Virtual Meetings

AMPC Chair Maila Hughes and Vice Chair Anna Lydon will present an overview of the 2026 Cape Town Annual Meeting, highlighting the program-at-a-glance, special sessions, and the Joint ISMRM/ISMRT Forum. They will also share key information on registration and meeting fees. Stephen Jermy of the University of Cape Town will offer insights into Cape Town, including recommended activities and places to visit. The session will conclude with a live Q&A.

Join us for a preview of our annual meeting in Cape Town—covering named lecturers, plenary sessions, cutting-edge education and science, special sessions, and more. We’ll also highlight member gatherings and share tips on making the most of your time in Cape Town, South Africa.

Pulseq is a vendor-independent MR pulse-sequence programming platform that enables MRI experiments to be designed and analyzed in interactive environments such as MATLAB or Python, and executed on scanner hardware via sequence-agnostic interpreters. In recent years, Pulseq has seen rapid adoption by research groups worldwide, driven by its ability to accelerate MRI method development, enable sequence sharing and collaboration across vendor platforms, and improve the reproducibility of MRI measurements across sites.

This three day course will provide a comprehensive introduction to Pulseq and its ecosystem, covering: (1) core and advanced Pulseq concepts; (2) vendor-specific implementation details and workflows, including hardware and patient safety considerations; (3) representative applications and third-party tools contributed by the user community; and (4) intellectual property and licensing issues relevant to open science.

Open science promotes transparency, reproducibility, and collaboration by enabling researchers to share data, code, and methodologies openly. This accelerates discovery, reduces duplicated effort, and builds trust in scientific results. These principles can strengthen MRI and radiation therapy research by supporting more robust methods, shared resources, and broader community participation.

In this virtual seminar, we will introduce the fundamentals of open science and discuss practical strategies for incorporating them into research workflows, present an example of an openly available dataset that demonstrates the value of shared resources, and showcase an open-source image reconstruction framework capable of real-time deployment. The session will end with a panel discussion on lessons learned, current limitations, and practical steps to expand the use of open science across the MR in RT community.

Schizophrenia is a rather heterogenous, though severe mental disorder characterized variously by hallucinations, delusions, disorganized thinking or behavior, and flat or inappropriate affect, and generally starting in late adolescence or early adulthood. This virtual meeting aims to provide an overview of some of MR imaging and spectroscopy techniques that are used to achieve an enhanced characterization and understanding of the disease.

The dopamine system is the focus of the first talk, where it was recognized that dysregulation of striatal dopamine is a central feature of schizophrenia, yet the substantia nigra (SN), a major source of dopaminergic input to the striatum, has remained relatively understudied. In this presentation, post-mortem and molecular imaging findings are integrated to review molecular alterations of the SN in patients with schizophrenia compared with healthy controls. These alterations underscore the critical role of the SN in striatal hyperdopaminergia and the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. Furthermore, the potential of neuromelanin-sensitive MRI of the SN as a promising biomarker will be highlighted, with potential relevance for predicting treatment response.

A second study was motivated by the observation that dopaminergic dysfunction is a core feature of psychosis, but its relationship with glutamatergic and GABAergic systems early in the illness remains unclear. In this multimodal MRI study, neuromelanin-sensitive MRI and proton MR spectroscopy were combined to examine associations between substantia nigra neuromelanin contrast and striatal and medial prefrontal Glx and GABA in never-medicated first-episode psychosis patients and matched healthy controls. The methods and results of this study will be presented and discussed, highlighting the value of multimodal MR approaches in psychiatric research.

This is a rolling, 24-hour virtual meeting hosted by the ISMRM Diffusion and White Matter Study Groups. On 23 March 2026 (starting 01:00 UTC), three regional blocks repeat a fast, value-packed format: tutorial-style educational lectures (diffusion, WM non‑diffusion, and beyond‑brain); “Meet the Teachers” Q&A; trainee orals and power pitches; themed poster discussions; and a social. Whether you build methods or apply them in the lab or clinic, come for practical education, fresh trainee science, and time‑zone-friendly networking. Talks on Zoom; posters/Q&A/socials in gather.town. Join the block/s that fit your day.

The MR Engineering Study Group presents the hyperpolarized MRI system tutorial. The speakers will cover RF coils for multinuclear applications, Xenon-129 hyperpolarized MRI theory and techniques, and making the hyperpolarization transportable by covering hardware design to sample optimization.