We caught up PhD Candidate James Grover while he was in the departures lounge, returning from the International Symposium for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine Conference ISMRM, held in Capetown this year.
James was supported to attend by Sydney Cancer Partners with funding support from Cancer Institute NSW, and Tour de Cure.
What was the conference highlight, for you?
Meeting the people behind the papers. It was great to discuss ideas with people who are working on similar topics and whose papers I have read many times.
What work were you presenting?
I presented our approach to generating future images for real-time adaptive MRI-guided radiation therapy using patient-specific training and cross-attention. “A Patient-specific Cross-attention Future Orthogonal Planes (CAFOP) Framework for Adaptive MRI-guided Radiation Therapy”
Editor’s note: James’ work was awarded summa cum laude, meaning his research was rated in the top 5% of work submitted to the conference.
What’s your main takeaway from ISMRM?
MRI can do so much and there are so many people working on it. It’s always humbling to go to these conferences to see the breadth and depth of MRI research.
Any recommendations for someone going to Capetown?
Robben Island, was formerly a political prison where notable people such as Nelson Mandela were held. In their words, the island now represents, “the triumph of the human spirit over adversity, suffering, and injustice”.
Table Mountain (accessible via cable car) or Lion’s Head (if you’re up for the hike/climb), both mountains provided stunning 360 degree views of Cape Town and surrounds.
Read James’ previous paper Super-resolution neural networks improve the spatiotemporal resolution of adaptive MRI-guided radiation therapy here: https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s43856-024-00489-9