NIF’s 2026 Annual Scientific Meeting started with a full day of lively and involving community workshops, in which imaging researchers, clinicians, technical experts and policy leaders shared their thinking about current and upcoming imaging needs, challenges and projects.
Hosted in Newcastle by NIF’s Node Partner the Hunter Medical Research Institute, organisers planned for the nearly-200 people who attended the three simultaneous sessions in person throughout the day, with many people joining remotely online.
In the morning, the NIF PET and Radiochemistry Scientists Joint Workshop covered data capture, analysis and automation. NIF radiographers met about their community of practice, and the NIF Human MRI team held a network meeting.
Dr Joseph Ioppolo (UWA NIF Scientist, Radiochemistry), who led the radiochemistry section of the PET and Radiochemistry Scientists Joint Workshop, said that a highlight was the section on identifying and designing PET tracers to target different diseases, presented by Dr Michelle James (UC San Diego) and A/Prof Mohammad ‘Mo’ Haskali (Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre).
“I am always amazed at how many hundreds of compounds need to be screened in order to find a ‘hit’ to move ahead with,” he said.
Dr Ioppolo also mentioned the thought-provoking discussions about radiopharmaceutical regulations, as facilitated by Dr Maggie Aulsebrook (Monash University) and Prof Dale Bailey (University of Sydney). Within the diverse range of ideas and opinions presented during the workshop, “it’s clear everyone ultimately is working toward what is best for patients,” he said.
The second session discussed a national framework for quantitative MRI harmonisation. The session went in-depth about practical approaches to quality assurance and quality control, multicentre reproducibility, and scalable harmonisation. The third annual ultra-low-frequency and low-frequency MR workshop met at the same time.
The day culminated in a session on how to engage and create relationships with First Nations communities in research-yarning as a methodology.
In high demand, the session was completely full: “People were keen to engage,” said session leader Dr Jennifer Rumbel (Gamilaraay ngaya woman and Indigenous Imaging Fellow at the Hunter Medical Research Institute).
The dedicated session “shows a desire that NIF and the Nodes are wanting to learn more in order to engage and support Indigenous-led research,” Dr Rumbel said.
“As an Aboriginal woman this has a feeling of right time, right place, right relations; people are ready to engage.”
A simultaneous ‘MEG in Australia’ session covered the systems, applications and next steps for the technique. Leader of the session, Dr David White (Swinburne Neuroimaging), was very pleased that the Australian MEG community came together to hear about key developments across the network.
“I’m excited by the growing community – as the network continues to develop, we’ll be able to share and expand expertise, and tackle even bigger questions with this imaging capability,” he said.
The community workshops day ended with NIF’s thanks for the significant support provided by its gold sponsors Bruker, Corcillum, GE HealthCare, the Mark Hughes Foundation, Philips, Revvity, Siemens Healthineers, United Imaging and the University of Newcastle; and silver sponsors AXT, Mediso and Unilab.
We look forward to the scientific symposium today, with its networking and collaboration.