icMRI 2017

ICMRI 2017 (Official Scientific Meeting of Korean Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine) was a big success. Total participant count was 1023, a record high and 20% increase from the last year. This is despite boycotts from several Chinese speakers at the last minute. The conference organizers did a good job in putting together a very respectable international conference. The English-speaking sessions were significantly increased from the last year. From SKKU-CNIR, Mr. Hwang Byung-jae won the best oral presentation award--Congratulations! Several new faces in the Korean MRI research community made their debut this year.

Week of March 13

Here are a few updates for this week:

1. Dr. Jeong Geun-Hong, a Professor and an army officer from the Korea Military Academy 육사 , gave a talk on his research in the Pines Lab at UC Berkeley. A very interesting case, he got his PhD at Berkeley while being a soldier, supported by the Korean government scholarship. His research involved a characteristic, novel, Pines lab-type of work, combining concepts of optical magnetic resonance and hyperpolarization. Strategies for a viable research collaboration with our center were discussed in a post-seminar meeting.

2. Dr. Lee gave an invited lecture on QSM at Samsung Medical Center. Several (>10) medical doctors in the field of neurology attended. Hopefully meaningful MD-PhD collaboration may come out of this meeting, leveraging facilities and expertise on quantitative MRI at CNIR.

3. The ICMRI conference is shaping up to be a good one, to be held in just one week. The organizing committee met for the last time in Seoul, to go through the last items (such as number of poster awards) to be discussed before the meeting. The registrant count is approximately 850, although more than half got free registration. About 100 registered are from outside Korea. An unfortunate news was an announcement from several invited Chinese researchers that they will boycott the meeting this time, due to national political issues.

Use of human MRI grows sharply

The 3T MRI scanner at the N Center has recently found an exploding number of users filling up the calendar for several weeks in advance. For one thing, the scanner was broken in January and had to be tested and fixed for weeks, causing backlog of scans now being rushed to complete. That repair, by the way, was due to the famous Prisma 80/200 gradient coil failing from the inside; it was claimed to be an isolated incident but if so we were very unlucky. For another, the use was driven by brain function researchers from inside and outside of our Center, doing volunteers studies ranging from pain response to learning response. Research on demand also includes animal brain studies, imaging for which is harder to prepare and also cumbersome to clean up. Overall, the scanner is fully booked during business hours and approximately 25% booked off-hours. So, Dr. Lee and Ms. Yoo teamed up on 3/1, a National Holiday, to do some volunteers scans. Ms. Yoo was scanned first, and a fresh volunteer of her age was scanned later in the day. These scans will add to the data to be presented in the ISMRM 2017 Meeting in Honolulu (hopefully).

Class of 2017

 

Thirty one BME undergraduate students have been newly admitted for the 2017 school year --The Class of 2017, by admission, was warmly welcomed by the department faculty, staff, and senior students on the Thursday 2/16 orientation event in the N Center. The students were then bussed to a small resort island called Jebudo (pictures above), about one-hour drive west of Suwon, for a student-only welcoming party. Student-only except that several "adults" had to accompany them for supervision. Dr. Lee was one of them, along with Dr. Kim H and administrative staff members, to have a chance to talk with the new students. The impression -- well, they are well-behaved. 

With the newcomers, the undergrad student body size at SKKU BME just about doubled, taking into account many vacancies left by older students serving in the military. With fresh faces soon looking into research opportunities, the labs at the N Center will undoubtedly become more vivid.

CNIR all-hands meeting and newcomers

Several new graduate students to the BME department and CNIR were introduced at a monthly all-hands meeting today. Out of six introduced, three were not-so-new; they did summer internship in 2016 and must have liked the Center enough to come to study here. Seulki was of course one of the returning students. Welcome! Among other things discussed were updates on Siemens Research Agreement and the 7T plan. On both fronts there have been much progress in the past few weeks, and according to Dr. Kim the breakthroughs on the two ends are likely related. It turns out that there is suddenly a very high likelihood that CNIR will have regular research access to "some" 7T scanner in about a year. Such development is likely to significantly benefit future talent hiring.

Frozen Suwon

Suwon in January is quite chilly. The "ecology lake" next to the N center has its watermill frozen. On the 3rd floor balcony of the N center, somebody made a Frozen snowman facing the faculty lounge.
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New Year Travels

From this year, the blog entries will be written in the 3rd person voice to reflect multiple (official and unofficial) members of the lab. The lab here will consist of Dr. Lee and his direct reports.

Dr. Lee is visiting upstate New York for a few weeks for vacation and for a visit to his former institute, GE Global Research Center. He talked to all the (>10) members in the MRI Laboratory at GRC on Jan. 6th about future collaboration between SKKU/CNIR and GE. A couple of potential avenues of collaboration were identified in the fields of QSM and ZTE imaging.

Seon ha Hwang is visiting San Francisco as part of her Creative School student award. Congratulations!

Seulki Yoo is traveling in Europe to celebrate her graduation from college and for a refreshment before start of her graduate work in the lab. Happy new year!