MICCAI 2025 (South Korea): Call for Lighthouse Challenges
Thursday 21st December 2023
Dear MICCAI enthusiasts,
Recent MICCAI conferences have featured more than 35 challenges on average, per year. While this quantity is a major strength, showing the breadth of coverage that the MICCAI Challenge community has of clinical needs, it also inevitably dilutes the participation and resources that any one challenge receives, and thus its potential impact.
To counter this phenomenon, we now aim to identify and elevate selected challenges that embody best practices in challenge design and have the potential for substantial impact both within and beyond the traditional MICCAI community.
To this end MICCAI 2025 will, alongside the regular number of challenges, specifically recognize and provide dedicated funding for a small set of particularly high-quality and high-impact challenges (“lighthouse challenges”) covering different modalities, domains, and tasks. These challenges will be subject to a more rigorous review process than regular challenges, including a data and annotation review following the submission of the full proposal.
With this call, we are asking for a statement of intent to organize such a lighthouse challenge. A subset of organizers who submit statements will be invited to send a full proposal and undergo dataset review.
Requirements
To be eligible for the selection process, challenge suggestions must adhere to the following requirements:
● The dataset must come from multiple institutions
● (Parts of) the organizing team must have experience in organizing challenges
● Challenge submission must be based on docker containers
● Evaluation code must be publicly available prior to the start of the challenge
● The test set must not comprise data that is already publicly available
● Publication of the challenge results must follow the BIAS standardized reporting guidelines (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.media.2020.101796)
In addition to the above requirements, priority will be given to proposals that
● Address a problem for which there is currently limited publicly available annotated data
● Engage with the relevant clinical or biological body (e.g., RSNA, ACR, USCAP, etc.)
Statement of Intent
Your statement of intent should include the following information (statements missing any of the following items will not be considered):
● Abstract including a description of the innovation and uniqueness of this challenge
● Statement of innovation and significance (What makes this proposal a lighthouse challenge as opposed to a high-quality regular challenge?)
● Mention of the organizing team having experience in organizing challenges
● Data usage agreement including concrete data license
● Number of training, validation (if any), and test cases
● Number of centers providing data
● Description of the annotation process, including number of annotators (total and per image), their experience level, labeling instructions, preparation and merging strategies, quality assurance mechanisms, description of semi-automatic approaches (if applicable), and proposed approach to empirically estimate label error rates
● Validation metrics used in the ranking
If you are interested, please submit your one-page Statement of Intent before 11 February 2024 to miccai-challenges-2025@dkfz-heidelberg.de.
The MICCAI 2025 Challenges Team