Dear AuntMinnieEurope Member,
The Maverinck loves to sound off about a wide range of topics, but when it comes to a controversy in his specialist area of MRI research, he tends to get particularly fired up.
In this week's column, he describes the case of a recent article about the reproducibility of relaxation time values in MRI. Why did this paper get his attention? Find out in the MRI Community.
Abbreviated MRI involves a shorter, abbreviated-protocol examination. Understandably, it seems to be gaining wider acceptance for breast screening, in which the emphasis is on volume scanning and efficient workflow.
The technique is highly effective and is the preference of many women, Australian investigators have reported. Importantly, the new study confirms abbreviated MRI works and is popular, commented Dr. Christiane Kuhl, who has championed the procedure for nearly a decade. Get the full story in the Women's Imaging Community.
Claustrophobia remains a big issue in MRI, but is it really viable to bring parents into the bore of a scanner to calm an extremely anxious child? In the November edition of the European Journal of Radiology, the authors have described how they do just this. Their incredible parent-and-child image has been shared multiple times on social media.
In another of our top stories, 14 top European chest experts have produced a document about the use of imaging in the long-term follow-up of COVID-19 patients. Our report includes the case of a 30-year-old woman who developed severe COVID-19 pneumonia and who spent 40 days in the intensive care unit.
Finally, we have an article about the impact of the pandemic on the global market for breast imaging equipment. The piece also looks at the key trends and drivers.
![Overview of the study design. (A) The fully automated deep learning framework was developed to estimate body composition (BC) (defined as subcutaneous adipose tissue [SAT] in liters; visceral adipose tissue [VAT] in liters; skeletal muscle [SM] in liters; SM fat fraction [SMFF] as a percentage; and intramuscular adipose tissue [IMAT] in deciliters) from MRI. The fully automated framework comprised one model (model 1) to quantify different BC measures (SAT, VAT, SM, SMFF, and IMAT) as three-dimensional (3D) measures from whole-body MRI scans. The second model (model 2) was trained to identify standardized anatomic landmarks along the craniocaudal body axis (z coordinate field), which allowed for subdividing the whole-body measures into different subregions typically examined on clinical routine MRI scans (chest, abdomen, and pelvis). (B) BC was quantified from whole-body MRI in over 66,000 individuals from two large population-based cohort studies, the UK Biobank (UKB) (36,317 individuals) and the German National Cohort (NAKO) (30,291 individuals). Bar graphs show age distribution by sex and cohort. BMI = body mass index. (C) After the performance assessment of the fully automated framework, the change in BC measures, distributions, and profiles across age decades were investigated. Age-, sex-, and height-adjusted body composition reference curves were calculated and made publicly available in a web-based z-score calculator (https://circ-ml.github.io).](https://img.auntminnieeurope.com/mindful/smg/workspaces/default/uploads/2026/05/body-comp.XgAjTfPj1W.jpg?auto=format%2Ccompress&dpr=2&fit=crop&h=167&q=70&w=250)
