Final exam week

The spring semester is nearing the end, and there is no class in the last week (in school calendar) of the semester. The final lecture on Electromagnetics for the BME students was given on Wednesday, with the last topic covered being the Poynting vector. This coming Monday will be the final exam day.

Wrapping up the semester, the senior and junior intern students did a good job in improving the MR-based susceptibility measurement. An improved sample holder, phantom base, and exam protocol were implemented, and over a dozen solid and liquid materials have been characterized. The method/workflow will be useful for future MR engineering projects.

Festivities!

SKKU school festival took place in the past week. The central lawn was packed with students watching concerts and consuming food. The BME undergrad students participated as one of the lawn food vendors on Friday night. The campus and the festival were completely open to anyone who came by to look (yes, security was light, as this part of the world is very, very safe). SKKU international students presented their traditional food and drinks, some even in their traditional clothing, to create a unique and welcome, international atmosphere in an otherwise very ethnically homogeneous town.

Week of May 15-19

The week started off with a very nice weather. The 15th of May was what is known as the "Teachers' day" in Korea. Cakes and flowers were seen here and there on campus on the occasion.
The lab has been following up on two things this week. First, collecting & comparing 7T images from other research sites (Univ. Iowa and Medical College of Wisconsin), and second, setting up QSM protocols for more patient studies from SMC.
Summer internship applications are now being reviewed. We have a total of 40 applicants. Many of them are interested in psychology and biological research. Very few of them showed interest in engineering aspects of MRI, which is a bit disappointing. The IBS center appears to appeal to the students more for its neuroscience studies than MR technology.

On Thursday, Dr. Bruce Pike from University of Calgary visited the Center to give a very nice, informative and understandable special seminar on quantitative fMRI and clinical applications.

ISMRM 2017, April 22-27

The SKKU MR team had a strong showing at this year's ISMRM annual meeting. The conference was well-organized and informative. All proceeding materials were distributed entirely electronically. There was no Friday session. Vendor (GE and Siemens) events appeared to be well attended. The general environment was relaxing and comfortable. The conference location was very good in many ways (climate, room, accessibility). About 5800 abstracts were presented at the meeting.

Undergraduate team project award

Ms. Seonha Hwang and Suzy Lim are selected as one of the 8 undergraduate research teams by the SKKU's Creative School Program. Congratulations! More details will be known later in the week at an information session run by the Program office.

Announcement page at SKKU C-School website

Spring in Suwon

The SKKU Suwon campus is blooming with spring flowers. The cherry blossoms came out in the first few days of this past week, and the warm weather with reasonably clean air prompted many  people to get out and walk on campus. The students are busy preparing for the upcoming midterm exams. The lab is busy preparing for the ISMRM presentations that will be given in less than two weeks.

7T test drive!

Dr. Lee along with Prof. Park JY visited a 7T vendor in Germany to test-drive their new 7T MRI scanner. Impressions from Dr. Lee: it was a big machine, reasonably well taken care of, and was producing images that showed both promises and difficulties of human imaging at such a high magnetic field. The head transmit coil occupying significant bore space was unfortunate; this left little room for goggles and other devices for fun fMRI experiments. A little surprising was the fact that no parallel transmit was needed for imaging a relatively large head with decent image quality. The apparent RF shading was not severe. The trip was refreshing and fruitful. The rural European town visited was quite enjoyable for a short stay. All the trip cost was borne by the visiting party, in light of the heightened scrutiny over business transparency.