Virtual Meetings

This next installment of the WFPI-ISMRM webinar series will focus on the role of artificial intelligence in pediatric MRI, including the unique opportunities and challenges of applications to the pediatric setting.

Fetal MR neuroimaging plays an increasingly important role for early, in utero diagnosis of fetal pathology and subsequent patient management. MRI’s advanced diagnostic accuracy contributes to more informed prenatal counseling, optimizes timing and mode of delivery, directs potential fetal interventions, and guides strategies for perinatal management. Fetal MR, including high-resolution anatomic scans and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), can help to confirm and further delineate CNS pathologies detected by surveillance fetal ultrasound, including ventriculomegaly, corpus callosum dysgenesis, holoprosencephaly, posterior fossa anomalies, intracranial hemorrhage, ischemic infarction, and vascular malformations. The integration of diffusion MRI/DTI to detect white-matter organization and integrity and hypoxic-ischemic damage has proven particularly valuable. Among the challenges of in utero fetal MRI are fetal and maternal motion, small anatomic structures, and the heterogenous placental/uterine environment, and various innovative strategies have been developed to help overcome them. This virtual meeting will provide attendees with an overview of state-of-the-art fetal MR neuroimaging techniques and their application to patient management.

Diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) of the abdomen and pelvis have well-established roles in cancer detection and lesion characterization. Diffusion-based quantitative imaging biomarkers show promise in detecting clinically relevant histopathologic markers, such as microvascular invasion and parenchymal disease such as hepatic fibrosis. However, body DWI remains challenging due to high sensitivity to off-resonance and patient motion. A number of cutting-edge technologies, ranging from optimized diffusion encoding gradients to novel reconstruction pipelines, have emerged in the past decade and have been applied to body DWI. This seminar features expert clinicians and scientists who will outline the unmet challenges in body DWI, the existing and emerging solutions to these challenges, potential pathways for translating these solutions into clinical practice, and opportunities for artificial intelligence.

Diseases and medical conditions disrupt the body's physiological and metabolic balance. Within the brain, a current challenge in neurological research is the limited ability to precisely measure how conditions affecting the central nervous system upset this delicate equilibrium. Metabolomics, the comprehensive study and holistic quantification of metabolic alterations within an organism, offers significant potential for addressing this gap. This virtual meeting will explore how cutting-edge metabolomic imaging techniques are converging to unlock the brain's complex metabolic landscape in health and disease. Speakers will highlight the latest developments in the field, including applications within and outside of the magnetic resonance domains. This interdisciplinary meeting is designed for a diverse audience, including scientists, clinicians, technologists, and trainees who are interested in the frontiers of metabolomics in biology and medicine. The ultimate goal is to inspire innovation and foster ongoing dialogue and research opportunities that advance the understanding of brain metabolism.

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.

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.