Sim4Life User Workshop and ZMT Exhibition at ISMRM 2024 in Singapore

From May 4 – 9, 2024, the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) community gathered at the Joint Annual Meeting of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) in Singapore. ZMT introduced the new web version of Sim4Life, providing users with a powerful cloud-based platform with a simple pay-as-you-use pricing scheme.

As in every ISMRM, the Sim4Life User Workshop provided the unique opportunity for existing as well as new users to meet, hear about the latest product releases and our plans for the near future, and learn from experienced Sim4Life users how our software tools made a big difference for their R&D work.

Arjama Halder from ZMT started the workshop with an introduction to the brand new Sim4Life.web solution which is based on the o2S2PARC technology developed by the IT’IS Foundation – and offers the ease to register and run the most complex simulations in the cloud – including several benefits to the user including full Sim4Life functionality with no installation required, a simple pay-as-you-use credit scheme, and additional collaboration tools.

Next, Emily Long presented the results from her study for GE Healthcare on the effects of flexible receive-only coils on local and whole-body specific absorption rate (SAR), for high thermal risk applications such as paediatric, which depend on blocking impedances being resistive, inductive, or capacitive.

The first session was concluded by Umberto Zanovello from INRIM, Italy, exciting the audience with his open-source Python library called CoSymPy for EM/circuit co-simulation. CoSimPy is a perfect expansion of Sim4Life’s MATCH tool for the RF coil design workflow.

Daniel Wenz from the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, started the second session by showing how the use of high-permittivity materials can advance future ultra-high field MRI applications, including multi-feed dielectric resonator antennas or flexible RF coils with integrated dielectric resonators, as well as theranostics for neuro applications.

The event was concluded by Michael Oberle from ZMT with an outlook on the strategy and future features of Sim4Life.

As last year, a stakeholder meeting was also held for the Euramet project STASIS (Standardisation for safe implant scanning in MRI), including STASIS participants from PTB, INRIM, the IT'IS Foundation, and industry stakeholders. Stakeholders were updated on newest STASIS project results, and discussions centered around the results and implementation strategies for a smart medical implant safety concept.

At ISMRM itself, Sim4Life and ZMT hardware, as well as the IT’IS Virtual Population were front and center throughout the RF safety sessions, including exciting presentations by Ozlem Ipek (King’s College), Hongbae Jeong (FDA), Chris Collins (NYU), and many of the MR Safety Study Group Business Meeting student talks. It was inspiring to see the academic research enabled in part by ZMT software and hardware.

A big thank you to everyone who joined us at the booth and during the workshop! We are looking forward to seeing you again at ISMRM 2025, which will be held in Honolulu, USA, in May 2025!