Announcing the PhD Thesis Madness Finalists

Sunday 6th October 2024

PhD Thesis Madness is an event organized by the MICCAI Student Board at MICCAI 2024, which allows final-year PhD students and recently finished doctorates to showcase their groundbreaking work. This event not only celebrates the achievements of graduating students but also offers industry researchers and academic investigators a unique opportunity to connect with emerging talent for future academic positions or industry roles. The event will take place during the lunch (which is provided at the venue) on Tuesday October 8 in the Oliveraie Meeting Room starting at 12:30 pm. No registration is required. Attendees will have the chance to vote for the best presentations, so come and show your support! This event is a unique opportunity to network, foster collaboration, and spark new ideas.

You can watch a preview of our speakers' presentations on our YouTube channel. Additionally, the finalists will be invited to participate in the next MICCAI Student Board webinar, where they will share insights about their PhD journey. Be sure to stay tuned!

The event has seven finalists who will give 3-minute spotlight presentations:

• Sasan Matinfar (Technical University of Munich, Supervisor: Prof. Nassir Navab) - Medical Sonic Interaction Design
• Julian Suk (University of Twente, Supervisor: Prof. Jelmer M Wolterink) - Geometric deep learning for 3D cardiovascular hemodynamics and beyond
• John Kalkhof (TU Darmstadt, Supervisor: Prof. Anirban Mukhopadhyay) - Democratizing Learning with Neural Cellular Automata
• Balamurali Murugesan (ETS Montreal, Supervisors: Prof. Jose Dolz & Prof. Ismail Ben Ayed) - Calibration in Medical Image Segmentation
• Cosmin I. Bercea (Technical University of Munich, Supervisor: Prof. Julia A Schnabel) - Deep Generative Models for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection in Medical Imaging
• Meirui Jiang (The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Supervisor: Prof. Qi Dou) - Federated Learning for Medical Image Computing: Robustness, Generalization, and Privacy
• Puxun Tu (Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Supervisor: Prof. Xiaojun Chen) - Research on Augmented Reality Surgical Navigation for Soft Tissue and Microsurgical Procedures

In addition, the event will also contain seven lightning-talks, which will last 90 seconds:

• McKell Woodland (The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Supervisor: Prof. Kristy Brock) - Predicting Liver Segmentation Model Failure with Feature-Based Out-of-Distribution Detection and Generative Adversarial Networks
• Francesco Galati (EURECOM, Supervisor: Prof. Maria A Zuluaga) - Robust Learning for Medical Image Segmentation
• Joshua D. Durso-Finley (McGill University, Supervisor: Prof. Tal Arbel) - Probabilistic Temporal Prediction of Continuous Disease Trajectories and Treatment Effects
• Alicia Pose Díez de la Lastra (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Supervisor: Prof: Javier Pascau) - Augmented Reality in Image-Guided Therapy to Improve Surgical Planning and Guidance
• Egor Panfilov (University of Oulu, Supervisor: Prof. Simo Saarakkala) - Magnetic resonance imaging-based biomarkers of knee osteoarthritis progression via deep learning
• Wietske Bastiaansen (Erasmus University Medical Center, Supervisors: Dr Stefan Klein, Dr. Melek Rousian, Prof. Regine Steegers-Theunissen, Prof. Wiro Niessen) - Modeling Human Embryonic Brain Development
• Catherine Namayega (University of Cape Town, Supervisor: Prof. Tinashe Mutsvangwa) - Development of a neural differentiable renderer for 3D reconstruction of X-ray images