2018 KSMRM PhD Workshop

Last weekend the KSMRM PhD workshop was held in KBSI in Ochang, the same place as last year. This time the participants were limited to PhDs and the talks were generally lengthier. Even without students there were a good number of participants to make the sessions feel well-attended and well-prepared. The first day had sessions organized by Molecular Imaging study group and the Advanced MRI study group, and the MR Engineering session was held on the second day. For the lab, the MRE session was particularly useful and relevant, featuring RF technologies for ultra-high field MRI, presented by 3 speakers from the 3 institutes currently having a 7T human scanner in Korea. 

MR microscopy with human 3T MRI

The topic of MR microscopy is an old one. However, the IBS CNIR is uniquely positioned to put such a technique to good use, with numerous occasions to need multi-modality (optical and magnetic) imaging of ex vivo tissue samples from a variety of animals. In that regard, we have been looking into making an RF coil that is particularly suited to image thin flat objects, such as a brain slice mounted on a glass slide. Such a coil is known as "histology coil" and was developed originally by the Penn State group several years ago. Now students from Gachon University, working as undergraduate interns in the lab, made one such coil tuned at 123.25 MHz for use in our 3T MRI machine. The picture above shows a 40 um-think rat brain slice imaged at 3T with the special coil. It is impressive that although the imaging time was a good fraction of an hour, one can image such a thin slice in a human MRI scanner. Surely this will improve at 7T, 9.4T and higher which are all available in our building. This raises hope that we can soon produce research quality images of histology samples and push it for quantitative MR parameter mapping, and pursue other fun (crazy) research ideas.

Autumn is here! and events of the month

Autumn colors have descended on the SKKU Natural Sciences Campus. The semester is half done and from tomorrow begins the midterm exam week. Unlike the past couple of years, October this year has been relatively calm in the N Center without large center-wide events. A few things that have happened earlier this month are as follows. In reverse chronological order,

- October 20th (Sat): KSMRM's annual MRI training day for medical doctors was held in Catholic University St. Mary's Hospital in Seoul. Dr. Lee SK gave a lecture on k space. In all, 12 educational talks were delivered by the PhDs in each area of MRI.

- October 19th (Fri): Samsung Medical Center held the 5th Joint Symposium on Radiology with the Osaka University in Japan. This was held at the Cancer Center building of SMC, Seoul, and Dr. Lee SK gave a talk on 7T MRI at SKKU.

- October 15th (Mon): KSMRM staff gathered at a restaurant near the Seoul Train Station to discuss organizing a PhD-only workshop in November.

- October 4th (Thurs): The biannual graduate school open-house event took place in the main library and at the N Center. Student turnout for the BME department was similar to the last year (between 10 and 20).

SMC neurology team visit

A team of medical doctors from the SMC Neurology department visited the SKKU Suwon campus as part of the biannual collaboration meeting between SMC and CNIR. After short presentations by Dr. EH Baek and Dr. YM Sohn, the participants exchanged ideas on mutual collaboration in the fields of ex-vivo high resolution MRI of post operation tissue specimens and human 7T structural MRI using the Terra scanner at SKKU. The meeting proceeded over a working dinner in the 3rd floor meeting room, followed by a tour of the 7T magnet room where the head coil installation and patient table motion were demonstrated. There appears to be much potential for new research directions involving 7T. From today's discussion, high resolution imaging of cerebellum and hippocampus could be one of the first clinical research targets.

Memorandum of Understanding

New semester started with an external event involving official launching of the human 7T MRI scanner facility. The event was held on Friday 9/7 at the N Center with the University President and the Siemens senior management in attendance. Many students in the BME department's MRI research labs were also present. The event was covered in the school and public media as shown here. Apart from external exposure, the event provided an opportunity for the university and industry leaders to meet one another, and motivate young students to conduct their research in human MRI at SKKU.

7T MRI scanner user training

On August 1-3, Siemens provided a 3 day hands-on training for the general users of the 7T Terra system. Led by Dr. Ioannis Giapitzakis and Mr. Jongmoon Hahm, the educational sessions held in the N Center were well attended and helpful. The training consisted of a couple of lectures on high-field MR safety and principles, and demonstrations and practices on the center's new 7T scanner with plenty of user-instructor interactions. The system is currently not approved (by the Korean government) for routine patient scans, nor is yet cleared for research use on human subjects by the SKKU's institutional review board. So this time, the training included scans only on phantoms. What was particularly useful was detailed explanation/demo on general features of the scanner's user interface, which in large part are common between the 3T and the 7T scanners in the Center. This gave a chance to clear/resolve some of the doubts about scanner operation that many people have had before. The training sessions will continue when human scans are approved for either research or clinical use. For now animal and phantom scans can proceed without much delay. It does appear that the 7T system is well constructed for basic-level scans as a commercial product. It is noted that features and functions from the 3T scanner are relatively seamlessly transferred to the 7T system, to the benefit of both the users and the manufacturer.

Summer Intership concluded

The 2018 CNIR/BME summer internship program was concluded on Friday 7/20, with a poster presentation by about 10 students/student pairs. For the lab, the summer project ended up being not one of the titles suggested in the previous web log, but was on gradient waveform changes according to peripheral nerve stimulation (PNS) control. This was fruitful, and the students, Seul LEE and Doyeon KIM, liked the project. This has a potential for a local/international MRI conference presentation, and perhaps a quick journal publication after more data be collected. The other teams also appear to have achieved something presentable, given the overall quality and content of the other posters. In the MRI-related projects, there were numerical validation of accelerated imaging (SMASH, GRAPPA), and lung image segmentation and respiratory gating tool development, all in Matlab. Good job and congratulations to all the summer students!

ISMRM conference at Paris

The 26th Annual Meeting of ISMRM was held in Paris, France, from 6/16 to 6/21. Many students and researchers from SKKU attended the meeting to enjoy the summer days in the popular western European destination and network with global friends. From the lab, Ms. Seulki Yoo presented a (paper) poster as well as a short oral presentation in the Electromagnetic Properties Study group on her habenula QSM research. Dr. Lee presented an e-Poster on multi-orientation B1 mapping. The MRM editorial board meeting was held on Tuesday 6/19 where the journal's latest status was presented/discussed by Dr. Bernstein. In the MRM deputy editors' luncheon event, Peter Barker (Johns Hopkins) and Peter Jezzard (Oxford), both of whom had attended the icMRI conference in Seoul in March, appreciated their stay in Korea as being very positive. It appeared that this year's ISMRM conference was well attended and much liked by many attendees. Particularly useful were several "Member-initiated symposia" on timely topics: QSM, PNS, portable MRI, and others.

Spring semester wrap-up

The first semester of 2018 will officially end in a week, and today marks the beginning of the final exam week. Many things have happened in the past 16 weeks, in the lab, which include:
- A paper draft is (finally) written on head-tilted human 3T MRI.
- A paper on MR-based material susceptibility measurement by SH Hwang is under revision, with iMRI.
- Data taking and analysis are nearly finished with headache patients' QSM study, and a manuscript will soon be drafted by Dr. Miji Lee of SMC.
- Seulki was selected to give a 2 min presentation at the ISMRM study group next week in Paris.
- The new lab at 86310 now has major equipment pieces, including a dielectric analysis kit, a 3 axis Hall probe, and two network analyzers and a spectrum analyzer.
Let the summer begin, and may the students have fun and fruitful time in the lab before the next semester starts!

Summer Undergraduate Internship Project Options

For those students who are interested in applying for the Summer Internship at SKKU-BME, the following projects were what was carried out in the past.
2016.
(1) Using 3 Tesla human MRI, investigate the appearance of human deep brain structure (in particular, habenula) with magnetic susceptibility contrast.
(2) Make an "L" shaped phantom to measure the magnetic susceptibility of unknown liquid using magnetic resonance frequency shift.
2017.
(1) Apply susceptibility weighted imaging (SWI) to visualize human habenula at 3T.
(2) Use Sim4Life simulation software to calculate electric and magnetic fields in a numerical phantom, for the purpose of testing Nachman's formula in MR-based electrical properties tomography.
Options for 2018.
(1) Continue with the "L" phantom experiment, with a custom-made, inductively coupled RF coil and investigate the temperature dependence of susceptibility.
=> Can make a journal paper
(2) Continue the Sim4Life simulation for an actual experimental phantom, to be compared with experimental determination of E- and B- vector field using MRI.
(3) Continuation of nuclear susceptibility shift, to apply it to phase-based T1 measurement.
=> "Feasibility of phase-based rapid T1 measurement using NSS"
(4) Extension of susceptibility-to-B0 forward calculation code for anisotropic susceptibility

Seminars and visits in April

Among many things that have happened in the month of April, here are the more notable ones:

• 2018 Fall semester graduate school admission fair was held on April 4-5. A few students expressed interest in GBME graduate school for research in MRI. The department-wide introduction session in the N Center was attended by about 20 prospective students.
• Dr. Lee gave a lecture on 7T MRI to medical doctors at SMC, in what was called RGR: Radiology Grand Round, on April 10th.
• Dr. Sukhoon Oh from KBSI visited the N Center on April 19th, to give a seminar to the GBME undergraduate students on 7T MRI.
• Dr. Lee visited Seoul National University on April 20th, to deliver a lecture on gradient coil technologies, invited by Prof. Jongho Lee at SNU Electrical engineering. There was a discussion with Prof. Han S-R on possibly building a new MRI machine using new high Tc superconductor technologies.
• Midterm exam for the BME Electromagnetics was held on April 25th.

ISMRM Workshop and KSMRM/icMRI in Seoul

This past week was a busy one for the Korean MRI community. The first 3 days were for a specially organized ISMRM-sponsored workshop in advance neuroimaging, held in Yeoksam-dong, Seoul. Then the next 3 days were for the annual meeting of KSMRM, also known as the International Congress on MRI (ICMRI), at a usual venue of Grand Hilton Hotel in Hongeun-dong, Seoul. Both research conferences were a success, with good turnout of registered audience and top-notch presentations from accomplished researchers. The SKKU MRI lab, MRI-CIEL, was well represented in the MR engineering sessions of ICMRI. Seon-ha Hwang made her debut! in an academic conference by smoothly delivering a 2 min pitch in the MR engineering power pitch session.

New-comers and new generation of researchers in the Korean MRI society are now being more visible in their various roles in the society. This seems to promise a continued, healthy growth of the Korean MRI community.

Matlab code for free download

The lab's in-house developed Matlab code for susceptibility-induced B0 perturbation was uploaded to the public website for Matlab file exchange. This short code, which was verified in many numerical and phantom experiments over the past year, is the first publicized MRI research tool developed from the lab. For those who are knowledgeable in this subject, most researchers are using k-space-discretized dipolar field convolution for 3D B0 calculation. The proposed method, called generalized susceptibility voxel convolution (gSVC), takes advantage of an analytical formula for the dipolar field from a magnetized rectangular block, and is inherently free from k-space discretization artifacts. Also, its computational speed does not depend on the relative distance between the susceptibility source and the B0 target grids, allowing fast computation for e.g. breathing-induced B0 inhomogeneity in the head. We will see how users out there will respond to the code!

MRM conferences in 2018

Abstract review results were announced on Friday 2/2 for the upcoming Annual Meeting of ISMRM, in Paris. A quick count of the list shows slightly over 6000 abstracts were accepted for presentation. Judging from the submission serial numbers, it appears that possibly as many as 9000 abstracts were submitted (this number likely counts incomplete submissions so the actual number is likely smaller). It seems that this year, the location's popularity has appealed to and attracted more people than in some other years. In Dr. Lee's lab, two abstracts submitted (one on multi-orientation B1 mapping and the other on susceptibility of habenula) were all accepted for poster presentations, which is what was planned. Separately, the Korean Society for MRM is going to hold its annual conference, icMRI, on March 29-31. The conference has just extended its abstract deadline to the 21st of Feb. The lab is submitting 4 student abstracts, all related to B0 inhomogeneity.