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.