2020-03-10 Newsletter

Dear renalMRI - PARENCHIMA Team!

we are pleased to inform you about the following news:

Mark the date! Plenary PARENCHIMA meeting 2020

The annual meeting for this year will take place on 15-16 october in Malta, and will be organised by our Vice chair Dr. Valerie Said-Conti. Please mark the data and have a look at the meeting page for further detail. We will update this early in the next grant period with registration details.

renalMRI.org / PARENCHIMA protocols

renalMRI.org / PARENCHIMA has published a number of recommendations for clinical renal MRI. We have now started the process of collecting detailed MRI sequence protocols that are compliant with those recommendations, and making those available here.

If you have protocols that are compliant, and you want to share them, please submit them follow instructions on the github page. It would be brilliant if we could extend this to a complete set of compliant protocols (all vendors, all sequences) so we can help others run protocols that align with our standards.

MAGMA special issue published including review papers

The special issue on renal MRI biomarkers produced by WG1 was published in MAGMA in January of this year. Please see here.

Apart from the technical recommendations mentioned above this includes 4 review papers, on phase contrast MRI (WG1), hyperpolarized MRI (WG1), image registration (WG2) and renal transplantation (WG3). The special issue also has 7 papers with original research spanning hardware development up until clinical studies.

CANCELLED: WG5: Dissemination Meeting Amsterdam 2020.03.25-26

Due to the current situation regarding SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19, WG5 has decided to cancel the dissemination meeting in Amsterdam.

WG4: Preclinical book submitted!

Earlier this week, Andreas Pohlmann from Berlin has submitted the book Preclinical MR Imaging of the Kidney for publication to Springer Protocols. The book represents a mammoth undertaking and includes 42 chapters on animal preparation, experimental protocols and analysis protocols. The book is an incredible achievement and the result of 2 years of work, and will be made freely available through open access.

WG2: Database and software evaluation meeting

On the 3rd and 4th of March the “Database and Software Evaluation Meeting” took place in Koper, Slovenia. It was kindly organized by our working group 2 co-chair Dr. Peter Rogelj. The minutes of the meeting can be accessed here.

Briefly, on the first day the main topic was centered around the PARENCHIMA Database, aimed at to become an image bank for benchmarking and quality control with phantom-, volunteer- and patient data. On the second day the topic was on software evaluation for analysing renal MRI data. Here, the discussion and presentation focussed around image registration and its evaluation, a still unsolved problem.

Working group 2 is inviting researchers and groups working on renal MRI to share their data with the PARENCHIMA database and to help populating this resource. We are highly looking for phantom-, volunteer- and patient- and preclinical-data. Ideally, this data comes along with a ground truth annotation, i.e. clinical renal parameters, segmentations etc. to allow to create an image bank for benchmarking and quality control.

If you are interested in sharing your renal MRI data and have further questions please see here or contact the working group leads.

PARENCHIMA symposium on ERA-EDTA in Milan 2020

PARENCHIMA has proposed a symposium on renal MRI in the annual meeting of ERA-EDTA in Milan 2020, which will continue as a fully virtual meeting.

Title: Advanced renal MRI - the non-invasive renal biopsy in 2020

Renal MRI application in research and in clinical practice
Renal MRI to detect tissue perfusion, oxygenation, inflammation and fibrosis
MRI: renal blood flow, the GFR and renal metabolism

Acknowledgement

This newsletter is based upon work from COST Action PARENCHIMA (CA16103), supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology).

COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) is a funding agency for research and innovation networks. Our Actions help connect research initiatives across Europe and enable scientists to grow their ideas by sharing them with their peers. This boosts their research, career and innovation.

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