Multicentre MRI is an increasingly popular approach for acquiring large datasets from diverse geographical populations yet technical issues in combining data from multiple sites need to be addressed. At this meeting, practical approaches to these problems will be discussed in addition to results from existing clinical and research multicentre studies.

Imaging studies performed across multiple centres provide an attractive method of obtaining large datasets with results that can be generalised across the population. However, despite the increasing number of multicentre studies in both clinical and normal populations, this approach is complicated by the many technical issues that have to be addressed before the MRI data from different sites can be combined - this latter issue often requiring input from MRI physicists.

The aims of this meeting are two-fold:

(1)        Present the clinical research results from on-going or completed multicentre studies (e.g. those conducted in subjects with autism, breast imaging or fMRI "standardisation" studies of healthy volunteers), thereby facilitating discussion of the advantages of multicentre imaging including the more general interpretation of the results.

(2)        Present and discuss some of the applied solutions to the technical difficulties important in multicentre imaging (e.g. standardised acquisition and analysis protocols, combination of data from multiple sites and MRI Quality Assurance) allowing further optimisation and / or adoption of these methods to new studies.

Provisional Programme and Registration Form available to download above. To register for this meeting, please complete the Registration form and submit it with your payment to the IPEM office by email, post or fax before the booking deadline to secure a place.

Registration deadline: 19 March 2010

If you have any queries, please contact Alice Fields in the meetings department.

This meeting is co-sponsored by SINAPSE and the British Institute of Radiology, and supported by the British Chapter of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine

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