PhD student Adam van Niekerk has been elected as a trainee representative for the 'Detection & Correction of Motion in MRI & MRS Study Group' of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM). He will hold the position for one year starting from June 2018 when the joint annual meeting of the ISMRM-ESMRMB is held in Paris.

CUBIC radiographers were awarded not one but two first prize oral presentations in the SMRT abstract submissions this year - in both the clinical and research categories!

Petty Samuels received the First Place Clinical Focus Award for her abstract titled  'Improving MR Spectroscopy in the liver with a small number of averages by accurate voxel placement'. She and her co-authors showed that placing a spectroscopy voxel at least 10mm from the periphery in segment 7 of the liver rather than in segment 8 achieves narrower linewidths and improves discrimination between middle chain methylene, methyl groups and glycogen peaks.

Ingrid Op't Hof was awarded the First Place Research Focus Award for her abstract "Examining the effects of SMS and GRAPPA acceleration on resting state fMRI signal quality" where she showed that acceleration of fMRI acquisition using parallel imaging (GRAPPA) and simultaneous multi-slice imaging (SMS) reduces temporal SNR (tSNR), with a larger effect for GRAPPA. She and her co-authors suggest that a GRAPPA factor of 2 with an SMS factor of 2 provides a good compromise between fast acquisition and acceptable tSNR.

They will both present their work at the 27th annual meeting of the Society for MR radiographers and technologists (SMRT) in Paris in June. Congratulations on this excellent recognition!

The UCT Legacy Society invites you to our annual Summer School Guest Lecture

Topic: The intersection of cardiovascular disease and ageing: A global health perspective

Professor Ntusi, a UCT alumnus, is the Head of the Department of Medicine at UCT and the Clinical Lead for cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) and cardiovascular computed tomography (CCT) at Groote Schuur Hospital. He holds the Chair of Medicine in the Faculty of Health Sciences in the Department of Medicine. His primary research interests comprise inflammatory heart disease (including HIV-associated cardiovascular disease), non-ischaemic cardiomyopathy and non-invasive imaging, in particular with CMR. He has in-depth training and expertise in CMR and CCT. He currently supervises postgraduate students and is conducting several single-centre mechanistic clinical studies, which are mostly CMR-based.

Join us for what promises to be an engaging talk by Prof Ntusi, with plenty of time for Q&A
Date: 20 January 2018
Venue: Kramer Lecture Theatre 1
Time: 17h00 Cocktail reception followed by talk at 18h00

Kindly RSVP online by 13 January 2018

For more information, please email Lwando Nteya at lu.nteya@uct.ac.za.