A Closer Look at Satellite Events at MICCAI 2025: Growth, Innovation, and Emerging Trends

As MICCAI 2025 draws near, one thing is clear: the community’s enthusiasm for sharing knowledge and advancing research continues to be strong. This year’s Satellite Event program, encompassing workshops, challenges, and tutorials, has expanded both in size and in scope, reflecting key trends and innovations shaping the field.

Continued Growth in Satellite Event Proposals

This year saw another record-breaking number of satellite event submissions, with 195 proposals received, marking a significant increase over previous years. Thanks to creative scheduling solutions, including the introduction of new quarter-day slots for nearly half of the challenges, the organizing team was able to accept approximately 100 events.

Selection decisions were guided by several factors, including topical balance, expected attendance, and the strategic merging of events (most of the full-day events absorbed other events), to ensure a relevant and impactful program. Most topics reflect some of the field’s most pressing and fast-evolving areas, such as foundational models, large language models, federated learning, fairness of AI fairness, low-resource applications, and efficient analysis.

Challenges: A Focus on Robustness and Real-World Impact

The MICCAI 2025 Challenge lineup, will feature over 40 competitions covering a diverse range of topics, from medical image segmentation and reconstruction to computer-aided diagnosis for various clinical applications. A growing emphasis can be seen on the application of foundation models and self-supervised learning, with a strong emphasis on ensuring the robustness, fairness, and clinical translation of solutions.

A major highlight is the introduction of three Lighthouse Challenges—BraTS 2025, SAGES-CVS 2025, and UNICORN 2025—which stand out for their potential for high clinical impact and access to high-quality data. These challenges represent the cutting edge of MICCAI's mission to bridge the gap between algorithmic innovation and real-world healthcare needs.

Workshops: Spotlight Emerging Themes and Clinical Relevance

With 40 Workshops accepted, this year’s program covers a diverse range of topics including simulation, digital twins, generative models, robotics, and federated learning. There’s a notable rise in interest in emerging themes such as foundation models, large language models and diffusion techniques, reflecting the field's shift toward scalable, explainable, and data- and compute-efficient AI methods in healthcare.

Also, the community shows sustained engagement with CAI, with several workshops directly addressing surgical navigation, robotic assistance, and interventional workflows, and others—primarily targeting MIC—also featuring CAI-related topics relevant to clinical procedures and patient-specific modeling. Additionally, two workshops explore emerging areas such as AI agents and embodied intelligence, signaling early momentum toward interactive and context-aware medical AI systems.

Tutorials: Expert-Led Sessions on Cutting-Edge Topics

Tutorials continue to serve as a vital platform for learning and community engagement. This year, the tutorial team received 32 proposals, with 11 selected for inclusion in the final program - 10 half-day sessions and one full-day tutorial. Accepted topics range from Fairness of AI in Medical Imaging and Generative Models for Synthesizing Medical Images, to Challenges and Opportunities in Wireless Capsule Endoscopy and Hosting a challenge on Grand Challenge. The presenting teams are composed of experts in their fields from a variety of institutions across the globe.

Register for MICCAI 2025 Satellite events

MICCAI 2025’s Satellite Events reflect not only the breadth and depth of current research but also the community’s commitment to innovation, equity, and real-world impact. Whether you’re attending a workshop, joining a challenge, or diving into a tutorial, the MICCAI 2025 Satellite Events offers something for everyone.

Don’t miss your chance to be part of the conversation. Register for Day 1 and Day 2 of the MICCAI 2025 Satellite Events and help shape the future of medical AI.

Register