Montreal - 2011 - To be approved at next annual meeting - DRAFT

WMSG Annual Meeting
Monday 09 May 2011, 18:45
Room 512A-G of conference centre
Montreal, Canada

The meeting was called to order at 18:45 in room 512A-G of the conference centre. The attendance was estimated to be about 200 persons. It was moved Klaus Schmirer and seconded by Bruce Pike to approve the White Matter Study Group Minutes from 2010. No issues were deemed to have arisen from the last year’s minute.

Thank you to Derek Jones and Hugo Vrenken for 3 years service on the Executive Committee.

Thank you to Becky Samsom for one year service on the Executive as our Student Representative. We give a special thanks to Becky (with local advice from former student representative, Ives Levesque) for organising the very successful social evening in the Benelux Brewpub/Brasserie brew pub on Sunday evening.

Welcome to Emily Wood, Johns Hopkins University, who was elected as our new Student Representative.

2011/2012 Governing Committee

Chair: Alex MacKay
Secretary: Sean Deoni
Committee Members: Bruce Pike, Klaus Schmierer, Claudia Wheeler- Kingshott
Student Representative: Emily Wood

Demographics of our Study Group in 2011

Membership total: 515 members from 31 countries. Associate 21, Emeritus 1, Full 120, Student 273, Technologist 100.

Our Student Representative program has been highly successful; it is unique among study groups in the ISMRM. We have 100 technologist/radiographer members. Our Executive decided to poll our membership to see if there was sufficient interest in establishing a Technologist/Radiographer Representative. There was sufficient enthusiasm among Study Group members present at the meeting to enable us to test this initiative next year. So, when our student representative, Emily, is organising the election of the next Student
Representative in early 2012, we shall also poll our group for nominations for our first Technologist/Radiographer Representative.

Our student representative organises the student representative elections, organises the student poster awards, plans the ISMRM weekend social event and organises short presentations by student members at our Annual Meeting. We would appreciate any input from the membership about what role(s) our Technologist/Radiographer Representative could play in our study group. Please respond on this White Matter Study Group email list with your suggestions.

Immediately after the business meeting we heard 17 short talks given by student members. Thank you to the students who presented their research! The speaker names and titles are listed in the Appendix to the minutes. It is refreshing to hear about the broad scope and excellent science being carried out by our junior members.

Next, two ‘Hot Topics’ presentations were given on the fundamental nature of the proton magnetic resonance signal from white matter:

Mark Does, from Vanderbilt University, presented results from his studies on rodent spinal cord which demonstrated that the residence time for water molecules in spinal cord myelin is relatively short- perhaps less than 200ms. This rapid movement of water molecules between the myelin bilayers and the intra and extracellular spaces, results in a lowering of the myelin water fraction from what would be obtained if water spent a longer time in myelin. Upon comparison to histology measurements, his group found that the myelin water fraction underestimated the amount of water in myelin while the partial saturation values (related to magnetization transfer ratio values) were unaffected by this exchange of water between compartments. Furthermore, the decrease in myelin water fraction depended upon the myelin sheath thickness with thin sheaths demonstrating a large decrease. This exciting result could lead to an in vivo measurement of myelin sheath thickness.

Bill Rooney, from Oregon State University, showed that, upon very careful measurement (carried out by Christian Labadie, Max Plank Institute, Leipzig), one finds two T1 components in cerebral white matter at about 200ms and about 1.0s. The relative amount of these two components is field dependent with larger values for the amplitude of the shorter T1 component obtained at 7T than at 3T. The relative values if the two components are similar to the relative values found for myelin water and the intra/extra cellular components in T2 measurements in white matter. This data is consistent with a myelin water residence time of 600ms in brain.

You may have noticed that the two talks came to very different conclusions about the lifetime of a water molecule in myelin.

Questions, which were raised after Bill’s talk, brought up the possibility that inversion recovery pulses applied an MRI scanner can result in unequal populations in the water and non-aqueous components (i.e. lipids, proteins) of brain (work by Dan Gochberg’s and Joel Ackerman’s groups). Subsequent re-equilibration of spin populations results in a magnetization transfer between the non-aqueous spins and water which could be interpreted as a T1 component.

Thanks to Mark and Bill for two superb presentations and to the many who asked questions and made comments for making this a stimulating scientific session. For many of us, the jury is still out on water exchange between the myelin sheath and the intra and extra cellular spaces in white matter. It is surprising that in 2011, we still do not understand the fundamental mechanisms for T₂ and T₁. 

The last presentation of the meeting was by Sean Deoni, the chair of the organising committee of upcoming White Matter Study Group Workshop on Advanced White Matter Imaging. This workshop will be held on Aug 21 – Aug 26, 2011 in Reykjavik, Iceland. The Abstract deadline ends in June 30, 2011. For more details consult the website: http://www.wmsgiceland2011.com. You can register online from the website. We recommend that you register soon; the workshop fee will increase on Aug 1, 2011. Also, IcelandAir flights are filling up- so purchase your tickets early to save money.

We hope to see everyone in our study group in Reykjavik!

In closing, I apologise for the less than optimal quality of the food provided at our meeting. I shall try to do better next time. Also, I apologise for the confusion about the ‘election’ of a new committee member this year. Our Executive Committee asked the ISMRM to not run an election this year; however, somehow, ballots were sent out to our members anyway. I did not notice the ballots in my voting package and just found out about this at our meeting in May. The results of this ‘election’ were not analysed. Next year we shall be having a real election for the new chair and two new committee members.

Appendix: Student member talks at our Annual Meeting

Brion, Veronique, NeuroSpin, CEA/I2BM, Gifsur-Yvette, France
Real-time Rician noise correction applied to real-time HARDI and HYDI

Chan, Kevin Chuenwing, Laboratory of Biomedical Imaging and Signal Processing, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong, China                 
Quantitative DTI of White Matter Abnormalities upon Early Postnatal Visual Impairments

Colby, John, Department of Neurology, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, United States
Along-tract statistics allow for enhanced tractography analysis

De Santis, Silvia, CUBRIC, School of Psychology, Cardiff University, UK
Improved precision in the charmed model of white matter through sampling

Hurley, Samuel, Medical Physics, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, United States  
Spoiling properties of the VAFI method for fast simultaneous T1 and B1 mapping scheme optimization and model parsimony testing from actual flip-angle imaging (AFI) and variable flip-angle (VFA) data

Kolind, Shannon, FMRIB Centre, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
Imaging myelin water in motor neuron disease

Kuceyeski, Amy, Radiology, Weill Cornell Medical College, New York,  NY, United States
Creation and validation of a white matter importance map using traumatic brain injury patient data

Li, Yiou, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States
Independent Component Analysis of DTI reveals multivariate microstructural correlations of human brain white matter

Liang, Alice Li-Wen, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada  
Short-term Stability of T1 and T2 Relaxation Measures in Multiple Sclerosis Normal Appearing White Matter

Lim, Issel Anne Lei, Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, United States,
Title Needed

Mazerolle, Erin, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
Frequency Mapping without Phase Wraps Hemodynamic changes can be detected in rat white matter using a hypercapnic challenge

Mohades, Seyede Ghazal, VUB, Brussels, Brussels, Belgium
White matter differences between bilinguals and monolinguals revealed by diffusion tensor imaging (DTI)

Otte, Willem, Rudolf Magnus Institute of Neuroscience, University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht, Netherlands
MRI-based measurement of longitudinal contralesional white matter volume changes after unilateral stroke in rat brain

Russell-Schulz, Bretta, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada  
Evidence of ‘Long-T2’ Fraction and Higher Myelin Water Fraction in the Corticospinal Tract

Thiessen, Jonathan, Physics and Astronomy, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
Correlating longitudinal and quantitative MRI metrics in cuprizone mouse

Tymofiyeva, Olga, Department of Radiology & Biomedical Imaging, UCSF,San Francisco, CA, United State
Towards the "Baby Connectome": Mapping the Structural Connectivity of the Newborn Brain

Varentsova, Anna, Biological, Chemical and Physical Sciences, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL, United States  A High Angular Resolution Diffusion Imaging (HARDI) Template of the Human Brian

2010 - Stockholm

2009 - Honolulu

2008 - Toronto

2007 - Berlin

2006 - Seattle

2005 - Miami