Report: The 10th BRI International Symposium

The 10th annual international symposium was held at Brain Research Institute, Niigata University on February 21-22, 2020. This year's theme was "Advanced brain imaging for the future". The symposium included special lectures by Dr Michael Garwood (Center for Magnetic Resonance Research, Department of Radiology, University of Minnesota), Dr Marek Kubicki (Departments of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School) and Dr Lennart Verhagen (Donders Institute, Radboud University, the Netherlands) in addition to 9 speakers from Japan. There were also 16 poster presentations by both on-campus and extramural researchers. To our great joy, a total of 130 people attended the two-day symposium, which was more than anticipated.

In line with the theme "Advanced brain imaging for the future", speakers shared the state-of-the-art topics including magnetic resonance imaging, positron emission tomography and electroencephalography, all of which are non-invasive techniques to study the brain. The symposium was a fourfold session. In the first session "Ultrahigh-field MRI", speakers presented the potentials of future study applying an ultrahigh-field MRI, which is becoming popular across the world. The talks at the next session "Bridging morphology and function by MRI" focused on exploring the way in which scientists carve out the new direction on neurophysiology and neuropathology research by assessing the ability of ultrahigh-field MRI. Both sessions brought keen discussions among attendees. The following day started with the session "Imaging of Neuro-Psychiatric function by PET", which shed a spotlight on approaches to brain disease study, under the circumstance that new PET markers, including tau protein imaging and brain inflammation imaging, are developed one after another. The last three talks in "New paradigms in neuroimaging" session proposed prospects of the deep learning methods which are rapidly being applied in the field of MR imaging research, and went further to the subject of a brand new realm of research applying modality that has been used only in scanning images into non-invasive neuromodulation.

Lastly, we would like to thank all the speakers, attendees and those who helped preparing and assisted at the venue for their contributions to making the event successful.

By Prof Hironaka Igarashi (Center for Integrated Human Brain Science)

Day 1 (Click to enlarge images)

Day 2 (Click to enlarge images)