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.