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.