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For the MRI community the last few days were the time of the year when preliminary and unpublished research contents are hurriedly written into a 1 page document and submitted to compete for the poster and oral presentation slots in the Annual Meeting of the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.