Same as the last year, the pandemic has forced the ISMRM meeting to be held entirely virtually. An international conference like this suffers from one big problem when it comes to on-line, at-home meeting: the time difference. Basically the sessions ran around the clock, and participants could only join when the time is favorable / manageable to them. Given such shortcomings, it must be said that there were on the other hand a number of advantages in this format. First of all, all activities can be digitized and made to leave trace, so for example one can record who viewed a given poster. Viewer questions on chatting windows are preserved for anyone to see. Recorded talks and videos can be re-viewed as often as one likes. Cost is saved, and one can take part in the meeting while not giving up regular workhours. Meeting data from the two digital posters from the Lab are captured in the picture above. In an interesting session on future jobs in MRI, Yiping Du presented clinical MR physicist jobs in Asia. GE introduced Signa 7T in corporate symposium. Siemens was said to have presented a new powerful 7T head gradient coil. All these can be viewed later, an unexpected benefit of the pandemic situation.
