ISMRM 2022 Abstract announcement

The annual meeting of ISMRM of 2022 will be held from May 7-12 in London, UK. The organizers have announced abstract acceptance results last week. Approximately 5000 abstracts were accepted in various presentation formats. From the work done in 2021 by the CIEL team, the abstract by Seulki Yoo ("Investigation of MR visibility control of water-based (CaTiO3) dielectric padding with iron oxide contrast agent in 7T human brain MRI") was accepted for poster presentation. This interesting work explores a method to reduce MR visibility of water-based dielectric padding, used to improve B1 homogeneity at 7T. We had found that conventional calcium titanium oxide-based padding is often highly visible in T1 weighted images which hindered brain segmentation. Adding commercially available iron nanoparticles to the padding made it completely invisible in T1 images, by virtue of T2* being shortened below ~2 ms. Importantly, the amount of iron needed to do this did not contribute significant susceptibility artifacts, making this method an effective and practical means to "discreetly" address RF homogeneity at 7T.

On the other hand, the more theory-oriented abstract on BOLD signal suppression in DIANA imaging was not accepted. Given the high interest in direct neuronal activity imaging, this decision is somewhat puzzling and disheartening, but it is also true that the whole field is highly competitive and often controversial, so purely theoretical work can be met with high level of skepticism. The work -- a rigorous analysis of how slow-varying pixel amplitude changes translate into (suppressed) dynamic image contrast in 2D k-space line-scan imaging -- will be further refined and packaged for another venue of publication.