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.