High performance neuroimaging conference in Boston

This was the second annual conference on MR neuroimaging and neuroscience enabled by high performance gradient coils. It followed the inaugural meeting at the GE Research center in December 2022, and was held in the Brigham and Women's hospital campus in Boston on Thursday 12/14, hosted by Prof. Carl-Fredrik (CF) Westin. Compared to the last one, the talks this year were more application-oriented than engineering, although there were interesting discussions on the comparison between GE's Magnus and Siemens' Connectome gradient coils. In particular, the current Connectome "2" user, Prof. S. Huang, gave a short talk on her team's experience with the new Siemens system. This helped make the conference take on a more vendor-neutral, academic forum-like atmosphere. Participants from all over the country and even outside (Lund university of Sweden), in addition to dozens (I think) of attendees from the local, BWH-Harvard medical school, appeared to reflect and echo a high level of community interest in high-performance* brain MRI. 

[*Note: High performance in this context means high-performance gradient coils, not necessarily dependent on static fields in excess of 3T. Both Magnus and Connectome gradient coils operate at 3T.]

Year-end party

At the intersection of academia (knowledge) and industry (accountability), 

Embodying diversity and integrity, 

Living impact and not just tallying it, 

Here is the GE Research MRI Lab, with candles lit! 

11.7T in Korea

 11.7T MRI magnet in Song-do, South Korea is at field! Prof. Kyoung-Nam Kim, who kindly provided a tour of the facility, says the field is stable, homogeneous, and the first NMR signal is expected any day. Given the long delay in progress at the French site, this Gacheon University scanner may not be much behind in the race for the first human image at this field. The magnet bore for this system is relatively small (60 cm before gradient), but human imaging is not out of the question if paired with an appropriate insert gradient coil.

DIANA debate in one figure

 This comparison figure from the Minnesota workshop says it all. On one side, Prof. Park (upper image) continues to break ground with new data, and moves DIANA forward with full sincerity, humility, and transparency of a mature scientist; while on the other side, the petty old man (not shown here) is on a negative campaign to undermine the other's credibility with not only malice and selfish intent but also cowardice of hiding behind big names (such as shown here, Dr. Bandettini). I know full well the intention of both sides. Apart from science, this battle cannot be won by the petty old man on a purely moral ground. 

Biennial ultrahigh-field MRI workshop in U. Minnesota

The workshop was held in a small auditorium/lecture room from Oct 12-14, with remote listen-in allowed for paid registrants. Remote attendance option in many such occasions is a notable positive change since the pandemic. The morning session of the second day covered MRI systems engineering, providing opportunity to hear about latest development or lack thereof from a few well-known speakers. My summary from the first 4 talks of the session is:

1. The French 11.74T system has identified resistive 3rd order shim coils coupling to the gradient coils as the primary source of image artifacts. They also found that other UHF MRI systems employing the same (Siemens SC72) gradient coil exhibited similar behavior. I am sure this will spur much discussion on the coupling issues, potentially exacerbated by vibration, between various non-RF coils in MRI.

2. Baby MRI researcher at 7T reported successful use of MR-based electrical properties tomography to estimate permittivity of infant brains.

3. Siemens's most powerful head-only gradient coils were apparently designed in Massachusetts General Hospital. The presenter incorrectly said that BEM is the industry standard method of gradient coil design. He also repeated what I think is a misleading statement that their design reduced PNS - peripheral nerve stimulation - in 4 out of 5 scan positions tested. The statement gives an impression that the 5 positions were selected randomly, while I believe they selected lowest-risk ones.

4. Brian Rutt continues to work with Minnesota team to provide a head-only gradient coil to fit inside a whole-body gradient coil that is in Minnesota's 10.5T scanner. He covered a broad range of topics including Comsol-based MGI simulation. He talked about an ultimate head gradient coil (reducing both PNS and MGI) as a work-in-progress.

The first day's schedule included Prof. Jang-Yeon Park's DIANA talk. I missed that one, but hope that the DIANA work will overcome a flurry of ego-driven criticisms (particularly instigated by one sore, petty old man) and be known for its true potential.

PS. The Workshop organizers kindly made recordings of presentations and Q&A available on-line until Nov. 9th. In the recording, Peter Bandettini was not being objective - he was politely but clearly siding with the petty man. It wasn't like him when he said "how can a higher-field be worse?", and when he repeatedly said a real signal will ALWAYS show up as number of averages goes up. It is unbelievable that a person with his expertise said something so obviously non-obvious so confidently. Fortunately two people from the audience brought these points up, and predictably he could not give a clear answer. Something is not right here. In a sense, I saw hope.

University of Wisconsin, Madison

University of Wisconsin-Madison is about to be the latest site to have the GE Magnus gradient system for 3T human brain imaging. As of now the scanner is being installed in the Waisman center which is home to UW Madison's developmental and neurodegenerative brain research. The Center, established in 1973, has just celebrated its 50th anniversary. Hopefully this latest brain imager developed by GE Research will help usher in another exciting half century of cutting-edge research at Waisman.

[PS] Tom Foo's LinkedIn page:

 https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7113495889494568961/

News from Univ. Iowa MRI center

The MRI Research Facility of University of Iowa (Director: Prof. Vince Magnotta) had the following LinkedIn post regarding the latest addition to their high-performance research MRI fleet.

(11) Post | Feed | LinkedIn

This is the first installation of the GE-developed MAGNUS 3T head-only system in a university. The next, at University of Wisconsin-Madison, is coming up in September. More news to come!

Great meeting and not-so-great moments in Toronto

 Last time when the conference was held without fear of virus was 2019 -- 4 years ago! Naturally, therefore, the ISMRM annual meeting in Toronto was teeming with smiles and laughter, excitements and curiosity. While fully in-person, the conference allowed on-line participation in oral sessions, many of which were also recorded live for off-hour viewing. Such recording effectively allowed to circumvent the limitation of massively parallel sessions. The general organization of the meeting, on the other hand, left some room for improvement, something to be desired. Maybe the committee needs a little bit of time to catch up and adjust in the post-Covid conferencing environment? A few not-so-great things that come to my mind were the following.

- Session assignment for some abstracts was questionable. For example, a magnet development poster (compact 7T, #4586) was put in an RF coils section.

- Three of my poster presentations (#4560, 4566, 4569), were put into a single, one-hour digital poster session.

- Digital poster presentation using muted pre-recorded video was difficult and annoying. A ppt file should have been available for viewing and presentation instead.

- Navigating digital poster session floor was very difficult. There was no easy way to match computer numbers (displayed physically) and program numbers (how citations were done).

- Moderator instruction/guideline was inadequate. A first-time moderator would not have known what to do. A clearer guidance should have been given regarding handling of questions submitted on-line.

[PS] In terms of fear of virus, unfortunately several participants that I know got COVID during/after the conference. The new reality defined by the pandemic certainly made itself known this time.

Toronto on line!

 The ISMRM abstracts and videos were published (link to proceedings) on May 19, two weeks before the conference. Those who have registration email + password can view the author-uploaded video recordings for orals, power pitches, and digital posters. I have three first-authored poster presentations in one, 1 hr session on Wednesday. The ability to view the videos in advance and off the schedule is particularly beneficial in this case. Each of the 3 screen captures above corresponds to a 6~7 min recording. Looking forward to the event in Toronto!

Iowa city and Rochester, MN

 University of Iowa is in Iowa City, and is 190 miles south of Rochester, MN. The former is soon to have the latest high-performance head gradient coil called MAGNUS, and the latter is the home of the world's first and only compact 3T human scanner made by GE Global Research. I travelled to both places in the past week. The biomedical building of Univ. of Iowa, called Papajohn Biomedical Discovery Building, is similar in many ways to the N Center in SKKU, albeit at a larger scale. It was built in 2014 with private and state funding, and houses a Neuroscience research center and a Biomedical imaging center, along with a few others related to medical research. Its MR Research Facility (https://medicine.uiowa.edu/mri/equipment-information) has Signa 7T and Premier 3T human MRI scanners (both by GE), as well as a 7T animal MRI scanner. Hopefully the new MAGNUS installation will further strengthen the Iowa-GE research partnership.

Educational video for submission and for the public

It took many tens of hours to prepare materials for and give final touches to creating a 3 min video! I finally uploaded a short video to explain the concept and experiments on high-field magnetic damping:  https://vimeo.com/826393926?share=copy. This was motivated by "Magnetic Moments" competition at this year's ISMRM meeting in June, but the recording is useful regardless of the competition outcome. (And uploading in a personal site is permitted.) Maybe this is one way to capture "Intellectual Moments" and preserve them in the digital world for the posterity.

Publishing MR engineering papers on an (applied) physics journal

Finally the Green's function paper was published in Journal of Applied Physics. This is the second time I am publishing here, following the magnetic Johnson noise paper of 2008 which has been quite popular. This time, the manuscript was originally intended for and submitted to IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, but it was rejected there in the hands of reviewers from the traditional MR engineering community. As an aside, I should start a website that posts rejected papers along with the rejection comments. It will showcase some egregious peer reviews. Anyway, publishing in JAP for the first time in 15 years made me realize a few things.

(1) The journal's management seems to have been improved (although my memory of 2008 is faint), with fast processing and reasonable editorial policies (e.g., manuscript formatting). I can see the efforts by the journal (or publisher) to promote citation ("automatically recommend your paper to 10 people"), increase revenue (pdf file now has first-page advertisement), and prevent illegal mirror sites (watermark on the right side of every page) 

(2) The journal layout and fonts are generally very readable and agreeable. The equations are definitely looking nicer than in say NeuroImage, and the word count per page is suitable for equation-heavy contents.

(3) Most importantly, the review focus was more on technical/methodological rigor than historical context and application prospects. In a sense this is akin to the approach of say Scientific Reports, but without collection of a publication charge.

Overall, applied physics journals appear to be a good vehicle for MR physics and engineering papers in an era of proliferating APC's (article processing charges) and dubious peer reviews.

ISMRM 2023 abstract announcement

 The ISMRM conference committee has announced abstract acceptance decision on 2/2. The full list of accepted abstracts appeared to contain about 5300 entries, which seems to be a bit smaller in number than previous years. The three abstracts that I submitted were all accepted as a digital poster, in sessions on Wednesday June 7th. Among co-authored submissions, the 2nd-order shim coil-based concomitant field correction abstract was accepted for oral presentation (first-authored by Dr. Ajala). This year the oral presentations will be given only 6 min to finish, which is the same length as the digital poster presentation recordings. Despite reduction in presentation lengths, it does not appear that the number of orals was significantly increased. Shortening of orals may reflect shorter attention spans of modern-day researchers, or simply echoes the organizers' efforts to more democratize the conference given difficulty in judging relative significance of many research submissions on ever-diversifying topics.

Who is citing CIEL?

 I will occasionally feature recent citations to the papers published in the past by the CIEL team. Today's posting surveys the papers that cite Dr. Yoo's habenula paper (Scientific Reports, Nov 9th,. 2020). As of today, Google Scholar lists 5 entries that cited this work, all from outside CIEL. One is a preprint that is under review in Scientific Reports, and the others are peer-reviewed journal publications. Interestingly, one of them is an Editorial in J. Neuroradiology, an official journal of the French Society of Neuroradiology (SFNR). Overall, the citations were made with significant and specific contexts. Barely two years after the publication, this work seems to receive substantial recognition from the scientific community. Full lists and links can be found in Google Scholar.

1. Wang 2022, Quant Imaging Med Surg “Alterations in brain iron deposition with progression of late-life depression measured by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-based quantitative susceptibility mapping”: This is a human QSM study where the habenula was included in the study design. Yoo et al., appears as ref. 88 (out of 89), in the discussion section, where tissue heterogeneity is mentioned as a source of limitation in their study.

2. Sarkar 2023, Spectroscopy Letters (not free) “Soft X-ray and susceptibility based magnetic resonance imaging to map iron distribution in apples: initial results to model iron storage in water-deficient or dehydrated biological tissue”: 

In this article, Yoo et al., is the 6th out of 35 references. Full text is behind a paywall, but judging from the reference list available from “researchgate.net”, it may have been cited as an example of how susceptibility biomarkers are used in MRI research.

3. Chen 2022, Front Neurosci “Chronic social defeat stress caused region-specific oligodendrogenesis impairment in adolescent mice”: Here Yoo et al., is cited prominently at the beginning of a paragraph in the discussion section introducing the anatomy and function of the habenula.

4. Milotta 2022 (under review in Scientific Reports) “In vivo multi-parameter mapping of the habenula using MRI”: Yoo et al. is #20 out of 43 references. In addition, the CIEL team’s 2017 ISMRM abstract on habenula QSM (with Dr. Anup Bidesi!) is also cited, as #21. The context of citation is limited prior research on habenula QSM. Yoo et al. was cited at least twice, and the second citation accompanied detailed mention of its research outcome (need for high resolution, and Hb susceptibility gradient).

5. Pyatigorskaya 2021, J Neuroradiol. (Editorial) “QSM as a new powerful tool for clinical practice in neuroimaging”: This is the first to cite Yoo et al., and it did so in an Editorial. Interestingly, it also cited Bulumulla et al (2012, CMR-B), where I was the second author. Yoo et al., is #11 out of 29. The citation was used to highlight how QSM allows better habenula visualization in MRI, and thus can help DBS.