KSMRM on-line education day

This year's KSMRM education day was held on June 19, 2021 in the form of a whole-day on-line lecture series. The lectures were streamed on-line from a studio that was set up in a conference hall provided by Guerbet Korea, in Gangnam-gu, Seoul. Out of the 14 speakers, 5 uploaded a pre-recorded video, 1 presented remotely on-line, and the rest (8) spoke in person from the studio. A total of 141 people registered for the event, and typically 80 ~ 90 people were logged in at any given time. This is the second time when the education day was delivered in a live stream format, following the last year's example. The sessions went smoothly without any major technical or logistical issues. Most of the lectures were on clinical applications of MRI, given by medical doctors in Radiology. Thank you all who helped prepare and wrap up this annual event successfully!

11.7T System at Gachon Univ.

 

Gachon university has recently acquired an 11.74 T MRI system from an Italian company, ASG Superconductors, which made a big local news (https://www.bosa.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=2139691) a few months ago. The picture above was taken on the 28th of May at the site where it is being installed, the Neuroscience Research Institute (Song-do branch) in Incheon. The magnet is being vacuum-checked, and is not cooled down yet. The magnet is not actively shielded, and although configured to image a human subject (with about 56 cm accessible bore), will primarily be used for animal imaging for the near future, for regulatory reasons. While the field strength is already quite unique, what is even more interesting is that the system is being configured for a sequential PET scan through a rail  system connecting the two scanners. Prof. Kyoung-Nam Kim (left in picture), kindly provided a tour of the building with several photo opportunities.

2021 ISMRM virtual meeting

Same as the last year, the pandemic has forced the ISMRM meeting to be held entirely virtually. An international conference like this suffers from one big problem when it comes to on-line, at-home meeting: the time difference. Basically the sessions ran around the clock, and participants could only join when the time is favorable / manageable to them. Given such shortcomings, it must be said that there were on the other hand a number of advantages in this format. First of all, all activities can be digitized and made to leave trace, so for example one can record who viewed a given poster. Viewer questions on chatting windows are preserved for anyone to see. Recorded talks and videos can be re-viewed as often as one likes. Cost is saved, and one can take part in the meeting while not giving up  regular workhours. Meeting data from the two digital posters from the Lab are captured in the picture above. In an interesting session on future jobs in MRI, Yiping Du presented clinical MR physicist jobs in Asia. GE introduced Signa 7T in corporate symposium. Siemens was said to have presented a new powerful 7T head gradient coil. All these can be viewed later, an unexpected benefit of the pandemic situation.

Research Sketch -- PD iron

In a paper published on-line yesterday (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10072-021-05223-0), Minkyeong Kim and Seulki Yoo (two lead authors) presented results of an iron-sensitive MRI biomarker study in early Parkinson's diseases patients. This work started in 2017 as part of a broader 3T neuro MRI collaboration between SKKU and SMC, with the SMC team led by Drs. Jin Whan Cho and Jinyoung Youn. 

At least 19 PD patients and 16 normal volunteers were brought from SMC to SKKU for a 3T MRI scan, from which 14 patients and 12 healthy subjects' data were selected for analysis of iron-sensitive MR imaging. Part of the funding came from IBS, and part from SKKU intramural research grant of 2019. 

For a clinical study the work used relatively small number of samples. The novelty claim has been laid on the use of relatively homogeneous, early-stage PD patients and investigation of non-motor symptoms. The main finding of the paper is the existence of non-negligible correlation between certain non-motor symptoms (such as sleep disorder) and R2* values in deep brain regions (such as red nucleus, amygdala, and hippocampus). Since R2* is sensitive to tissue iron level, this observation suggested that iron in specific brain regions of PD patients may be indicative of non-motor clinical symptoms. 

Despite much effort and time spent in data collection and analysis, the study exposed limitations of using iron-sensitive MRI for clinical research. Most significantly from the Lab's point of view, the QSM results were highly variable among subjects, to a degree much greater than inter-group differences expected from early PD cohorts. Motion, head orientation, and other physiological factors appear to affect QSM much more than R2* and other established, magnitude-based contrasts. 

This observation, made early on in the project, strongly suggested the need of longitudinal studies to follow variation of QSM on individual subjects. Such studies can greatly benefit from the ability to post-process routine clinical MR scans collected in SMC. To this end, the team has looked into the possibility of including multi-echo GRE scans, including phase images, in the routine scan protocol at SMC. Hopefully this line of research will continue in the near future for more fruitful clinical collaboration.

2021 Spring semester started

In fact this year's spring semester started from late February. The campus atmosphere is still somewhat heavy and subdued because of the pandemic, but the number of students and other pedestrians on and around the campus has clearly increased from a month ago, and also when compared to about this time last year. More classes are being offered in-person, and the degree of fear for the unknown appears to be less intense. The Lab now has officially 5 graduate students, after welcoming Jun-Ho Kim in to the incoming class. To celebrate this and other events (see News for publication updates), back-to-back small-group lunch meetings were held (as mandated by the local health authority) in the past week. May this semester be another successful one with continued progress in work and personal developments for all.

2020 fall undergraduate research presentation

This is the third time this year when undergraduate lab interns held a research presentation session. On the 21th of December, three students, Sung-Joon Yoon, Ji-Sung Barg, and Joon-Ho Kim each spoke about what they did and learned in the Fall semester. The session was held in one of the main lecture rooms of the N center, with 7 people in the audience seated far apart from each other, all wearing a mask. The presentations showcased the substantial involvement of the students in different lab projects, from RF coil design and electrical property measurements, to gradient coil theory. Holding this event in a physical place, rather than on-line, was a good idea in terms of enabling more lively discussions among the students.

7T MRI at KBSI

On Monday November 16th, Dr. Lee (SK) and two graduate students (HS Kim, BP Song) visited the Korea Basic Science Institute (KBSI) at Ochang. Dr. Sukhoon Oh kindly hosted the delegates to provide a tour of the MRI research building, in particular the human 7T scanner. Currently, Korea has three human 7T scanners (one in SKKU, from Siemens; another in Gachon Univ. also from Siemens, and the one in KBSI from Philips). Of these the ones in SKKU and KBSI are currently fully operational for human scanning. The KBSI scanner is being used for fMRI, extremities imaging, and RF hardware development. Compared to the SKKU scanner, it has more coil options including a diverse set of non-proton coils. A downside of the scanner is that Philips is not actively pursuing 7T imaging products, so the upgrade options are limited; however the scanner can be a good platform for basic science and engineering research at ultra-high magnetic field with human-sized bore space.