Accelerated Medical Imaging Workshop in Madison WI on June 17th – 18th

The 2nd annual accelerated imaging workshop at UW Madison is next week, and should be a great event. There are scheduled speakers from Mayo Clinic, Northwestern, UIUC, Berkeley, Harvard, the NIH, and GE Healthcare (among others). If you think you might be able to attend, the free registration deadline is Saturday June 12th, otherwise you can register on-site for a nominal fee. Here’s the registration form, which you can fax or email in.

Imaging Workshop - Madison/Freiburg

The International Center for Accelerated Medical Imaging at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA and the Dept. of Diagnostic Radiology, Medical Physics, at the University of Freiburg, Germany are co-hosting the 2nd Workshop on Accelerated Medical Imaging ‘Rapid MR Imaging – Beyond the Nyquist Limit’.

Objectives of this workshop are to discuss the current state of the art accelerated imaging concepts and applications, roadblocks to clinical applications and strategies to effectively address these limitations.

  • Fundamentals of the Constrained Reconstruction Rainbow
  • State-of-the-Art Concepts and Applications in MRI and other modalities
  • Rapid Quantitative Imaging
  • Performance Metrics – Connecting Imaging Science with Radiology
  • New Hardware Developments

Invited speakers will present keynote lectures on pertinent topics with further presentations by contributed papers. The workshop in Madison will also be tailored towards students’ education.
Extended poster viewing and discussion sessions are an integral part of the scientific program and will allow discussions about new concepts.

The workshop will take place in Madison, WI at the Health Science Learning Center (HSLC), which is located on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus adjacent to the UW Hospital & Clinics.

The workshop announcement in pdf format can be found here.

If you don’t want to download the PDF of the program, I’ve embedded it below the fold. Also check out the official workshop website on the UW Madison website for more details.

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The Shoe Event Horizon

This segment ranks among my most favorite moments of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Secondary Phase, Fit the Eleventh, to be precise (the BBC radio series is the True version of the Guide, without all that tedious mucking about with printed pages).

Part of the brilliance is the twisted, yet straightforward, logic of the economic theory itself. But what makes it gold is how the narrative is presented in a teacher-student context, with a rather.. twisted… take on academic incentives. I’ve decided to waste 15 minutes of my life and transcribe the good bit below.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy BBC Radio Series - The Complete Collection

TEACHER: Good morning, lifeform!

STUDENT: Hi teach!

Are you sitting comfortably?

Yes!

Then stand up. Harsh Economic Truths, class 17. Are you standing up?

yes.

Good. Posit. You are living in an exciting, go-ahead civilization. Where are you looking?

Up.

What do you see?

The open sky… the stars… an infinite horizon.

Correct! You may press the button.

Thank you! (tinkly music plays) Oh! That feels nice.

Posit. You are living in a stagnant, declining civilization. Where are you looking?

(subdued) Down.

What do you see?

My shoes.

Correct! What do you do to cheer yourself up?

Um. Press the button?

Incorrect! Think again. Your world is a depressing place. You are looking at your shoes. How do you cheer yourself up?

I buy a new pair.

Correct!

Can I press the button?

All right.

(twinkly music plays) Oh ho! So nice!

Now. Imagine everyone does the same thing. What happens?

Everyone feels nice?

Ah, forget the button, concentrate! Everyone buys new shoes. What happens?

More shoes.

And?

More shoe shops.

Correct.

Can I?

No.

Aww.

And in order to support all these extra shoe shops, what must happen?

Everyone must keep buying shoes.

And how is that arranged?

Manufacturers dictate more and more fashions and make shoes so bad that they either hurt the feet or fall apart.

So that?

Everyone has to buy more shoes.

Until?

Until… everyone gets fed up with lousy rotten shoes.

And then what?

(plaintive) Why can’t I press the button?

And then what? Come on!

Massive capital investment by the manufacturers to try and make people buy the shoes.

Which means?

More shoe shops.

(insistent) And then we reach what point?

(sullen) The point where I press the button again.

(exasperated) All right!

(twinkly music plays) Woo hoo hoo! Ah! That’s so nice! That’s really nice!

And then we reach what point?

(sighing with bliss) The Shoe Event Horizon! The whole economy overbalances! Shoe shops outnumber every other kind of shop! It becomes economically impossible to build anything other than shoe shops, and bingo! I get to press the button again! (twinkly music plays) Wooooo hoooo!!!!

(angry) Wait for permission!!! Now, what’s the final stage?

(distracted) Um. Every shop in the world ends up as a shoe shop.

Full of?

Shoes no one can wear.

Result?

Famine, collapse, and ruin… any survivors eventually evolve into… birds… and never put their feet on the ground again.

Excellent! End of lesson! You may press the button!

(twinkly music plays) Woo hoo hoo! Yee hoo hoo hoo! Oh ho! Oh, that’s nice! Thank you teach, goodbye!

Ahem, aren’t you forgetting something?

What?

Press the other button.

Oh. Right.

(twinkly music plays) Ooh ho ho ho! Woo hah hah hah! Wha ha hah ha ha ha!

A Primer on Dixon Imaging

Dixon imaging is a technique for separating out water and fat in an MR image that depends on the relative chemical shift between water and fat (as opposed to relying on the absolute resonance frequencies, as in saturation-based techniques). For someone just getting started in this area, or who is simply interested, here is a list of references. I am not attempting to be exhaustive. In particular, I am not focusing strongly on clinical papers or more historical ones.

download: Endnote iconDixon primer (zipped EndNote library)

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SlideShare

Here’s a great resource for sharing powerpoint slides online: SlideShare. Many of us have useful presentations that we’ve created for various academic or professional purposes; if you upload a presentation to that service please tag it “@refscan” so we can create an automatic table of contents for presentations here. I’ll update this post and upload a simple one later this weekend here as a demo.