27th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MEDICAL IMAGE COMPUTING
AND COMPUTER ASSISTED INTERVENTION
6-10 October 2024 • MARRAKESH / MOROCCO

AREA CHAIR GUIDELINES & RESPONSIBILITIES

This document provides detailed guidelines to Area Chairs (AC) for MICCAI 2024. The role of AC entails a significant commitment involving tasks of monitoring and managing the review process for a set of papers, making recommendations for paper acceptance, recommending high-quality papers for orals and awards, and interacting with the Program Chairs (PCs) and other ACs.

Important tasks and schedules for AC duties include the following:

  1. Before the end of February: You will be asked to update your subject areas in CMT and upload your relevant papers to TPMS
  2. Mid-March: You will be asked to join a teleconference explaining the reviewer process and your role and responsibilities as an AC.
  3. 19 - 25 March: You will make reviewer suggestions and do additional format checking of submitted papers.
  4. 04 April: You will check assignments to make sure no two reviewers from the same institution review the same paper.
  5. 08 April - 06 May: During the main and emergency review periods, you will monitor the review process, check the quality of incoming reviews, send reminders, request further information from reviewers where needed, and reassign reviewers if needed.
  6. 13 - 20 May: You will do a lightweight check on early decisions, and make recommendations for accepted papers regarding orals, awards, session type
  7. 28 May - 03 June: You will make independent recommendations (accept/reject) for rebuttal papers (20-30 papers), make recommendations for orals, awards, session type for papers where you recommended acceptance, and write brief justifications for papers where you recommended rejection. Each rebuttal paper will be assessed by two ACs.
  8. 04 - 10 June: You may be asked to help with final decisions for all rebuttal papers where there was a disagreement between the two AC recommendations.

This process was designed to minimise your workload while ensuring a high quality and fair decision process. Unlike previous years, ACs will not have to do meta-reviews for early accept and early reject papers, and instead, only perform a lightweight quality and sanity check. ACs will also not have to write meta-reviews for rebuttal papers where they recommend acceptance, and only write brief justifications for rebuttal papers where they recommend rejection. During the rebuttal stage, we expect ACs to carefully assess the reviews and the rebuttal, and only if necessary, read the paper in full detail. The intention is that ACs do not act as an additional reviewer, and primarily rely on the reviews and rebuttal for making their recommendations. A more detailed outline of the individual tasks and phases of the review process is provided below.

Please also check the timeline with important dates on the conference webpage.

The MICCAI review process is fully blinded among the authors, reviewers, and ACs. Below is a list of the key responsibilities of the ACs throughout the review process.

1. Formal Rules

Confidentiality: You have the responsibility to protect the confidentiality of the ideas represented in the papers you handle. MICCAI submissions are by their very nature not published documents. The work is considered new or proprietary by the authors. Authors are allowed to submit a novel research manuscript that has been archived for future dissemination (e.g., on the arXiv or BioRxiv platforms). Sometimes the submitted material is still considered confidential by the authors' employers. Sending a paper to MICCAI for review does not constitute a public disclosure. Therefore, it is required that you strictly follow the following recommendations:

  • Do not show the paper to anyone else including colleagues or students. These colleagues and students will also be subject to the same confidentiality.
  • Do not show any results, videos/images or any of the supplementary material to non-reviewers.
  • Do not use ideas from a paper that you handle for any research or other purposes before its publication.
  • Do not use or share ideas from a rejected paper.
  • After the review process, destroy all copies of papers and supplementary material associated with the submission.

Conflict of Interest: The blind reviewing process will help hide the authorship of papers. If you recognize the work or the author and feel it could present a conflict of interest, decline to handle the paper and inform the Program Chairs. You have a conflict of interest if any of the following is true:

  • you belong to the same institution or have been at the same institution in the past five years,
  • you co-authored together in the past five years,
  • you hold or have applied for a grant together also in the past five years,
  • you currently collaborate or plan to collaborate,
  • you have a business partnership,
  • you are relatives or have a close personal or professional relationship.

2. Responsibilities of the Area Chairs

In phase 1, each AC is expected to be assigned about 18 papers as the primary AC. In phase 2, approximately an additional 15 papers will be assigned to each AC as the secondary AC. Note, that about 50% of papers from your first stack may receive early decisions, so the total amount of (rebuttal) papers in phase 2 is expected to be less than 30. In phase 1, each paper is handled by one AC. In phase 2, each paper will be assigned to one primary AC and one secondary AC.

  • Paper submission and assignment to Area Chairs (paper submission deadline: 07 March; paper assignment to AC: 18 March)

    • Encourage your networks, including postdocs and students from their group, to sign-up for reviewing.
    • Paper assignment to ACs will be completed automatically using CMT and the Toronto Paper Matching System (TPMS). If you have concerns about your assignment (outside areas of expertise, COI, etc), please inform the program chairs (program_chairs@miccai2024.org) for manual adjustment.

  • 1st AC Teleconference (Mid March 2024)

    • All ACs are invited and strongly encouraged to attend a first AC teleconference that will provide orientation on AC responsibilities during the MICCAI 2024 review process

  • Phase 1: Reviewer suggestions and paper format checking (19 - 25 March)

    • Suggest a ranked list of 10-15 possible reviewers for each assigned paper. This can be facilitated by sorting a CMT-generated list of reviewers by subject areas [score 0-1.0, 1.0=best match] or TPMS rank [1 - 1400,1=best match].
    • If you wish to add a reviewer not in the database to review a particular paper, you must (1) ensure that the person is willing to review the particular paper, and then (2) contact submission platform manager Kitty Wong at submission@miccai2024.org and we will include the reviewer manually within CMT for that paper during Phase 2. This is a difficult process and will only be considered as a rare exception.
    • You will be asked to check papers for formatting violations that may have been missed during the screening stage.

  • Phase 1: Check review assignments (04 April)

    • You will need to check assignments to make sure no two reviewers from the same institution review the same paper.

  • Phase 1: Main review period (08 - 25 April)

    • Monitor the reviews received for each assigned paper, and contact the reviewer for corrections as needed (e.g., poor quality, brevity, inappropriate language, etc). You will only perform a lightweight quality and sanity check, but are otherwise not involved in the early decisions. No additional feedback beyond the original reviews will be provided to authors.
    • If you are unsatisfied with the quality of a review, and fail to get further feedback from the reviewer, please contact the program chairs for additional reviewer(s)' input on the paper, beyond the original three reviewers.

  • Phase 1: Emergency review period (26 April - 06 May)

    • Continue to monitor the reviews received for each assigned paper, help with recruiting emergency reviewers (e.g., from your own lab)

  • Phase 1: Assess and check early decisions (06 - 20 May)

    • For early accepted papers, you will make recommendations for accepted papers regarding orals, awards, session type.

  • Rebuttal period (13 - 20 May)

    • An additional ~15 papers will be assigned to each AC while early decision papers are removed from the AC paper stack.

  • Phase 2: Recommendations for rebuttal papers (28 May - 03 June)

    • Each rebuttal paper will be assessed by two ACs (primary and secondary).
    • You will make recommendations (accept/reject) for all rebuttal papers in your stack, make recommendations for orals, awards, session type for papers where you recommended acceptance, and write brief justifications for papers where you recommended rejection.
    • You will rank the papers for which you recommended acceptance.

  • Phase 2: Arbitration on rebuttal papers with AC disagreement (04 June - 10 June)

    • You may be asked to help with final decisions for all rebuttal papers where there was a disagreement between the two AC recommendations.

  • 2nd AC Teleconference (Mid to Late June)

    • ACs are invited and strongly encouraged to participate in a 2nd AC teleconference, where the MICCAI 2024 PCs will communicate the overall results and statistics of the review process and present any arising issues to the ACs. In these teleconferences, ACs also will be asked to provide feedback on the overall review process and formulate recommendations on any need for adjustments or improvements.

3. Best Practices of Being an Area Chair

  • Recommendations for rebuttal papers: One of the most crucial duties of ACs is the recommendation for acceptance or rejection of rebuttal papers. This is where the ACs should carefully assess the reviews, the author response, and if needed, the paper itself. We do not expect ACs to act as an additional reviewer. ACs will not have to write meta-reviews for rebuttal papers where they recommend acceptance, and only write brief justifications for rebuttal papers where they recommend rejection. AC decisions should primarily rely on the reviews and the author's rebuttal for making their recommendations.
  • Conflicts of interest: If you identify any paper with which you might have a conflict of interest, please notify the PCs immediately so the paper can be re-assigned. DO NOT talk to any other AC about papers assigned to you without prior approval from the PCs, as there may be several other ACs conflicted with the paper. DO NOT talk to any other AC about your own paper(s) (the paper(s) on which you are an author) or a paper with which you have a conflict, during this whole process. Please remember that it is unacceptable to include anyone as a co-author who has been directly or indirectly involved with the manuscript at any stage during the decision process either as a Reviewer, Area Chair or as part of the PCs; this includes any direct follow-on publications (e.g., MICCAI special journal issues).
  • Attitude: Be aware that you have a strong influence on the decision for a paper. Take your job very seriously and be fair. Be professional and willing to listen to the reviewers, the authors, other ACs, and PCs. Do not give in to undue influence from anyone.
  • At the conference: Please keep track of accepted papers from your stack; for talks, have a question or two prepared for the speakers to stimulate discussion. For posters, go see the poster and ask questions.