We are in the final stretch to the 2026 ISMRM meeting in Cape Town, and I am so excited to see you all there! I hope that your preparations for the meeting are going well. To assist you, I’d like to share some thoughts about digital posters.
Since their inception at the ISMRM in 2004, digital posters have gone through several changes, and we are changing things again this year. As I mentioned in a previous blog, licensing issues and cost led us to adopt a video format in 2024, but the video format resulted in buffering issues that were frustrating for everyone. We knew that we could not keep things the same.
Within ECHO, we have tried to build a digital poster platform that will allow you to communicate your results similar to a traditional paper poster. We rolled out the digital poster creation a few weeks ago, and some of you jumped right in to try it out. Thank you. We appreciated this feedback from early users, and we heard that there were some challenges. We did a big revision to the digital poster creation interface, and we hope that it addresses the feedback. (Please note, if these changes caused any issues to a submitted poster, we have contacted you directly.)
This is a poster; it is not an oral presentation.
Given that it is a poster, we want people passing by to know what abstract is being presented. For this purpose, there is a top bar that is always present with the program number, title, and authors.
During poster presentations, you want the ability to easily move between topics or sections of the poster. The sections on the lefthand side of the poster correspond to the different sections of the poster. You can include up to 10 sections in your poster—beyond 10, we found there were challenges with rendering the lefthand side correctly. The lefthand side can also be used as a summary of the abstract. If you use it this way, someone can easily read an overview of your work.
On the right side, you show the content of your poster: figures, text, and tables.
Consider the key figures that you need to communicate your work.
With this format, I would recommend that you consider the key figures needed to communicate your work and prioritize including those in your poster. The figure caption can be used to add text for context. As with the abstract submission, tables can be included as figures.
We want the posters to be quickly responsive during the meeting.
At a minimum, we want everyone’s poster to load and also provide a responsive experience for the presenter and viewer. A positive aspect of a digital poster should be the ability to play GIFs, videos and other dynamic figures to show off MRI in action—without buffering. To accommodate presentation of all posters during the sessions, each poster is limited to a total of 250 MB. If you would prefer to do a video format as in 2024 and 2025, you still can: video uploads without audio are allowed in each section, as long as the combined file size fits within the 250 MB limit.
Thank you for adapting to this change.
We understand: it is hard that the digital poster format has changed every few years. We appreciate that you are learning a new approach this year. During the meeting, the AMPC will be on the lookout for great examples of this format. We intend to highlight these posters in the digital poster guidelines next year.
To get your creative juices flowing, here is an example poster, generated by AI agent Claude and modified by me, which uses many of the features of the new format: https://echo.ismrm.org/conferences/public/poster/97200990-c89c-45c1-bd1d-0b182eb23d36
Here is another poster, also generated by AI agent Claude, using a set of slides: https://echo.ismrm.org/conferences/public/poster/033be5c2-1c2d-4657-995f-fef0969cb0af (We have observed that Claude seems to think fMRI is the only type of MRI…)
I look forward to seeing your caffeine-fueled digital posters in Cape Town!
Katy Keenan, Ph.D.
2026 Annual Meeting Program Chair
