IBS Conference on Neuroimaging

A second IBS conference hosted by CNIR was held on Oct 11-12 in the Chemistry building on the SKKU campus in Suwon. The conference was funded by the IBS to host many renowned speakers from the US, Canada, Japan, and Europe. With famous names and free registration, the conference was well attended by local and domestic students and researchers. The 2-day conference was followed by the CNIR's annual Scientific Advisory Board meeting on Oct 14-15 at the N Center.

5th International Workshop on MRI phase contrast and QSM

Yonsei University hosted the 5th QSM conference on Sept 25~28. The meeting featured many "stars" in the field as speakers and discussion leaders, and was run very efficiently in a friendly environment on a convenient location at the heart of Seoul. The two organizers, Profs Jong-ho Lee and Dong-hyun Kim, should be credited for their hard work and effective fundraising. The CIEL lab graduate students attended the conference in full, with two posters presented on QSM in humans and phantoms. A few impressions from the conference are:

- There were no major new QSM processing methods announced.
- QSM recon challenge "rev 2" took a step back from the previous one, by using synthetic data instead of in-vivo real data, recognizing challenge in finding the ground truth.
- Much discussion was devoted to effects of micro-structure on QSM.
- Anisotropy was a popular discussion point.
- R2* and TKD method are not dying, for their artifact robustness.
- EPT (Electrical Properties Tomography) was all but covered by just one invited session. Although the tutorial lectures by U Katscher, JK Seo and others were very informative, EPT was a relatively minor component in the conference.

The 10th Annual Scientific Symposium on Ultrahigh-field MRI was held in Berlin, Germany yesterday. As Robin Heidemann summarized as the final speaker of the one-day workshop, the meeting was held on a beautiful campus with fine food and excellent presentations. It was run in a highly friendly and informal atmosphere, yet was run quite professionally. Eye-catching were the lecture room names (Axon, Synapse, Dentrit) of the building, and a grand piano that was actually played between sessions by the hosting researchers IN the lecture room. Scientifically, the symposium covered human and animal MRI at 7T and higher, with about half-and-half split between technical and clinical works. Some of the notable topics discussed were: thermal MRI (Berlin group), 10.5 T human body images (Minnesota), and prospect of 14T MRI (Mark Ladd). Siemens appears to be working on new gradient coils and higher power gradient amplifiers (between 2 and 3 MW). A good question: How can meetings like this happen in SKKU, where presenters and organizers are happy, enjoying and proud of their work, and focusing on information and not person?

Summer 2019 winding down

Hot summer days are finally giving way to cool air and the university's summer vacation has officially come to an end today. The Lab did not take summer interns during the official intern program weeks, but instead had Ms. Do-yeun Kim from last year continue her work in the lab part-time for 5 weeks. To send her off, and to celebrate the first publication by the GBME undergraduates in an international journal (PlosOne), the Lab had a party on Wednesday 8/28 at a popular restaurant overlooking the Baek-Woon lake in the city of Ui-wang.

On the research front, what we did in the summer includes:
(1) So-Hee Lee completed the monkey-brain spherical phantom, which can now be imaged for many hours (>6) in a row in the 7T scanner for high resolution imaging at multiple orientations.
(2) Hyeong-Seop Kim improved the surface coil for multi-orientation B1 mapping on a cylindrical phantom, which is now more robust against rotations and placements of cables.
(3) Byeong-Pahn Song is finishing up collecting data for a short Note publication on the inductively coupled histology coil.
(4) Seulki Yoo has made progress on Habenula QSM paper. A part of it, the ROI dependence, was submitted for poster presentation at the 5th International Workshop on QSM and Phase Contrast in September.
(5) In collaboration with Prof. JY Park, a kick-off meeting was held on DIANA fMRI, and a long-overdue revision of Jeongtaek Lee's radial recon paper was finally submitted to Scientific Reports.

End of the semester, Spring 2019

The spring semester is officially over as of today, June 21. Many undergraduate students were busy with final exams in the past couple of weeks, and summer programs will start from next week including the 4-week internship program of the BME department. In the Lab, the semester had a few good news:
- Grant of Korean government funding for Multi-orientation B1 mapping (from March), and Direct Imaging of Neuronal Activity with MRI (from June, led by Prof. JY Park).
- Admission of two new graduate students (HS Kim and BP Song).
- Positive responses to the spherical phantom paper submitted to PLoS One.
- Good representations at the icMRI and ISMRM meetings.
The Lab's summer research plan includes wrapping up of human habenula QSM studies, revising the tilt-head B0 manuscript, and writing up a couple of MR engineering works presented at icMRI in March. The undergraduate students will be tasked to work on gradient coil PNS simulation using Comsol and Sim4Life.

ISMRM 2019

The 27th Annual Scientific Meeting of the ISMRM was held in Montreal last week. From the lab, Ms. Lee SH and Ms. Yoo SK each presented a digital poster and Dr. Lee SK gave a 30 min lecture on MR systems engineering. The conference hall is familiar to old-timers since there was another ISMRM meeting in 2011 in the same place. The climate was pleasant and the dining options were excellent. One of the (personal) highlights was that GE officially unveiled the compact head-only 3T scanner, dubbed ESP, as a research-only, made-to-order scanner. Abstracts related to what the Lab is working on included: (1) high temporal resolution eddy current imaging (Xiaohong Joe Zhou), (2) habenula MRI at 3T (Haacke), and (3) B0 simulation for head motion (Bowtell).

Visit from GRC

Tom Foo and Desmond Yeo from GE Global Research Center visited the SKKU Suwon campus on 5/3 Friday. Tom, a Chief scientist at the 120 year-old research center in upstate New York, gave a short presentation on the latest MRI technologies being developed at GRC to the students in the Lab. Desmond, a Technology leader at the MRI and Superconducting magnet laboratory, helped answer questions from the students, before taking a short campus tour together with Tom and Dr. Lee SK. The discussions also touched upon combined MR and ultrasound imaging technology. Prof. Jinhyoung Park joined the discussion later in the presentation session and exchanged ideas for potential GE-SKKU collaboration for Korean government funding. Overall, the short GRC visit was very productive and helpful to the students, while being comfortably casual.