Summer undergraduate research presentation

 The two-month summer vacation is almost over, and on Friday 8/21 Seok-Jin Yeo, an undergraduate junior who worked in the Lab, presented his summer research to the GBME colleagues and senior students. Mr. Yeo had successfully calculated the convolution kernels for computing the static magnetic field vectors induced by an object magnetized in an arbitrary direction, and extended gSVC -- generalized susceptibility voxel convolution -- to arbitrary orientations. The results were presented with appropriate levels of details. The students had a pizza lunch after the presentation. Good job Seok-Jin!

RF vector field mapping

 

The multi-orientation B1 mapping method successfully created a first-ever radio-frequency 3D vector magnetic field map in a liquid phantom using MRI. Hard work by Hyeong-Seop Kim to interface a custom-made surface coil with a commercial 3T scanner, unaffected by large orientation changes of the RF coil, paid off to conduct experiments reproducibly. The results are nicely visualized above in a spinning 3D GIF animation created from within Matlab.

Undergraduate research

Jisung Barg, a junior (3rd year undergrad), presented his work in the Lab in the spring semester to his colleagues on Monday 7/6. As a significant achievement, we have recently obtained a 3D vector plot of the RF field in a liquid phantom, produced by a surface coil at 123 MHz using 3T (2.895T) MRI. Mr. Barg's work was on studying the principles and visualizing the results in 3D vector arrow plots in Matlab, and process them to improve the quality of visualization. This summer there will be no intern students from outside the department, but the Lab's undergraduate research will continue with the BME students. Some new & existing ideas will be able to find their way to materialization in this way.

End of the semester, spring 2020

A highly unusual 15-week semester finally came to an end today, Friday 6/19/2020. The lab members went out for a celebratory lunch in Homaesil, and took a picture in the N center outdoor court area with masks off (!) for two minutes. Such gathering is generally discouraged, and can be frowned upon, but it was determined that any risk is sufficiently low that this modest, once-in-6-months lab activity should go head. During the semester, the BME Electromagnetics course was successfully delivered on-line, and the students' feedback has been positive. The graduate students had two papers accepted in international journals and one brand-new paper is now under consideration. The multi-orientation B1 mapping data were collected with very promising vector B1 field results, and the human 7T head coil engineering is making slow progress. Some of the research highlights will be posted soon on this site. In the summer, neither the department nor the lab has any active plans for summer internship. Exchanges and visits of intern students will generally be suppressed across the country for the year. In many labs more time will be spent for internal research and self development.

MR conferences

The two main conferences for the Korean MRI community -- icMRI and ISMRM annual meetings -- that are usually held before summer will instead take place either entirely on-line (ISMRM) or late in the year (icMRI). The official scientific conference of KSMRM, icMRI, which this year will be held jointly with the newly-formed Asian Society for MRM, was first delayed from its usual March dates to July, and then postponed again to early November. It was also reduced in length, from 3 days to 2 days, and will be held in a new location in Seoul. On the other hand, the two largest international conferences relevant to MRI, the annual meetings of ISMRM and RSNA, were announced to go fully virtual. In particular, the ISMRM meeting had been delayed from its original dates in April to August, but ultimately was decided to go on-line only. These are big changes and a great challenge for the meeting organizers. For many small academic societies, such changes are directly related to their financial well-being for the year. It remains to be seen if such on-line conferences will be more widespread from now on.

Submission results, on-line class, and KSMRM board meeting

One of the things that have always been conducted on-line is academic paper publication. Out of the four (new and revised) papers submitted in March, two were accepted without further revision (yeah!), one was rejected (sigh..), and one was given a revision request. While the team in the Lab and the collaborators worked on the manuscripts, the on-line class on electricity and magnetism went on, and already 1/2 of the course has been covered. The midterm exam, scheduled for next week, will in fact be replaced by an extended homework, to be completed remotely ("at home"), and graded with weights higher than regular homeworks.
The first KSMRM board meeting of 2020 was held on the April 13th, on-line. This is normally held during the icMRI conference at the end of March, but this year, it had to take place separately. The on-line meeting platform "zoom" was used, smoothly, to give chance for the Society's (incumbent and incoming) chairs and board members to greet each other on a video call.

Submissions and recordings

While the school is barely open for activities and with many meetings delayed or cancelled, the Lab has been busy to write up research results and submit manuscripts to academic journals. In the past 3 weeks, four separate papers (all with at least one person in the Lab being a main author) have been submitted to: J Parkinson's Disease, Scientific Reports, Medical Physics, and J Korean Physical Society. Relatively empty calendars and flexible work hours helped researchers focus on manuscript preparation, where most of the work was editing (.ppt), coding (.m), and writing (.doc). Regarding teaching of the courses, the first week of the semester has been entirely run on-line, with narrated ppt files and recorded videos uploaded on a school server. The BME electromagnetics course now has 4 lectures (each between 40 ~ 60 min) recorded and uploaded. On-line teaching will continue for at least 3 more weeks. The digital lecture materials will find ways for use outside the courses, and be subject to all the goods and ills of digital contents (easy editing, sharing, but easy copying and misleading quotations).