2021 ISMRM Innovation in MRI Education Award Winners
1st Place
Meet Dr. Tan’s team:
Bien Soo Tan
Dr Bien Soo Tan is Senior Consultant at the Department of Vascular and Interventional Radiology, Singapore General Hospital (SGH) in Singapore. Bien Soo is concurrently Clinical Professor at the Duke-NUS Medical School and Clinical Associate Professor at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore. He is also Honorary Professor at the Department of Medical Science, Development and Management University of Medicine 1, Yangon, Myanmar.
Bien Soo is a fellow of several professional organizations, including the Academy of Medicine, Singapore, the Society of Interventional Radiology, and the Cardiovascular and Interventional Radiology Society of Europe. He has served in various leadership positions within his institution and organization, and at several national and international professional radiological organizations. He is active in interventional radiology research, and several prospective randomized clinical trials have been conducted by the team at SGH.
He is also passionate about nurturing future radiologists, having personally benefited from great mentors during his career.
Bien Soo and his colleagues at SGH learned harsh lessons when the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak hit Singapore in 2003. When the COVID-19 Disease emerged in early 2020, they leveraged upon their experience gained during SARS to implement their operational response for radiology. Their preparedness response experience was rapidly shared globally through many webinars and publications. Bien Soo was subsequently invited to be the only international member of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) COVID-19 Task Force. This RSNA task force has been instrumental in developing radiological guidelines and operational policies for COVID-19 and disseminating them through educational initiatives.
With widespread adoption of virtual meetings and conferences during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Bien Soo started thinking about how the new normal would be like for medical education. He was inspired by Dr Aarti Sekhar, a radiologist from Emory University, to experiment with using videos to enhance the virtual learning experience. He was fortunate to team up with talented colleagues (Dr Lionel Cheng, Myo Min Tun and Gareth Ng) in SGH who were similarly interested to innovate. It was this team effort, and through additional contributions from numerous other colleagues, that led to the inhouse production of the video for his lecture at ISMRM 2021.
2nd Place
Agah Karakuzu
Agah Karakuzu is a PhD Candidate under the supervision of Dr. Nikola Stikov at NeuroPoly, the Neuroimaging Research Laboratory at École Polytechnique de Montréal. His current research focuses on bringing quantitative MRI (qMRI) applications under one umbrella through data standardization, vendor-agnostic pulse sequences and open-source software development for data processing. Bringing these pieces together, his project qMRLab (https://qmrlab.org) aims at establishing fully transparent qMRI workflows starting at the scanner console and extending all the way to journal publication. In addition to his work in the field of MRI, Mr. Karakuzu is one of the lead developers of NeuroLibre (https://neurolibre.org), a preprint server for reproducible data analysis, completing the puzzle of end-to-end neuroimaging workflows. Further information about Mr. Karakuzu’s research projects, academic publications, talks, awards and sponsors are available at https://agahkarakuzu.github.io.
Agah is an active contributor to several science communication and publication platforms including MRM Highlights, MR Pulse, MRPub and the OHBM Blog. He is involved in the organization and/or conduct of several hackathons (MRathon, BrainHack Global) and other scientific events with a particular focus on open-source development of neuroimaging tools (OpenMR, QBIN SciComm, OHBM Open Science Room, Open & Reproducible Neuroimaging Workshop). Apart from his academic interests, he is passionate about cats, biking, downhill skiing, music, digital graphic designing and brewing specialty coffee for his fellow MRI colleagues.
3rd Place
Kaori Togashi
Kaori Togashi is a radiologist who worked on gynecologic MRI research. She was named Chair of the Department of Radiology, Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine as the first woman in 2004, and retired March 2020. In her 16 years appointment, she not only continues to be productive in her research with more than 500 publications, but also has built a strong academic Radiology program. She admitted 117 residents, 89 of whom returned to school to get their PhD degrees. Among her achievements, it can be said that the most important thing to be emphasized is that she has trained many young people to become researchers. In addition to the mid-career researchers who continue to work at ISMRM, there are countless young researchers who have begun to climb the research ladder. Last year, she became the first woman in Asia to receive the gold medal, and was especially recognized for nurturing the next generation of researchers.
Honorable Mention
Walter Kucharczyk
Spin Gymnastics
Charlotte Sappo
Coil Demo: What’s Different About Low-Frequency Coils?
Greg Cron
DSC-MRI: Acquisition