Summer in SKKU

Summer is still in full swing! The heat and humidity of the past several days were very uncomfortable. The forecast is not promising for those waiting for cool air. The campus is markedly quieter, with many undergraduate students out of town, summer programs largely wrapped up, and faculty and staff members having days off from work. In CNIR, the new, air-conditioned building is  providing a good shelter for those who would rather sit and type and read in the summer, with no better place to be in. The 3 T MR scan room on the 1st floor is particularly inviting, with constant temperature and humidity control, and not much usage by external users. Well, what about a summer retreat to MRI? 

Summer research

Summer is in full swing. Today was the hottest of the days so far this year. Four weeks have passed since the start of the summer vacation on campus, and the Center's first Summer Intern Program ended today with a great success. Success in terms of the engagement of the participating students, logistics, publicity, communication, and future recruiting.
It so happened that my lab was the only one (out of 7) with two separate research projects for the two students. Four weeks is not a long time for a research with any level of completeness. I like the summer program name "Summer Immersion" of Cornell - it is an intensive activity with much focus required, from decision making to execution. The two research topics, one on in-vivo brain R2* and the other on phantom susceptibility, were well digested by the students and the time spent was well worth it. 

Summer School - Workshop on MRI at CNIR

Since my first Korean public lecture at Aju University in March, I have felt that interest in neuroscience and MRI in Korea is significant and growing. This summer, for example, there are multiple public/academic events on neuroscience, at Aju Univ., and Korea Institute for Science and Technology (KIST). The CNIR 3-day Neuroimaging Workshop on MRI, held on Wednesday-Friday (7/6-7/8) this week, was one of them, and it was well received. First of all, the weather was perfect for this time of the year, between days of rain earlier in the week and a surge of hot air late Friday. I gave the first lecture and officially hosted the show for the first day, and I think there were about a hundred in the audience at one point. Prof. Park JS did a good job in inviting the session speakers from his broad network of MRI researchers in Korea, and Ms. Choi BH was instrumental in preparing and running the hands-on practical demo/training around the 3 T scanner. I am positive that this event was also meaningful for the summer intern students, and our Center got the needed boost in publicity as envisioned earlier this year by Prof. Kim SG.

GE head-only scanner in the news

Apparently the head-only 3T scanner has worked well enough to have an official opening ceremony at Mayo Clinic. May the scanner have a long, acclaimed life to see many patients coming and going, and create a real impact beyond news articles!

In an unrelated GE web resource, MR diffusion tractography is featured as a tool for a European (but not EU, as per today's Brexit decision!) autism research. It is mentioned that machine learning from Steve Williams' team is utilized for the research. I am not sure if there is anything new on the MR side of this latest development in GE-King's College collaboration.

Finding referees

In the past week or so I have been managing the editorial processing of two new papers submitted to MRM. This experience brings home to me the difficulty of finding a good, available team of referees for academic papers in, perhaps, any branch of modern science. On one hand, difficulty comes from ever-narrowing specialization of the academic field. Reviewing, with critical eyes, a new report on a particular subject requires knowing the current status of the research field. For any given researcher, this becomes more and more difficult as new branches are rapidly introduced, while old branches remain, and the number of ways to combine different branches grow exponentially. A consequence is that many active researchers in the field know relatively narrowly, and a knowledgeable peer in the peer review process becomes harder to find. (Or, the only knowledgeable ones may come from the authors' inner circle, therefore being biased.)

My other problem with searching for referees is a practical one. The research community should change the way the authors are identified by their names. For Korean researchers, in particular, I have long thought that the first and the last names should be swapped in academic publications. It is simply ridiculous to ask Korean scholars to conform to the Western naming convention, which is to fully spell out the last name only, while abbreviating the first name by it initial(s). That is unfit as a global way to identify the authors. Any naming degeneracy-- now I see it first-hand-- leads to confusion in the referee selection process, and its natural consequence, sadly, is for the editorial board simply to avoid Korean researchers from the referee pool. As a numeric author ID is not likely to be liked by many, in the long run the journals should allow the authors to designate which name, first or last, should be used as a primary identifier on record.

First meeting to gear up for the next year's Korean MRI Conference

The meeting was held at a restaurant near the Seoul Train Station. Dr. Hong KS from KBSI did a good job presenting the results of this year's ICMRI & KSMRM annual meeting (which was held in March), and explaining current status of the organization committee. For me, new to the inner workings of the Korean MRI society, it is humbling to see the large efforts devoted by many busy professionals to grow the society at a rapid pace.
1. Imperatives: The society wants to grow more international. The ICMRI conference should attract more international registrants. In practice, this can be most readily achieved by fostering more resource exchange with Chinese and other Asian magnetic resonance communities.
2. Desirables: Expansion of mutual educational sessions between the PhD's and MD's. The former, including the PhD students, will benefit from more coherent medical case and practice reports, while the latter will appreciate better plain-language expositions of MR theories covered at the conference.

Kudos to the hands and brains of the KSMRM society!

Susceptibility seminar

The CNIR internal seminar on magnetic susceptibility mapping was well-received.
The comparison between conventional physical susceptometry and MR-based measurement interested the audience. It certainly intrigues me that MRI phase measurement can be so sensitive to small magnetic changes in the object. Having started my research career in sensitive magnetometry, I now feel like coming a full circle to undertake research on applying MRI to magnetometry.