Virtual Meetings

The last week in July is universally recognized as MR Safety Week, inspired by the anniversary and 2001 tragic MRI-related death of Michael Colombini, age 6, resulting from a steel oxygen cylinder being brought into the MRI room during his exam. The initial goal of this week was to prevent such a tragedy from happening again and has expanded into a week-long event giving us a chance to refresh our safety education and highlight some of the issues we all face in the MR environment.

This webinar series will provide a guide to writing strong ISMRM abstracts with an emphasis on key success elements, common pitfalls, and practical examples relevant to early-career researchers. In the second session, we will hear insights from abstract reviewers and specific suggestions on preparing abstracts on clinical trials research and technical hardware research.

James R. Christie, MBBS, FRANZCR, and Jeff Chen, Grad.Dip. will explore the power of collaboration in fetal MRI. Blending radiographic expertise with radiological insight, this presentation showcases how teamwork enhances image quality, interpretation, and patient outcomes. Through interactive cases and real-world examples, learn how multidisciplinary approaches elevate care for the tiniest patients before they’re even born.

This webinar series will provide a guide to writing strong ISMRM abstracts with an emphasis on key success elements, common pitfalls, and practical examples relevant to early-career researchers. In the third session, we will hear insights on successful submission including specific suggestions for abstracts on clinical research, machine learning methods, and preclinical research.

This virtual seminar will focus on recent advances in motion correction in fetal and placental MRI. Our expert speakers will describe various motion correction strategies implemented during both acquisition and post-processing, with a focus on imaging the fetal heart, placenta, and uterus. The seminar will explore state-of-the-art techniques designed to address image artifacts caused by fetal movement and maternal respiration. Attendees can expect to gain a comprehensive understanding of current motion correction strategies for fetal-placental MRI, including the strengths, limitations, and practical applications of these methods in both clinical and research settings. A live Q&A session will follow the presentations.

This one-hour virtual session is hosted by the Flow & Motion Quantitation Study Group. It will spotlight two innovative 4D flow MRI approaches. Haben Berhane will present a deep learning-based technique that combines anatomical models with fluid dynamics to derive 3D aortic hemodynamics using a large 4D flow clinical database. Charles McGrath, Ph.D., will present a novel method for referenceless 4D flow MRI using radial bSSFP at 0.6T, demonstrating the potential of low-field imaging without the need for traditional phase correction. Both presentations challenge the norms of acquisition and analysis, promising discussions on the techniques, accuracy, accessibility, and clinical integration. Whether you are research-focused or clinically oriented, this is not your usual 4D flow meeting.

During MRI, RF-induced thermal stress of tissues is managed by limiting the specific absorption rate (SAR), which is used as a surrogate for temperature increase. In principle, both global and local values of SAR can be restricted. Global SAR is easier to assess, for example, taking the ratio between the measured absorbed power and the patient mass, but it provides average information only. In contrast, local SAR is much more difficult to estimate, but it has the potential to “personalize” safety, possibly allowing to widen the safety margins and exploiting the full power of MRI. The spatial distribution of local SAR is influenced by several factors, including body size, posture, and position within the scanner. In addition, a truly subject-specific SAR assessment would require knowledge about the heterogeneity of tissues, with their dielectric properties.

The virtual meeting aims to provide an up-to-date overview of the available scientific evidence about the variability of subject-specific SAR and possible solutions to assess it. Special attention will be paid to electric properties tomography (EPT), which estimates the patient’s dielectric properties from complex B1 maps and can provide an estimation of electric field maps to enable an estimation of subject-specific local SAR. To provide a comprehensive picture and explore the benefits of subject-specific SAR, the discussion will be supplemented with a presentation on the relationship between SAR limits and thermal thresholds.