2019 year-end photo opportunities

Year-end parties for the department, IBS-CNIR, and the MRI laboratory provided photo opportunities in the latter half of December. Jun-Ho Kim, in particular, was featured in a university research news for his work on spherical phantoms, which also appeared in an external media.

Meeting with GBME undergraduate students

The medical devices faculty of the GBME department held an undergraduate student Q&A session on Friday Dec 20 in a meeting room at the N Center. About 25 students attended, a majority being freshmen, with strong interest to share questions and concerns about their academic and career matters with peers and the faculty. The session was the first of the kind in the department, and was run smoothly thanks to the very helpful advices, candid answers, and supportive comments from the professors including the department chair Jang-Yeon Park. It is hoped that this meeting would stimulate more dialogues in the future between the students and the faculty of the department, as the department moves forward into its 6th year of foundation in 2020.

KSMRM year-end meeting in Gwangju

A workshop and social gathering took place on December 6-7 in Gwangju, Jeollanam-do, celebrating the year's end among the PhD members of the Korean Society of the Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. Well-known for the exquisite culinary selections and traditions, the city of Gwangju was very well-received by the participants as an excellent choice for the venue of this event. A special thanks goes to Prof. Il-Woo Park, of Chonnam University, who took care of all the logistics of the two-day meeting. The workshop was held in a conference room inside the Chonnam University Hospital campus, and covered research lectures (Prof. Sung-Hong Park and others), society journal (iMRI) updates (Prof. Jaeseok Park), and discussions on next year's medical device funding from the Korean government (Prof. Yong-Min Chang). About 20 PhDs took part in the event, and had a good time exchanging professional information and personal greetings.

US military funding agency visit

A very interesting meeting was held on Friday, Nov 15th at the N Center, between the BME/CNIR researchers and delegates from the US military research funding agencies. The visitors represented all three services of the US armed force -- Air Force, Navy and Army. Many were based outside US, notably in Japan. Apparently they were on their way to visit a few different research institutes in Korea to promote funding opportunities for international collaboration and research support in basic sciences. A 45 min meeting with the PIs in the N Center was followed by a tour of the CNIR facilities, led by the Department Chairman Prof. J-Y Park. Kindly, Prof. J-W Son arranged the whole visit and drove many of the guests from Seoul to the SKKU campus in the morning. 

IBS Conference on Neuroimaging

A second IBS conference hosted by CNIR was held on Oct 11-12 in the Chemistry building on the SKKU campus in Suwon. The conference was funded by the IBS to host many renowned speakers from the US, Canada, Japan, and Europe. With famous names and free registration, the conference was well attended by local and domestic students and researchers. The 2-day conference was followed by the CNIR's annual Scientific Advisory Board meeting on Oct 14-15 at the N Center.

5th International Workshop on MRI phase contrast and QSM

Yonsei University hosted the 5th QSM conference on Sept 25~28. The meeting featured many "stars" in the field as speakers and discussion leaders, and was run very efficiently in a friendly environment on a convenient location at the heart of Seoul. The two organizers, Profs Jong-ho Lee and Dong-hyun Kim, should be credited for their hard work and effective fundraising. The CIEL lab graduate students attended the conference in full, with two posters presented on QSM in humans and phantoms. A few impressions from the conference are:

- There were no major new QSM processing methods announced.
- QSM recon challenge "rev 2" took a step back from the previous one, by using synthetic data instead of in-vivo real data, recognizing challenge in finding the ground truth.
- Much discussion was devoted to effects of micro-structure on QSM.
- Anisotropy was a popular discussion point.
- R2* and TKD method are not dying, for their artifact robustness.
- EPT (Electrical Properties Tomography) was all but covered by just one invited session. Although the tutorial lectures by U Katscher, JK Seo and others were very informative, EPT was a relatively minor component in the conference.

The 10th Annual Scientific Symposium on Ultrahigh-field MRI was held in Berlin, Germany yesterday. As Robin Heidemann summarized as the final speaker of the one-day workshop, the meeting was held on a beautiful campus with fine food and excellent presentations. It was run in a highly friendly and informal atmosphere, yet was run quite professionally. Eye-catching were the lecture room names (Axon, Synapse, Dentrit) of the building, and a grand piano that was actually played between sessions by the hosting researchers IN the lecture room. Scientifically, the symposium covered human and animal MRI at 7T and higher, with about half-and-half split between technical and clinical works. Some of the notable topics discussed were: thermal MRI (Berlin group), 10.5 T human body images (Minnesota), and prospect of 14T MRI (Mark Ladd). Siemens appears to be working on new gradient coils and higher power gradient amplifiers (between 2 and 3 MW). A good question: How can meetings like this happen in SKKU, where presenters and organizers are happy, enjoying and proud of their work, and focusing on information and not person?

Summer 2019 winding down

Hot summer days are finally giving way to cool air and the university's summer vacation has officially come to an end today. The Lab did not take summer interns during the official intern program weeks, but instead had Ms. Do-yeun Kim from last year continue her work in the lab part-time for 5 weeks. To send her off, and to celebrate the first publication by the GBME undergraduates in an international journal (PlosOne), the Lab had a party on Wednesday 8/28 at a popular restaurant overlooking the Baek-Woon lake in the city of Ui-wang.

On the research front, what we did in the summer includes:
(1) So-Hee Lee completed the monkey-brain spherical phantom, which can now be imaged for many hours (>6) in a row in the 7T scanner for high resolution imaging at multiple orientations.
(2) Hyeong-Seop Kim improved the surface coil for multi-orientation B1 mapping on a cylindrical phantom, which is now more robust against rotations and placements of cables.
(3) Byeong-Pahn Song is finishing up collecting data for a short Note publication on the inductively coupled histology coil.
(4) Seulki Yoo has made progress on Habenula QSM paper. A part of it, the ROI dependence, was submitted for poster presentation at the 5th International Workshop on QSM and Phase Contrast in September.
(5) In collaboration with Prof. JY Park, a kick-off meeting was held on DIANA fMRI, and a long-overdue revision of Jeongtaek Lee's radial recon paper was finally submitted to Scientific Reports.

End of the semester, Spring 2019

The spring semester is officially over as of today, June 21. Many undergraduate students were busy with final exams in the past couple of weeks, and summer programs will start from next week including the 4-week internship program of the BME department. In the Lab, the semester had a few good news:
- Grant of Korean government funding for Multi-orientation B1 mapping (from March), and Direct Imaging of Neuronal Activity with MRI (from June, led by Prof. JY Park).
- Admission of two new graduate students (HS Kim and BP Song).
- Positive responses to the spherical phantom paper submitted to PLoS One.
- Good representations at the icMRI and ISMRM meetings.
The Lab's summer research plan includes wrapping up of human habenula QSM studies, revising the tilt-head B0 manuscript, and writing up a couple of MR engineering works presented at icMRI in March. The undergraduate students will be tasked to work on gradient coil PNS simulation using Comsol and Sim4Life.

ISMRM 2019

The 27th Annual Scientific Meeting of the ISMRM was held in Montreal last week. From the lab, Ms. Lee SH and Ms. Yoo SK each presented a digital poster and Dr. Lee SK gave a 30 min lecture on MR systems engineering. The conference hall is familiar to old-timers since there was another ISMRM meeting in 2011 in the same place. The climate was pleasant and the dining options were excellent. One of the (personal) highlights was that GE officially unveiled the compact head-only 3T scanner, dubbed ESP, as a research-only, made-to-order scanner. Abstracts related to what the Lab is working on included: (1) high temporal resolution eddy current imaging (Xiaohong Joe Zhou), (2) habenula MRI at 3T (Haacke), and (3) B0 simulation for head motion (Bowtell).

Visit from GRC

Tom Foo and Desmond Yeo from GE Global Research Center visited the SKKU Suwon campus on 5/3 Friday. Tom, a Chief scientist at the 120 year-old research center in upstate New York, gave a short presentation on the latest MRI technologies being developed at GRC to the students in the Lab. Desmond, a Technology leader at the MRI and Superconducting magnet laboratory, helped answer questions from the students, before taking a short campus tour together with Tom and Dr. Lee SK. The discussions also touched upon combined MR and ultrasound imaging technology. Prof. Jinhyoung Park joined the discussion later in the presentation session and exchanged ideas for potential GE-SKKU collaboration for Korean government funding. Overall, the short GRC visit was very productive and helpful to the students, while being comfortably casual. 

ICMRI 2019 and Awards

The 2019 International Congress on MRI (ICMRI 2019) was held in Seoul, from March 28th to 30th. Five research posters were presented from the Lab in the conference in the MR Engineering session, and Dr. Lee SK presented a talk on 7T MRI at SKKU. The poster by Mr. Hankyeol Lee was selected for the best poster award in the session! And all the participants had a good time together at the conference buffet dinner. Unexpectedly, Seon-Ha Hwang, a recent alumnus of the Lab, got the 1st prize (out of several hundreds!) in the dinner table lucky draw. Separately, Jun-Ho Kim and Jung-Hyun Kim were selected by the SKKU GBME department as the best undergraduate research team for their gelatin phantom work which was presented at this conference. Congratulations to all the award recipients!

MR Engineering posters to be presented at icMRI

The 2019 annual meeting of KSMRM, International Congress on MRI, will be held on March 28 - 30 in Seoul. Five MR Engineering posters will be presented at the meeting by the authors from the Lab. All in the same power pitch session, they are:

• So-Hee Lee et al., Multi-orientation R2* mapping of Intact Ex-vivo Rhesus Monkey Brain at 7T
• Byeongpan Song et al., Inductively Coupled RF coil for Imaging 40 um-thick Histology Sample in a Clinical Scanner
• Hankyeol Lee et al., Real-time imaging of periodically varying electric current in a wire phantom with 4.5 ms temporal resolution
• Jun-Ho Kim et al., Fabrication of a spherical inclusion phantom for validation of magnetic resonance-based magnetic susceptibility imaging
• Hyeong Seop Kim et al., Human 7T multi-channel RF coil development for high-resolution visual cortex imaging

Class of 2019, GBME of SKKU

A small but very significant ceremony was held at the N Center lecture room on Feb 25, to celebrate the graduation from the GBME department of 6 bachelors and several Master's and PhD degree recipients. Of those the highlight was clearly on the small number of graduating seniors who were admitted to SKKU in 2015, as the first class of the newly minted Biomedical Engineering department of the university. Out of thirty who entered, only six graduated but this is not abnormal given the mandatory military service required of the male students. Seonha Hwang, who worked as an undergraduate intern for 3 years with Dr. Lee SK, got the highest GPA and was presented with the summa cum laude award by the Vice President of the university (and on a separate occasion same day in Seoul, also by the President of this 620 year-old university). It was reported that most of the 6 graduating seniors went on to do research at a graduate school (one went to Samsung), although none came to GBME. It is understandable that they could have looked for more established and experienced research labs and departments. GBME is widely expected to grow into one of those places in the near future.

ISMRM meeting presentations scheduled

This year's ISMRM meeting will be held in Montreal, Canada in May. Today the abstract decision was mailed to the first authors (it appears) and the lab's presentation schedule is set. This year, there will be two posters by the two graduate students: Seulki Yoo, on B0 homogeneity improvement by head-tilting, and Sohee Lee, on numerical simulation of B0 variation by respiration. Congratulations to both for being selected for presentation! In addition, Dr. Lee SK will give an invited educational lecture on MR systems overview on Saturday morning. The time table is

• Saturday 8 am: SK Lee, lecture
• Monday 915 am: Sohee Lee, ePoster
• Tuesday 6 pm? : (Maybe Korean night)
• Thursday 7 am: SK Lee moderating in a Sunrise educational session
• Thursday 915 am: Seulki Yoo, ePoster.

Some of our newer, more "crazy" research on 7T ex-vivo and RF-related projects will likely be presented in next year's meeting. We will see!

Yet another breakthrough in gradient technology

The picture above looks like a usual T1-weighted MR image but it was in fact obtained from a highly unusual set of gradient coils which was recently invented by GE. Called Magnus, the gradient coil inserts into a clinical 3T whole-body scanner to boost the imaging speed and gradient encoding power dramatically compared to a conventional scanner. The formal performance metrics are: 200 mT/m and 500 T/m/s, which compare with 80 mT/m and 200 T/m/s for the most expensive clinical scanner available today. What is even more important is that the design of the gradient coil, targeting specifically human head imaging, allows operation near the design limit without human peripheral nerve stimulation, which is known to limit gradient performance in conventional designs. This remarkable achievement was made from a team at GE Global Research in Niskayuna, NY, under a grant from US Department of Defense, and is well on its way to define the next generation of MR neuroimaging hardware. On a brief demo run, the team has shown high b-value (at 2000 s/mm^2) whole-head diffusion imaging with TE of 36 milliseconds!, which compares with a typical TE of over 60 msec in conventional scanners. The new gradient coil is planned to be installed in Walter Reed Military Medical Center in Bethesda, MD (near Washington DC) in the summer.