MRITogether26 — MRI TogetherThon: Refocusing the Community

This year, MRI Together becomes a collaborative hackathon. The goal is to bring the community together around a shared practical challenge: building a fully open-source, end-to-end MRI pipeline for prenatal imaging—from sequence programming to image analysis.

Day 1 30 November Sequence Programming
Opening	Introduction to MRITogether and the hackathon
Talk	Open-source sequence programming Maxim Zeitsev - University Medical Center Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany Jon F. Nielsen — University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA
Talk	Optimisation of MRI sequences for diffusion placenta imaging Nahla M.H. Elsaid — Children's National Hospital, Washington DC, USA
Hands-on	Program and optimise a diffusion sequence for placenta application

Day 2 1 December Reconstruction & Simulation
Talk	Reconstruction
Talk	Introduction to numerical phantoms and MRI sequence simulation with KomaMRI Carlos Castillo-Passi — Stanford University, Stanford, USA Pablo Villacorta-Aylagas — Universidad de Valladolid, Valladolid, Spain
Hands-on	Building a Digital Placenta Phantom, Simulating Data, and Running Reconstructions

Day 3 2 December Motion Correction & Post-processing
Talk	Addressing Motion Artifacts in (prenatal) MRI Thomas Küstner — University Hospital of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany
Talk	Advanced Diffusion Post-Processing Pipelines for Prenatal Imaging Jana Hutter — Leibniz University Hannover, Hannover, Germany
Hands-on	Correct motion-affected k-space data

Day 4 3 December Analysis
Talk	Quality metrics and reconstruction quality assessment Martin Styner — The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, USA Steven Meisler — University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA
Talk	Applications in placenta diffusion imaging Esra Abaci Turk — Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, USA
Hands-on	Applying image quality metrics and extracting quantitative parameters

Day 5 4 December Pipeline Assembly
Workshop	Full Placenta MRI pipeline: integrating sequence programming, simulation, reconstruction, and analysis
Closing	Prize Announcements and closing talk