Technology (KIST). The CNIR 3-day Neuroimaging Workshop on MRI, held on Wednesday-Friday (7/6-7/8) this week, was one of them, and it was well received. First of all, the weather was perfect for this time of the year, between days of rain earlier in the week and a surge of hot air late Friday. I gave the first lecture and officially hosted the show for the first day, and I think there were about a hundred in the audience at one point. Prof. Park JS did a good job in inviting the session speakers from his broad network of MRI researchers in Korea, and Ms. Choi BH was instrumental in preparing and running the hands-on practical demo/training around the 3 T scanner. I am positive that this event was also meaningful for the summer intern students, and our Center got the needed boost in publicity as envisioned earlier this year by Prof. Kim SG.

GE head-only scanner in the news

Apparently the head-only 3T scanner has worked well enough to have an official opening ceremony at Mayo Clinic. May the scanner have a long, acclaimed life to see many patients coming and going, and create a real impact beyond news articles!

In an unrelated GE web resource, MR diffusion tractography is featured as a tool for a European (but not EU, as per today's Brexit decision!) autism research. It is mentioned that machine learning from Steve Williams' team is utilized for the research. I am not sure if there is anything new on the MR side of this latest development in GE-King's College collaboration.

Finding referees

In the past week or so I have been managing the editorial processing of two new papers submitted to MRM. This experience brings home to me the difficulty of finding a good, available team of referees for academic papers in, perhaps, any branch of modern science. On one hand, difficulty comes from ever-narrowing specialization of the academic field. Reviewing, with critical eyes, a new report on a particular subject requires knowing the current status of the research field. For any given researcher, this becomes more and more difficult as new branches are rapidly introduced, while old branches remain, and the number of ways to combine different branches grow exponentially. A consequence is that many active researchers in the field know relatively narrowly, and a knowledgeable peer in the peer review process becomes harder to find. (Or, the only knowledgeable ones may come from the authors' inner circle, therefore being biased.)

My other problem with searching for referees is a practical one. The research community should change the way the authors are identified by their names. For Korean researchers, in particular, I have long thought that the first and the last names should be swapped in academic publications. It is simply ridiculous to ask Korean scholars to conform to the Western naming convention, which is to fully spell out the last name only, while abbreviating the first name by it initial(s). That is unfit as a global way to identify the authors. Any naming degeneracy-- now I see it first-hand-- leads to confusion in the referee selection process, and its natural consequence, sadly, is for the editorial board simply to avoid Korean researchers from the referee pool. As a numeric author ID is not likely to be liked by many, in the long run the journals should allow the authors to designate which name, first or last, should be used as a primary identifier on record.

First meeting to gear up for the next year's Korean MRI Conference

The meeting was held at a restaurant near the Seoul Train Station. Dr. Hong KS from KBSI did a good job presenting the results of this year's ICMRI & KSMRM annual meeting (which was held in March), and explaining current status of the organization committee. For me, new to the inner workings of the Korean MRI society, it is humbling to see the large efforts devoted by many busy professionals to grow the society at a rapid pace.
1. Imperatives: The society wants to grow more international. The ICMRI conference should attract more international registrants. In practice, this can be most readily achieved by fostering more resource exchange with Chinese and other Asian magnetic resonance communities.
2. Desirables: Expansion of mutual educational sessions between the PhD's and MD's. The former, including the PhD students, will benefit from more coherent medical case and practice reports, while the latter will appreciate better plain-language expositions of MR theories covered at the conference.

Kudos to the hands and brains of the KSMRM society!

Susceptibility seminar

The CNIR internal seminar on magnetic susceptibility mapping was well-received.
The comparison between conventional physical susceptometry and MR-based measurement interested the audience. It certainly intrigues me that MRI phase measurement can be so sensitive to small magnetic changes in the object. Having started my research career in sensitive magnetometry, I now feel like coming a full circle to undertake research on applying MRI to magnetometry.

Summer Internship Announced

Apparently emails have been sent out to the summer internship applicants who passed the selection process. First, welcome to Mr. Jung Hyun Uk and Ms. Yoo Seul ki, who will join my lab for 4 weeks in June-July! Overall the Center is satisfied with the Internship application turnout, with 34 students applying for 10 announced openings. The Center is admitting 12 of them, and there has been significant effort to make the selection process fair and reasonable. "Spread the word" is the spirit, and we should work to make this event fruitful and sustainable over the years.

Wednesday update, Singapore

Today was less humid. There was some rain in the afternoon, cooling the air a little bit, before the muggy air returned in a few hours.
1. My poster was attended by a couple of very interested researchers both from Western Ontario. They work on making an insert gradient coil and showed much interest in my PNS measurement with rotated head. They both said good words about Tom's ePoster on head-only scanner from yesterday, which I had missed. Later I went to the computer screen to look it up - the head-only ePoster was well presented.
2. I told a Siemens technical representative about the need to relax dB/dt limit on Prisma. We also discussed UTE options.
3. Lunch with Prof. Jaeseok Park.
4. Dinner with Prof. Seong-gi Kim's team.
5. Requested quote from Electric Geodesics on MR-compatible 32 ch sensor package.
6. Early morning educational session on QSM was helpful -- I asked the 1st speaker for his ppt slides by email.

Monday May 9th, 2016, Singapore

Update from the Meeting:
1. Dr. Seong-gi Kim's paper was displayed as the 5th most cited MRM paper published in 2013!
2. Dr. Erwin Hahn appeared on screen via Skype, to address the plenary hall audience! I was almost in tears to see him on the screen, positively to learn that he is still thinking clearly, but also by his visible sign of aging compared to when I last talked to him in Berkeley.
3. I delivered the 9+3 min oral presentation in a Session on Artifacts. I probably spoke too fast. A question was asked about the difference between this work and a Green's function sampling method. Later, I chatted with the questioner - he had an electronic poster, later in the day, about an alternative representation of the dipolar field kernel and its impact on QSM.
4. GE lunch time symposium had Eric Stahr showing one slide on head-only scanner delivered to Mayo Clinic. Exciting!
5. The MRM and JMRI reviewer session in the evening was very informative. Interesting to hear the JMRI Editor-in-Chief say that Discussion is the least important part when reviewing a manuscript. For MRM, Matt said the journal honors at most one of the preferred reviewers as suggested by the authors.

ISMRM 2016

This year's ISMRM meeting will be held in Singapore, from May 6th to the 13th. I am doing three different things this time - moderating, poster presenting, and an oral talk in a scientific session.

1. Moderation
This is the second time I am co-moderating a session in ISMRM. Each time, connections at GE have helped me be found by the Annual meeting committee for such a opportunity. Last year it was in a traditional oral session, on MRI systems calibration including B0 and B1 mapping. This time is different - it is for a day-long educational session. Pretty much a whole business day will be dedicated to this activity. It will be interesting though. I expect more of a housekeeping role than intervening in heated technical debates. The session is "Physics for Physicists", on Saturday.

2. Poster
This is on Wednesday, in a session on MRI safety. I have had some material prepared on PNS in an asymmetric head-only gradient coil last year. Unfortunately, since my departure from GRC this work was orphaned, and I seriously thought about cancelling this poster. At the last minute, however, I obtained from GRC old electronic files used to prepare the abstract, and was able to edit the content into a minimally acceptable poster. PNS research itself continues to have my attention. At the meeting I will try to see what new results are discussed from Brian Rutt's group on head gradient PNS.

3. Oral presentation
Last Friday I pretty much completed the content of the oral presentation on an improved method to compute the B0 inhomogeneity map from susceptibility distribution. The 3 undergrad students timed my practice talk, and I still need to complete one page with computation time data from the students. This talk will be on Monday morning, on "Artifacts: System Imperfections & Implants".

Undergraduate research participants

Welcome to the three sophomores who expressed interest in research in MRI! Ki-baek, Jae-young, Suhn-ha have started meeting with me regularly to learn MRI basics and discuss research participation. This reminds me of my time as a summer research "trainee" at Postech many years ago. We were three at that time too, studying polymer physics and calculating diffusion models. One difference is that at this time the research participation is happening concurrently with the students' regular course work. Good luck and kudos to them who set out to start a long journey towards scholarship and the world of professional research.

MRI is an excellent way to introduce young students to the field of medical physics and engineering. What can be more motivating than seeing your own body and brain so readily, in a totally non-invasive way? This is so as long as the students can run and be scanned on a machine safely. So the first task to everyone is to be trained on the use of the 3T scanner we have (Thank you Ms. Choi on being such an effective and resourceful instructor!). Next, we will look at how the magnetic susceptibility of the human body affects MRI - while generating simulation data for my ISMRM oral presentation this year in Singapore.

Impressions from ICMRI

Last Thursday-Saturday (March 24-26) there was the 4th International Congress on Magnetic Resonance Imaging at Grand Hilton Hotel in Seoul. First of all, I must thank the organizers at KSMRM for their hard work to prepare this very respectful meeting with hundreds of participants. As a first-time participant, I can only guess its past trajectory but I did come away with an impression that lots of effort has gone into the meeting over the years to make it this well organized and resourceful.
1. Dual language meeting. I thought it made sense to have explicit Korean and English language sessions in the conference. This does emphasize however the need for Korean professionals to be proficient in two languages. Foreign language speakers may still see it as a barrier to participating, but given many medical doctors in the audience who use only Korean in their work, it was probably a right balance.
2. The lecture by Dr. Cho Janghee was eye-opening when he showed the early 2 T scanner with a home-made gradient coil at KAIST. How does this fit into the history of MRI told by GE? How can IBS/SKKU be another history maker in MRI in ten years?
3. SKKU made a good show in the meeting, thanks to the hard work of the graduate students and postdocs who got numerous scientific recognitions for their presentations. Dr. Seong-gi Kim delivered a very comprehensible Korean lecture on CEST. I feel that the school and the institute got much needed visibility reinforcement during the past few days.
4. Unfortunately, there was no good planform for job postings.


I found a small number of presentations that had QSM components in them. It will be useful to follow up on these works.

World Brain Week

Last week was apparently a "World Brain Awareness Week" https://www.sfn.org/baw/ of the year. I was one of the 6 speakers at an event held in Aju University Medical School on Saturday March 19th. It was open to the general public, and the diligent Korean high school students were the majority in the audience. They are said to get some kind of credit from attending such events, and accordingly, the speech contents were much tailored to young and aspiring students. AND all address was given in Korean, which is a challenge to prepare, but as far as I can tell, all speakers I saw (I only attended the first half of the meeting but I have no doubt that the rest of the speakers did well too) did an excellent job in delivering the talk.

In retrospect, I feel that I have unintentionally ignored the adult listeners in the audience. I should have been more neutral to the age of the listeners, and have avoided sounding like a teacher talking to a minor. Profs Suh Minah and Choi Myungwhan did do an excellent job talking about their optical methods of animal brain imaging and studies. Many questions from the students were directed to Prof. Choi, on opto-genetics.

Highlights of the week, March 7-11

The second week of the first semester at the University was pretty dynamic and interesting. Prof. JB Jang finally made his appearance in the department, and delivered a much-attended undergraduate seminar on his work. On Wednesday this year's Neuro-at-Noon series was kicked off by Prof. Kim CJ of KIST/UST who gave a very understandable and interesting talk on brain volume and intelligence. The lunch meeting that followed was attended by many faculty members of the department, and was highly informative.

The undergraduate sophomores started to look for and join research labs to start their work on undergraduate thesis. I was contacted by two of them, and they are likely to meet with me regularly to discuss plans and progress soon. I understand that even the freshmen are supposed to work on a limited scope research supervised by a faculty. As one research project topic for either the 1st or the 2nd year students, I am thinking of an MR magnetometry experiment on Korean currency bills, with an eye on looking for a magnetic printout solution for small volume shimming.

There was a BME faculty dinner meeting at an upscale restaurant in a nearby city overlooking a lake.

On Friday I met with a former classmate who is now on the faculty of Gacheon University. The stories I am exposed to these days through these meetings are all interesting. They are both new and old, as a matter of fact, in the sense that they tell a story in a part of the world, and a corner of the society that are directly opposite to where I was in in the past several years, while at the same time that corner of the world and society is familiar to me from my faraway past so I can quickly understand why things are as I hear they are.

Semester begins!

The 2016 Spring semster started this week. The department, the center, and the school are now busier with new and returning students and staff and faculty who came from the vacation and started to keep regular business hours. And, of course the most obvious difference for the academic staff is that the teaching schedule started. The first class for me, for graduate students on MRI engineering, went fairly well, I think. I also delivered the first BME undergraduate seminar for the second-year undergraduate students. Returning to a Korean classroom nearly 17 years after I left for California, now as a teacher, gives me a very special feeling. I was hoping to be able to be effective in both languages, but I must admit, doing all that with proper preparation of the lecture materials is quite a task. I do feel that given enough time, I would be one of those who would enjoy teaching. Hope the students felt the same.

A few first impressions:
1. Internet makes it easy to find pictures for the lecture slides, on any subject.
2. There is a clear discrepency between the international language requirement by the University and the preference of both the students and the lecturers in the classroom.
3. I do feel that it would be helpful to have a definite class textbook (or a reader printout) for the graduent class I am running. This will improve as course develops.
4. Being able to address the students, albeit demanding, is a privilege, and a big and unmeasurable one.

Impressions from the conference

The organizers did an excellent job in hosting the small but respectable conference at KRISS. It is indeed a significant news that International Conference on Biomagnetism is being hosted in October in Seoul. I hear that there will be about 700 attendees, and the initial interest in opening special program sessions ("symposia") is encouraging. Good job, for the local MEG communities!

1. MEG and EEG are still struggling with low confidence in source localization. MEG is still trying to position itself as a cost-justified modality with unique capabilities. EEG is not as easy to use as one might think when it comes to source localization, due to need to exactly know sensor positions and handling time for many sensors with good skin contact. For fMRI, I asked Dr. Kim Seong-gi (on return to Suwon) on making scan faster; his assessment is that blood response-dependent nature of fMRI is the real source of sluggishness and poor time resolution. The desired resolution, it appears to me, is about 100 ms. For example, what is called N170 [ms] is related to facial recognition. I still feel it feasible to make fMRI useful in detecting fast dynamic functional processes.

2. Daejeon is rural for most part, and the train station on a Friday night is very crowded, with roads conjested that lead to the station, and many weekend travelers heading to the Seoul area. Passengers in the train were courteous; they refrained from making loud noise using cell phones. The railroad staff did not check train tickets, I guess it may be done randomly.

3. I thank our Center's chauffeur for giving me a ride to KRISS, door to door, in the morning. I was able to read a QSM article by F. Schweser in the car. It was about Homogeneity-Enabled Incremental Dipolar Inversion, dubbed HEIDI. I should make my own inversion code, ultimately.

2016 Biomagnetics Korea

Dr. Kim, at the Center for Biosignals, Korea Research Institue of Standards and Science (KRISS), invited me to speak at a half-day conference on Biomagnetics today. The conference is held in KRISS, for one afternoon, and will feature MEG, EEG, MRI, and other brain signal related research topics. I will talk about my work at GE, on compact 3T MRI scanner development, and will have an opportunity to publicize and introduce the new lab at SKKU. One of the research topics of potential interest to both me and the Biomagnetics community is animal QSM, where MR-based susceptibility mapping is validated by SQUID-based direct measurement. "MR susceptometry" may grow from such effort.