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).