It has been clear since the location of MICCAI 2024 was announced that this edition of the MICCAI Conference would focus on the need for more healthcare research and collaboration with African countries. We have introduced several exciting initiatives to the program to share knowledge and identify opportunities. In today's lineup of satellite events, we're highlighting the new MICCAI Meets Africa Workshop, which will take place from 8:00 am -10:00 am and 10:30 am -12:30 pm in the Palmeraie Meeting room.
"In recent years, there has been considerable excitement about the extraordinary opportunities that machine learning may offer in the future of healthcare," said Udunna Anazodo, Workshop Co-Chair. "However, machine learning in medical imaging has almost entirely targeted imaging applications in higher-income settings."
MICCAI Meets Africa aims to connect researchers, medical experts, policymakers, and regulators from Africa and beyond to share experiences and initiatives in promoting ML for medical imaging on the African continent by Africans for Africans.
"With this workshop, we hope to showcase exceptional research done on the continent and raise awareness about initiatives, new research and innovation in the field to address Africa-specific healthcare challenges," said Celia Cintas, Workshop Co-organizer. "We want to attract collaborators and encourage similar initiatives for promoting practical ML solutions for resource-limited settings around the world."
An astonishing number of 45 submissions were received, and more than 17 reviewers helped with the selection process. The acceptance of the papers was based on methodological novelty, contribution to the state-of-the-art of ML, significance of results, relevance to the workshop theme and objectives, and clarity of the work summarized.
"In the accepted papers, we can see cutting-edge research from the continent and worldwide," said Tinashe Mutsvangwa, Workshop Co-Organizer. "These presentations cover various topics related to medical imaging and machine learning, including fairness and trustworthiness, out-of-distribution detection, breast cancer in low-resource settings, evaluation metrics for ultrasound-guided needle placement, multiple sclerosis synthesis with diffusion models, foot arch bone analysis, and automated stroke lesion segmentation, among many others."
Selected papers from this workshop will be published in Springer Nature's Communications in Computer and Information Science (CCIS).
The workshop consists of three keynote presentations, nine contributed talks, and twelve posters spanning three main theme sessions, focusing on:
Each session will start with a keynote presentation from renowned experts spanning academic, industry, and clinical backgrounds. Contributed talks will follow it and will close with a poster and networking session.
In addition, two awards, sponsored by the Radiological Society of North America Research & Education Foundation (RSNA R&E) will be announced. The Best Paper Award for the highest quality paper, and the People's Choice Award chosen by the workshop attendees.
The MICCAI Meets Africa Workshop has been spearheaded by a strong organizing team of members belonging to diverse institutions from academia and industry backgrounds in the continent and globally, as well as different career stages.
More details, including the organizing team members, accepted papers, workshop schedule, and keynote speakers, can be found here.