Hands-On Learning at “OPEN MR DAYs” – The Section Biomedical Imaging (SBMI) successfully hosted the first joint meeting of the Nordic and DACH chapters of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) in September 2025. Ahead of the main event, participants had the opportunity to attend the “OPEN MR DAYs” pre-conference workshops on September 14–15. Attendees received hands-on training in tools and platforms designed to make MRI research more transparent, reproducible, and collaborative. Leading experts provided insights into open-source methods in MR sequence development and image reconstruction, including BART, Pulseq, gammaSTAR, and Open Recon. A big thank you to Prof. Martin Uecker, Prof. Maxim Zaitsev, Prof. Matthias Günther and Siemens Healthineers for hosting the workshops.
BART Sunday, Sept. 14 – The Berkeley Advanced Reconstruction Toolbox (BART) is a free and open-source image-reconstruction framework for Computational Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Prof. Dr. Martin Uecker, Prof. Martin Uecker, Daniel Mackner und Dr. Vitali Telezki Institute of Biomedical Imaging, Graz University of Technology, Austria.
PULSEQ Monday, Sept. 15 – Allows development and execution of MR pulse sequences for imaging and spectroscopy directly in Matlab, Octave or Python, and the export to the Pulseq file format which can be executed on real hardware. Prof. Dr. Maxim Zaitsev, Medical Physics, Department of Radiology, Medical Center – University of Freiburg, Germany.
gammaSTAR Monday, Sept. 15 – gammaSTAR provides a hardware-agnostic, user-friendly platform for MR pulse sequence development that simplifies the transfer of research ideas to diverse MRI systems. The workshop will explore key features of gammaSTAR to create an MR pulse sequence based on a modular design concept, and highlight recent developments and applications. Prof. Dr. Matthias Günther, Deputy Institute Director Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Medicine MEVIS, Bremen, Germany.
Siemens Healthineers „Open Recon“ Monday, Sept. 15 – Developing in the Open MAGNETOM Community puts you in control of cuttingedge MRI technology. Create, apply and scale your research - run your own reconstruction algorithms directly on the scanner (Siemens Healthineers, SHS).
Over 50 pre-conference workshop participants from different countries underlined the community’s enthusiasm for hands-on learning and technical exchange.
Text: Dr. Ronald Seidel