MRathon 2019: Plenary Talks

This year, we organized the MRathon, a hackathon for MR professionals held in Montréal just before the 2019 ISMRM meeting. Hosted at Polytechnique de Montréal on the campus of the University of Montreal, it had over 50 participants spanning all five continents. The hackathon consisted of nine idea pitches, and resulted in a fun and productive event that sprouted several new collaborations and friendships.

This two-day event began with a series of four plenary talks on a set of topics of timely importance for the MR community: reproducibility, standardization, and open source software.

❮ ❯

The first plenary talk was by Paul Tofts, emeritus professor at the University of Sussex and author of the book Quantitative MRI of the Brain.

The second plenary talk was given by Katy Keenan, an MRI research engineer at NIST, current Chair of the Quantitative MR Study Group, and lead author on a recent review paper on the need for good quantitative MRI phantoms.

The next plenary was by Lukas Winter, a staff scientist at Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) in Berlin and founder of OpenSourceImaging.org

And the last plenary talk was by Daniel Gallichan, a lecturer at Cardiff University, past-Chair of the Reproducible Research Study Group, and project manager of the ISMRM-affiliated MR-Hub website listing open-source MRI software.

This event was sponsored by Institut TransMedTech, the Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform, the Montréal Heart Institute, OpenSourceImaging.org, the Réseau de Bio-imagerie du Québec, Rogue Research Inc., the Functional Neuroimaging Unit (UNF), and HeartVista.