The Road to ISMRM 2016: Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference
For anyone involved in MRI research, this is an exciting time of year. The faculty are dreaming about their students collecting the last bits of data for their abstracts. The students are dreaming about getting started thinking about maybe collecting data for their abstracts. And those of us involved in organizing the annual meeting are working to make sure you have the best experience possible in Singapore.
As part of this, I’ve been talking to a lot of the membership about problems they have at the meeting and working with the AMPC to come up with solutions. If you ask people “what would you like to see improved at the annual meeting?”, the first thing that people say is “Internet”. They don’t need to include verbs, or adjectives. Just the one word is enough. From my perspective, they don’t even need to say that one word… all of us know this is an issue. The ISMRM has spent thousands of dollars trying to fix this, but for several reasons, we still have issues.
The second issue that people bring up is that the meeting is getting larger and larger and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find presentations that interest them. Those of us on the AMPC also find it more difficult to organize the scientific meeting with the increasing number of submitted abstracts given the way we do things now. The photo at the top of this post should highlight the problem. That’s the stack of abstracts submitted to the pulse sequence group in 2015. You can immediately see the problems. First, the abstracts are all on paper. They’ve been sorted into review category and then sorted by score, but the success of the whole meeting relies on us keeping track of over 6000 pieces of paper as they are shuffled around among the 50 people on the AMPC. It’s also difficult to sort through these huge stacks of paper to find the right abstracts for a session. The second problem is that the abstracts on paper, and they were designed to be on paper, even though we increasingly read and interact with abstracts on computers, tablets and phones.
This leads to the problem shown in the image here, where abstracts get more and more difficult to read as the screen size gets smaller, to the point where reading an abstract on your phone is almost a joke. There is also a hidden problem that links these two main problems together. If you go back over the last few years, the average abstract size is about 2MB, and you have to load the entire abstract if you want to read it, since it’s in PDF format. Let’s say that 20% of the attendees want to open the first abstract of a session to follow along. How much data is that? Well, since that’s about 1000 people, it’s easy to calculate that this corresponds to a 2GB data request. And this is only for 20% of the people at the meeting. Add in the fact that the average ISMRM attendee is likely to wait 10 seconds before hitting the “reload” button, and it’s clear that we have set up a beautiful denial-of-service attack on ourselves no matter what we do, especially if more than a fraction of the meeting wants to read abstracts while reading email, etc.
All of these problems point to the fact that it’s time to change the way we submit, review and publish abstracts. We’ve been through this process before. Many of the “old-timers” in the field will remember the famous “blue lined form” that was required to submit your abstract on paper when I started out. I think everyone would agree that the current system is much much better than that. I’m hoping that our new system will provide us with this kind of improvement very quickly as well.
The new abstract submission system that we will be using this year is based on a responsive HTML text layout (much like the page you’re reading now.) What this means for you is that you will just have to submit text and figures. You won’t have to worry about the formatting of the abstract — the system will take care of that for you. This means that the abstracts will resize depending on the size screen that you’re on, so that the abstracts will always be readable. We also hope that the AMPC will be able to more easily find and organize the best, most targeted abstracts for our sessions. And finally, once the abstracts are published you will only have to download the text and figure thumbnails when you first read an abstract, meaning that the load on the internet should be roughly 100x lower than now. (You will still have access to the high-resolution images by clicking on them.) I hope that all of these factors will combine to dramatically improve the entire experience of submitting, reviewing and reading abstracts at the ISMRM.
We believe that we’ve designed a system that will be almost trivial for most members to adapt to. We’ve been testing this rigorously for the last six months, and most people have been able to submit an abstract in between 10–20 minutes without any detailed instructions. Most of that time is still spent entering author information and filling out disclosures, neither of which has changed from the system last year. We’ve put together some detailed instructions about entering the abstract text here:
Detailed Instructions for Submission
The biggest changes are that you only prepare your abstract in plain text broken into different sections, and equations are entered in MathJax. Figures and tables are uploaded separately along with their captions. Otherwise, the system should be what you’re used to.
Thanks in advance for all of your patience through this process! We all hope that this will be a positive step for the ISMRM. I’ll be back later in the year to update you on our progress planning the meeting. I’ll also be posting about some of my favorite places in Singapore. As always, please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or comments on these changes. I’ll do my best to answer you personally.
— Mark
