In November, I shared my perspective on the abstract submission process and some details about the new platform, ECHO. Now, I’d like to tell you more about ECHO, to let you see behind the scenes of this really incredible process and learn how ECHO will (hopefully) improve your experience at the Annual Meeting.
I’ve spent the past few years preparing to be the Program Chair, and beyond my own conference experiences, I’ve tried to listen and hear what you all think about conferences. 2026 ISMRM President Mark Griswold, Ph.D., challenged me to reconsider all aspects of the Annual Meeting process from abstract submission through scientific session planning and including the experience of attending the meeting.
In late July 2025, Mark and I considered what it would take to build a different abstract submission tool. Also in late July 2025, Mark asked Andrew Dupuis, Ph.D., a post-doc in his group, if he would be interested in building this tool. I don’t have the skills to build such a platform (even “just” an abstract submission tool). Fortunately, Andrew has the skills, and he was willing to make the jump with us.
One week later, Andrew, with support from AI agent Claude, had a prototype abstract submission tool built. This was amazing. It was a prototype, but it was built in just a week. And it was only early August—we had two months before abstract submission would open. At this point, Andrew, Mark, and I started thinking a bit bigger. It was at this point that our thoughts moved from only an abstract submission tool to incorporating the ISMRM community’s ideas about the entire conference experience.
In August 2025, we worked with the Central Office to consider how to entirely upend their lives (joking!). Early conversations with the office staff showed us that we needed to better understand the “back end” of the conference creation for this to fit with all the inner workings of the Annual Meeting. Collaboration with the Central Office gave us the opportunity to create a tool that met their needs as well as the members’. During this process, we learned that there was no commercial tool that actually met the needs of our community and the office.
The first week of September 2025, ECHO was officially named to reflect the building blocks of MRI. Immediately thereafter, the invitations for Educational talks in Cape Town were sent via ECHO. In October, you all submitted your abstracts via ECHO, with the additional excitement of an abstract deadline extension due to a worldwide Azure shutdown (not caused by us!). In November, abstracts were reviewed using ECHO, and in December and January, the AMPC did the scientific session planning through ECHO. At the same time, the Central Office planned and ran the Data Sampling workshop in Sedona using ECHO.
Now, you can create your digital poster for the Annual Meeting in ECHO, and soon you will be able to upload your presentations (Presenter Guidelines). You can also manage your affiliations (if you do not like the way that they appeared during abstract submission, you can clean them up).
For the Annual Meeting, you will be able to view the program and proceedings in ECHO, search for presentations, build a personalized schedule, add presentations or sessions directly to your calendar, export bibliography files for abstracts from ECHO, and export a CV-ready list of your abstracts!
I extend my thanks to the Central Office who agreed to try out this crazy idea and work with us to build ECHO. My appreciation also goes to the AMPC who have jumped at the opportunity to test each feature in ECHO. Additionally, I thank Mark and past program chairs and presidents for sparking these ideas. Last but not least, we can all thank Andrew for building the whole thing.
We hope that you will enjoy your ECHO experiences in Cape Town (or at any recent workshop). ECHO contains a lot of thought and a lot of effort. We do ask for your patience as we continue to work on ECHO, and we value any shared feedback. This platform was built for our community, by our community, and we hope that it can serve you all well.
Katy Keenan, Ph.D.
2026 Annual Meeting Program Chair
Fig 1: Screenshots from the early August abstract submission tool prototype.
Fig 2: Just a week later, screenshots from the updated abstract tool showing the start of the abstract review system.
Fig 3: Coming for Cape Town, a desktop and mobile interface that allows you to view the program, view abstracts, and create a schedule within ECHO.
