Chapter Meetings

Indian Chapter Conference

Bustling Hyderabad hosted the 2025 ISMRM Indian chapter conference from Feb. 27th to March 1st, 2025. With participants from more than 120 academic institutes, the level of science presented, was extremely high. Neurology played a large part of the meeting with talks covering neurodegenerative disorders and brain damage as well as brain connectivity. In oncology, elastography was at the focus. The clincial presentations were mirrored in the preclinical presentations, a fact which was emphasized in a Bruker sponsored talk that underscored the potential of preclinical imaging to bridge the gap between basic research and clinical applications. Centering on India, additional sessions dicussed the impact of the country's, while still at a very low median, aging population.

Italian Chapter Conference

The city of Lecco was the host of the 2025 ISMRM Italian Chapter Conference from March 24th to 26th, where the spotlight was on pediatric imaging and emerging MRI techniques. The program featured developments in synthetic MRI, tumor microenvironment imaging, and structural and functional connectomics. Picking up on the additional topic of high-relaxivity contrast media, Silvio Aime, whose pioneering work continues to shape the future of imaging, presented an educational talk titled “Design and Testing of Innovative Procedures with Paramagnetic MRI Contrast Agents". In the preclinical realm, Eleonora Cavallari, also from Torino, presented O2 in vivo assessment of transmembrane water cycling in the developing brain using experiments on chicken embryo permeating Gd CA through the egg surface without injection.

Iberian Chapter Conference

The 2024 edition of the Iberian Chapter Conference, which took place from the 2nd to the 3rd of July was extremely productive. It was held at i3S, the Institute for Research and Innovation in Health at the heart of the University of Porto and fostered fruitful discussions and great networking opportunities The very good balance between clinical, preclinical, and computational MRI created by the executive committee was highly appreciated by the attendees who enjoyed such keynote speakers as Emma Munoz-Moreno from IDIBAPS, Barcelona who heads the MRI Core facility and covers several applications such as neurodegenerative disease, neuropsychiatry and neurovascular diseases.

Japanese Chapter Conference

The ninth annual ISMRM Japanese Chapter coference took place on September 21st in Chiba. This meeting, which was chaired by Dr. Fukunaga from the National Institute for Physiological Sciences was held together with the 52nd annual meeting of the Japanese Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. A highlight was the presentation of the prestigous Seiji Ogawa Prize, named in honor or Seiji Ogawa's ground breaking work in fMRI to Dr. Hiroshi Tagawa from Kyoto University.

German Chapter Conference

The German ISMRM chapter celebrated its 26th annual conference, which was held from September 4th to 5th in Tübingen. Starting with this meeting, the chapter evolved into a German-speaking section of ISMRM (DACH-ISMRM (D = Germany, A = Austria, CH = Switzerland)) including scientists from nearby countries. Four plenary lectures from Prof. Jürgen Henning, Prof. Laura Schreiber, Dr. Natalia Petridou and Dr. Lars Hanson captured the audience on new frontiers of neuroimaging, cardiology, and general innovation in MRI.

Hot topics in this 2024 edition: Hyperpolarization and Metabolic Imaging, Clinical and Biological Applications and Hardware and software developments.

In addition, a special industry session focusing on careers opportunities for young scientists was organized.

British and Irish Chapter Conference

The ISMRM British and Irish chapter conference was held from the 11th to the 13th of September in Nottingham. The theme of the meeting was 50+ years of MRI, recognizing Nottingham’s long association with the development and application of magnetic resonance imaging and spectroscopy (MRI/S). While the 12th and 13th covered the full range of MRI topics, the opening day Bruker-sponsored workshop on the 11th focused on X-nuclei MRI/S and brought leading experts in the field together to discuss carbon, phosphor, sodium, and more. Bruker's presentation of the newly developed high throughput and yeild d-DNP hyperpolarizer by Dr. Willy Gsell was very well received by this audience.