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?