Stockholm - 2010 - To be approved at next annual meeting

WMSG Annual Meeting
Monday 03 May 2010, 18:45
Room A9
Stockholm, Sweden

Board Members in Attendance: Alex MacKay, Sean Deoni, Hugo Vrenken, Bruce Pike, Shannon Kolind, Stefan Ropele
Total number of voting members present > 20 (Quorum reached)

Meeting was called to order at 18:45

1.0   Welcome (Alex MacKay)
   
1.1   Approval of minutes from April, 2009
        Moved/Seconded: Bruce Pike
        Motion Carried.

1.2   Items resulting from previous minutes.
        No items brought to attention of the executive.

1.3   Re-instatement of the White Matter Study Group.

1.4   Review of Committee Membership:
        406 total members, representing 31 countries.

1.5   Introduction of New Committee Members / Thanks to Outgoing Committee Members:
    1.5.1 New Committee Members:    
                       Claudia Wheeler-Kingshott
                       Klaus Schmierer
                       Rebecca Samson (student representative)

    1.5.2 Outgoing Members:   
                       Stefan Ropele
                       Shannon Kolind (student representative)   
 

2.0    WMSG STUDENT ORAL PRESENTATIONS

Following the Business Meeting, brief oral presentations were given by nine of our student
members:

Adrienne Dula, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA                                                  Application of CEST Imaging to Study Amide Proton Transfer (APT) in Healthy Controls and Multiple Sclerosis Pathology at 7 Tesla
Junqian Gordon Xu, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA                  Toward Reproducible Tract-specific In Vivo Diffusion Quantification in Human Cervical  Spinal Cord
Elan Grossman, NYU School of Medicine, New York, NY, USA                                Diffusional Kurtosis Imaging of Deep Gray Matter in Mild Traumatic Brain Injury
Richard Dortch, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA                                    Quantitative Magnetization Transfer Imaging of Human Cervical Spinal Cord at 3T
Amy Kuceyeski, Weill Cornell Medical College                                                                   Analysis of connectivity of gray matter regions using DTI and graph theory
Shruti Agarwal, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India                       A principal eigenvector based segmental approach for reproducible white matter
quantitative tractography
Sinchai Tsao, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA                            CSF Contamination Correction in DTI Tractography of the Fornix in Elderly Subjects
Jie Luo, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA                                         In vivo quantitative evaluation of Multiple Sclerosis progression using Gradient Echo         Plural Contrast Imaging technique
Saeed Kalantari, University of British Columbia Hospital, Vancouver, BC, Canada            Looking at Magnetization Exchange in Human White Matter Structures In Vivo
Emi Takahashi, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Charlestown, MA, USA                                                             Diffusion Spectrum Tractography and Histology: Developing Connectivity in the Cat Brain

3.0    STUDENT POSTER COMPETITION (Shannon Kolind)
    Finalists:
    1569 Els Fieremans: "White matter model for diffusional kurtosis imaging"
    2998 Ives Levesque: "A simple iterative reduction method for optimization of quantitative Magnetization Transfer Imaging"
    4311 Adrienna Dula; "Application of CEST imaging to study amide proton transfer (APT) in healthy controls and MS pathology at 7T"
    5124 Bing Yao: "Towards an in-vivo and post-mortem characterization of chronic multiple sclerosis lesions using susceptibility-related mechanisms of contrast at ultra-high field"

    Winner:     1569 Els Fieremans
    Prize:         Book : “Radiographic Atlas of Skull and Brain Anatomy: Atlas of Radiographic Anatomy"; M. Gallucci, S. Capoccia, A. Catalucci
   

4.0    PANEL DISCUSSION: 'Advanced white matter techniques (mcT2, qMT, DSI, etc.) will never reach widespread clinical utility

Panel:

Massimo Filippi, MD
Director of the Neuroimaging Research Unit
Professor of Clinical Neurology, Department of Neurology, Scientific Institute
and University Ospedale, San Raffaele, Milan, Italy.
Charles Guttmann, MD
Director of the Center for Neurological Imaging at Brigham and Women's
Hospital and Assistant Professor in Radiology at Harvard Medical School, USA
Derek Jones, PhD
Director of MRI, Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre,
Professor, Cardiff University, UK
Greg Stanisz, PhD
Senior Scientist, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre
Associate Professor, University of Toronto, Canada

This was a stimulating and generally optimistic event which gave us reason to hope that our research on new technique developments for white matter characterisation will have important clinical applications.

5.0    White Matter Study Group Workshop ’11

Sean Deoni gave a brief presentation on the theme and location of our next White Matter
Study Group Workshop. The essential details are presented below. He will be circulating more details about this exciting meeting as the plans evolve.

Advanced White Matter Imaging - Approaches to Acquisition & Analysis
Planned Location:   Reykjavik, Iceland
Planned Venue:      Grand Hotel Reykjavik
Planned Date:       Aug. 22-25, 2011
Working Budget:     $70,000 - $100,000 USD
Tentative Program Topics:
Day 1:        White Matter Imaging: Applications and New Research Avenues
Day 2:        Acquisition Methods: The Manual That Should Have Been Included
Day 3:        Approaches to Analysis
Day 4:        Emerging Results in White Matter Imaging

6.0    Adjournment:
  
Meeting adjourned at 20:45pm.

Next meeting: May 2011, Montreal.

2009 - Honolulu

2008 - Toronto

2007 - Berlin

2006 - Seattle

2005 - Miami