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.