2017 wrap up

The year is winding down and an unmistakable winter weather is gripping the Suwon area. The Center this year has decided on a 7T human MRI purchase, and there was a significant increase in the research personnel in the human fMRI research area. In Dr. Lee's lab, the undergraduate research interns did an excellent job in their research presentations for undergraduate project contests (C-School) to grab a Grand prize for two semesters in a row. There was a significant progress in  collaborative research with MDs at SMC, led by Ms. Yoo, on QSM of neurological disease patients. Multiple international invited talks were delivered by Dr. Lee. For research publication, currently one paper is under revision at MRM, and another at Sci Rep (led by Prof. Park JY). Multi-orientation B0 and B1 research has taken off to a promising start in collaboration with Prof. Shim's lab (B0) and KBSI (Dr. Oh S-H, B1). Finally, a brand-new, lab-dedicated research/office space was secured in 2017 and is now being furnished for full use starting January.

Happy new year!

KSMRM PhD meeting

PhDs in the Korean Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine met at Korea Basic Science Institute (KBSI) in Ochang, about 100 km south of Seoul, on December 1st~2nd. The meeting featured short presentations from many of the principal investigators in the Society, making this a good opportunity for everyone to learn current MR-related projects that are on-going in Korea. The Society is relatively small, but is growing, and one thing that was easy to see in the meeting was that there are a healthy group of young researchers in MR physics and engineering, taking over from an older generation of scientists who pioneered MRI research in Korea from the very early days of MRI. The hosting institute is home of the 2nd 7 Tesla human MRI scanner in Korea. So there was a short tour of the 7T facility in the evening of Dec 1st. The scanner, from Phillips, appeared to be in good shape and well taken care of. It was said that the team wanted to expand research more in the direction of fMRI-based human brain disorder studies.

PIERS 2017, Singapore

PIERS stands for Progress In Electromagnetics Research Symposium, an annual conference dedicated to research in fundamentals and applications of EM physics and engineering. This year's conference was held in Singapore from 11/19-22, and Dr. Lee gave an invited talk at a session on E&M in MRI, organized by Drs. Tommy Vaughan and Shaoying Huang. The conference itself was well attended, with reported abstract submissions counting over 1700. With such diverse areas of E&M applications (pretty much covering all engineering in modern days!), the parallel sessions were  many and individual sessions were uncrowded. About 5 sessions, including E&M in MRI, were closely related to biomedical engineering. MRI itself was not a main subject in the conference, but the few bio-oriented sessions featured diverse laboratory-scale engineering projects that could potentially fit the SKKU BME department.

MRI-C.I.E.L.

Magnetic Resonance-Inspired Creative Ideas and Experiments Laboratory, or, Crazy Ideas and Experiments Lab (CIEL) is taking shape slowly in the new space, with half of the furniture delivered last week. The room is now awaiting plumbing and electrical wiring work before the rest of the (big) furniture arrives. Much of the relatively small-scale experimental preparation work which is currently done in the 1st- floor workshop will get moved to the new room, probably early next year. Crazy ideas are welcome!

Scientific Advisory Board Meeting

The Scientific Advisory Board meeting was held on Thursday-Friday last week. This is probably the most important official event held this year for the Center. 5 external scientists, 4 from the US, visited for a two-day event featuring faculty seminars and break-up sessions for interviews. The interview part was an interesting one in which graduate students and research fellows were all invited for small-group Q&A sessions, discussing not research, but the Center's operation. The seminar session, occupying most of Thursday, was good for everybody to learn what other groups in the Center are up to. Repeated questions raised by the Board, as well as by ourselves in a wrap-up, are (i) how to define a grand theme of the research for the whole Center, (ii) how to attract talents to work here, and (iii) how to balance global and local (Korean) ways to operate the Center in terms of culture and language. Many who participated in the Meeting came away with an impression that the Center is now more stable and generally on the right track, compared to last year.

New template-based layout for MRM

Magnetic Resonance in Medicine has conducted a poll over switching to a new article layout, and the results are in. The decision was made to make the switch (some time soon). The new format apparently follows one of the standard templates of the publisher, and will speed up typesetting for accepted manuscripts. The new format features larger line spacings and less crowded letters. The downside is increased page count, by maybe about 20%. The change speaks to the pressure on the academic journals to make a rapid turnaround in the publication process. This undoubtedly reflects a fast pace and increasing number of players in academic research. It is hoped that this latest move by MRM will help attract high-quality paper submissions by more authors.

It's official: human 7T

This week it was made official that the Center is going to purchase a human 7T scanner from Siemens. The system, known as Terra, has recently been approved for clinical use in Europe. The clinical use as approved will be limited to a single transmit RF chain, which is problematic for body imaging, which in turn indicates that Siemens is envisioning marketing 7T for neuro applications primarily. The Center's human 7T research is finally taking off. The delivery is expected by September 2018.  That will be a 3rd 7T installation in Korea, following NRI (Gachon Univ., 2005) and KBSI (2015, also see here).

New space for MR physics and systems research

The north building of the N center has many empty rooms set aside for future expansion of the campus's research facilities. In early September it was decided that the rooms on the 3rd floor would be given to the CNIR and GBME for office and laboratory use. This is a boost to the MR research labs since the MR methodology research activities have been slow compared to neuroscience ones lately at CNIR.
The three human MRI research labs will each occupy one of the newly allocated rooms, facing north, and Dr. Lee's research will now expand more into the experimental projects, utilizing the new space. The lab will be called MR physics and systems laboratory, for both hardware and software research addressing broad subjects on human MRI systems.

MRI Workshop in Pusan

Many KSMRM members gathered in Pusan in the past weekend (Fri-Sat) for an MRI technology workshop, in which 12 MR scientists (PhDs) presented reviews of various MR technologies in current use. The workshop had significant emphasis on education; many students attended for  lectures covering plenty of basic principles rather than just latest results. Dr. Lee presented his research on compact 3T MRI scanner from his time at GE. From the lab, Seulki and Seon-ha also attended. The workshop was well organized, and the all-Korean presentations were well-received and helpful to both beginners and experts in MRI. It was suggested that similar meetings be held more regularly, e.g. every two years.

Siemens Reference Site Symposium

As part of the on-going and expanding collaboration between CNIR and Siemens, last Friday in N Center there was a symposium on fast neuroimaging with a special guest lecture by Kawin Setsompop. Four Siemens representatives accompanied Kawin, and Director Kim hosted the guest from the morning hours to lunch. The Lecture was well attended and was presented with much information and clarity. A few interesting points were: "death of 2D", by which the speaker suggested that in neuroimaging fast 3D scans almost beat 2D scans in every aspect; the notion that simultaneous multi-slice imaging can be viewed as a kind of 3D imaging; and an indication that work is being underway or in contemplation to realize SMS without a multi-channel receiver array, which will be relevant for small animal imaging.

Kawin, originally from Thailand, is married to a Korean wife. After the N Center symposium, he went to Seoul for another lecture aimed at clinicians, and was about to continue his trip to go to China for a MRI research meeting. There is much indication that China is expanding facilities and research in MRI in recent years.

Summer internship program concludes.

The second Summer Internship Program of the Center was completed last week with a Friday lunch-time poster presentation and picture taking. See here for the 11 posters presented. The program, aimed at  promoting the research opportunities at the Center and recruiting future graduate students, went well as a whole. It was proposed that next year, the internship program be open to BME professors not participating in IBS as well, which may help attract more engineering-oriented students. This year about 1/3 of the participating students decided to stay for 4 more weeks to continue their lab activities. Their research interests are primarily in neuroscience.

IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference

An annual international conference, IEEE-EMBC, is being held in Je-ju island. The conference is from Tuesday 7/11 to Saturday 7/15. Among many parallel sessions, a few that were related to the Lab were held on Thursday.

There were a series of sessions on Computational Human Models. This is probably one of the very active areas where government, industry, and academic institutes are closely collaborating. New players appear to continue to enter the field (FDA developing MIDA, Novocure, NICT from Japan, NEVA Electromagnetics, and a Hanyang University team working with ICRP), and new applications are emerging as computational power grows as does interest in non-invasive electromagnetic treatment of patients. In this conference, Novocure highlighted what they named Tumor-Treating Fields (TTFields) which can benefit from bio-electromagnetic modeling.

One session on MREPT took place with four invited speakers. In general, despite some new ideas, in this conference no new methods/concepts capable of human clinical application were presented.

Summer internship started.

2017 Summer Internship program kicked off on Monday. A total of 18 students from outside the GBME department of SKKU are participating. Today was the first full day of the program, which started with Prof. Jang JB's lecture on his biomaterials research. At 11 AM, Dr. Sungman Moon from GEHC (USA) visited for an informal seminar on MR gradient coils, which was attended by several intern students as well as GBME graduate students. In an emphatic lecture, Dr. Moon gave a very good introduction of industrial medical imaging engineering research. Students were attentive and engaged.

This was the second time for a GEHC MR team member to give a seminar at the Center this month. Last Tuesday, Dr. Yang, Yoon Jeong from GEHC in Cleveland, OH (USA) visited CNIR (with her husband and two girls!) for a seminar on RF coil technology. The method itself had a slick name, Adaptive Imaging RF (AIR) technology. Both seminars well portrayed the latest MR engineering innovation led by GE.

Final exam week

The spring semester is nearing the end, and there is no class in the last week (in school calendar) of the semester. The final lecture on Electromagnetics for the BME students was given on Wednesday, with the last topic covered being the Poynting vector. This coming Monday will be the final exam day.

Wrapping up the semester, the senior and junior intern students did a good job in improving the MR-based susceptibility measurement. An improved sample holder, phantom base, and exam protocol were implemented, and over a dozen solid and liquid materials have been characterized. The method/workflow will be useful for future MR engineering projects.

Festivities!

SKKU school festival took place in the past week. The central lawn was packed with students watching concerts and consuming food. The BME undergrad students participated as one of the lawn food vendors on Friday night. The campus and the festival were completely open to anyone who came by to look (yes, security was light, as this part of the world is very, very safe). SKKU international students presented their traditional food and drinks, some even in their traditional clothing, to create a unique and welcome, international atmosphere in an otherwise very ethnically homogeneous town.

Week of May 15-19

The week started off with a very nice weather. The 15th of May was what is known as the "Teachers' day" in Korea. Cakes and flowers were seen here and there on campus on the occasion.
The lab has been following up on two things this week. First, collecting & comparing 7T images from other research sites (Univ. Iowa and Medical College of Wisconsin), and second, setting up QSM protocols for more patient studies from SMC.
Summer internship applications are now being reviewed. We have a total of 40 applicants. Many of them are interested in psychology and biological research. Very few of them showed interest in engineering aspects of MRI, which is a bit disappointing. The IBS center appears to appeal to the students more for its neuroscience studies than MR technology.

On Thursday, Dr. Bruce Pike from University of Calgary visited the Center to give a very nice, informative and understandable special seminar on quantitative fMRI and clinical applications.

ISMRM 2017, April 22-27

The SKKU MR team had a strong showing at this year's ISMRM annual meeting. The conference was well-organized and informative. All proceeding materials were distributed entirely electronically. There was no Friday session. Vendor (GE and Siemens) events appeared to be well attended. The general environment was relaxing and comfortable. The conference location was very good in many ways (climate, room, accessibility). About 5800 abstracts were presented at the meeting.

Undergraduate team project award

Ms. Seonha Hwang and Suzy Lim are selected as one of the 8 undergraduate research teams by the SKKU's Creative School Program. Congratulations! More details will be known later in the week at an information session run by the Program office.

Announcement page at SKKU C-School website

Spring in Suwon

The SKKU Suwon campus is blooming with spring flowers. The cherry blossoms came out in the first few days of this past week, and the warm weather with reasonably clean air prompted many  people to get out and walk on campus. The students are busy preparing for the upcoming midterm exams. The lab is busy preparing for the ISMRM presentations that will be given in less than two weeks.

7T test drive!

Dr. Lee along with Prof. Park JY visited a 7T vendor in Germany to test-drive their new 7T MRI scanner. Impressions from Dr. Lee: it was a big machine, reasonably well taken care of, and was producing images that showed both promises and difficulties of human imaging at such a high magnetic field. The head transmit coil occupying significant bore space was unfortunate; this left little room for goggles and other devices for fun fMRI experiments. A little surprising was the fact that no parallel transmit was needed for imaging a relatively large head with decent image quality. The apparent RF shading was not severe. The trip was refreshing and fruitful. The rural European town visited was quite enjoyable for a short stay. All the trip cost was borne by the visiting party, in light of the heightened scrutiny over business transparency.

Kwangwoon university visit

Dr. Lee visited Prof. Ahn Chang Beom at Kwangwoon University in Seoul on Wednesday 3/29. The MR research team under Prof Ahn is focusing on signal processing, especially on QSM images. Dr. Lee gave an informal seminar and exchanged ideas for QSM-related collaboration. An easy first step would be to exchange scan data and phase processing codes between the two groups. Also discussed was the prospect of utilizing 7T scan capability that will be available in Suwon late next year.

icMRI 2017

ICMRI 2017 (Official Scientific Meeting of Korean Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine) was a big success. Total participant count was 1023, a record high and 20% increase from the last year. This is despite boycotts from several Chinese speakers at the last minute. The conference organizers did a good job in putting together a very respectable international conference. The English-speaking sessions were significantly increased from the last year. From SKKU-CNIR, Mr. Hwang Byung-jae won the best oral presentation award--Congratulations! Several new faces in the Korean MRI research community made their debut this year.

Week of March 13

Here are a few updates for this week:

1. Dr. Jeong Geun-Hong, a Professor and an army officer from the Korea Military Academy 육사 , gave a talk on his research in the Pines Lab at UC Berkeley. A very interesting case, he got his PhD at Berkeley while being a soldier, supported by the Korean government scholarship. His research involved a characteristic, novel, Pines lab-type of work, combining concepts of optical magnetic resonance and hyperpolarization. Strategies for a viable research collaboration with our center were discussed in a post-seminar meeting.

2. Dr. Lee gave an invited lecture on QSM at Samsung Medical Center. Several (>10) medical doctors in the field of neurology attended. Hopefully meaningful MD-PhD collaboration may come out of this meeting, leveraging facilities and expertise on quantitative MRI at CNIR.

3. The ICMRI conference is shaping up to be a good one, to be held in just one week. The organizing committee met for the last time in Seoul, to go through the last items (such as number of poster awards) to be discussed before the meeting. The registrant count is approximately 850, although more than half got free registration. About 100 registered are from outside Korea. An unfortunate news was an announcement from several invited Chinese researchers that they will boycott the meeting this time, due to national political issues.

Use of human MRI grows sharply

The 3T MRI scanner at the N Center has recently found an exploding number of users filling up the calendar for several weeks in advance. For one thing, the scanner was broken in January and had to be tested and fixed for weeks, causing backlog of scans now being rushed to complete. That repair, by the way, was due to the famous Prisma 80/200 gradient coil failing from the inside; it was claimed to be an isolated incident but if so we were very unlucky. For another, the use was driven by brain function researchers from inside and outside of our Center, doing volunteers studies ranging from pain response to learning response. Research on demand also includes animal brain studies, imaging for which is harder to prepare and also cumbersome to clean up. Overall, the scanner is fully booked during business hours and approximately 25% booked off-hours. So, Dr. Lee and Ms. Yoo teamed up on 3/1, a National Holiday, to do some volunteers scans. Ms. Yoo was scanned first, and a fresh volunteer of her age was scanned later in the day. These scans will add to the data to be presented in the ISMRM 2017 Meeting in Honolulu (hopefully).

Class of 2017

 

Thirty one BME undergraduate students have been newly admitted for the 2017 school year --The Class of 2017, by admission, was warmly welcomed by the department faculty, staff, and senior students on the Thursday 2/16 orientation event in the N Center. The students were then bussed to a small resort island called Jebudo (pictures above), about one-hour drive west of Suwon, for a student-only welcoming party. Student-only except that several "adults" had to accompany them for supervision. Dr. Lee was one of them, along with Dr. Kim H and administrative staff members, to have a chance to talk with the new students. The impression -- well, they are well-behaved. 

With the newcomers, the undergrad student body size at SKKU BME just about doubled, taking into account many vacancies left by older students serving in the military. With fresh faces soon looking into research opportunities, the labs at the N Center will undoubtedly become more vivid.

CNIR all-hands meeting and newcomers

Several new graduate students to the BME department and CNIR were introduced at a monthly all-hands meeting today. Out of six introduced, three were not-so-new; they did summer internship in 2016 and must have liked the Center enough to come to study here. Seulki was of course one of the returning students. Welcome! Among other things discussed were updates on Siemens Research Agreement and the 7T plan. On both fronts there have been much progress in the past few weeks, and according to Dr. Kim the breakthroughs on the two ends are likely related. It turns out that there is suddenly a very high likelihood that CNIR will have regular research access to "some" 7T scanner in about a year. Such development is likely to significantly benefit future talent hiring.

Frozen Suwon

Suwon in January is quite chilly. The "ecology lake" next to the N center has its watermill frozen. On the 3rd floor balcony of the N center, somebody made a Frozen snowman facing the faculty lounge.
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New Year Travels

From this year, the blog entries will be written in the 3rd person voice to reflect multiple (official and unofficial) members of the lab. The lab here will consist of Dr. Lee and his direct reports.

Dr. Lee is visiting upstate New York for a few weeks for vacation and for a visit to his former institute, GE Global Research Center. He talked to all the (>10) members in the MRI Laboratory at GRC on Jan. 6th about future collaboration between SKKU/CNIR and GE. A couple of potential avenues of collaboration were identified in the fields of QSM and ZTE imaging.

Seon ha Hwang is visiting San Francisco as part of her Creative School student award. Congratulations!

Seulki Yoo is traveling in Europe to celebrate her graduation from college and for a refreshment before start of her graduate work in the lab. Happy new year!