A fantastic ISMRM workshop on low-field MRI was held on 17-18 March with nearly 300 participants attending virtually. The agenda had several open source projects, such as “An Open-Source Low-Cost Operating Console for Accessible Low-Field MRI (MaRCoS)” presented by Benjamin Menküc, FH Dortmund and Vlad Negnevitsky, Oxford or “OSI² ONE: An Open-Source Low-Field MR Scanner” presented by Tom O’Reilly, LUMC Leiden and Lukas Winter, PTB Berlin. The OSI² ONE is a complete open source MRI scanner (https://gitlab.com/osii-one) and a live scanning session of this system was performed by Andrew Webb, LUMC Leiden. More information on this systems will be posted here soon.
Further talks e.g. by Larry Wald, MGH Harvard on “The Cost vs. Performance Trade-Off” or by the co-chair of the meeting Adrienne Campbell-Washburn, NIH Bethesda in her presentation on “Future Opportunities for Low Field in the Context of Modern MRI”, highlighted the importance of open source initiatives such as opensourceimaging.org, to reduce costs and collaboratively improve science and application of these devices. These interesting presentations were accompanied by vivid discussions on an open source approach to MR development and MRI science. E.g. highlighting the advantages of fragmented community developments of hardware modules or how this technology would connect resource poor and resource rich settings across the globe. Further suggestions were made asking for more active ISMRM support on Open Source Hardware and Software, which would be important to further strengthen and benefit from the current collaborative efforts of the Open Source community.