28th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MEDICAL IMAGE COMPUTING
AND COMPUTER ASSISTED INTERVENTION
23-27 SEPTEMBER 2025DAEJEON CONVENTION CENTER

CALL FOR CHALLENGES

Overview

MICCAI Challenges aim to provide a fair and robust environment for evaluating solutions to common problems in our field. Challenges have become a cornerstone of the MICCAI conference, bringing together diverse teams from around the world to work on common benchmarks and share ideas. This enables rapid advancements of the state-of-the-art and efficient dissemination of new results.

We are pleased to announce the Call for Challenges for the MICCAI 2025 conference in Daejeon, Korea. We invite researchers, clinicians, and industry professionals to propose innovative challenges that address current problems in medical image analysis and computer-assisted interventions. We welcome challenges in all areas relevant to MICCAI, including but not limited to:

  • Medical image segmentation, registration, and reconstruction
  • Computer-aided diagnosis and prognosis
  • Image-guided interventions and robotics
  • Machine learning and deep learning in medical imaging
  • Multi-modal image analysis
  • Computational anatomy and physiology
  • Surgical planning and simulation

Proposals that address issues of fairness, global health, and barriers to translation are especially welcome.

MICCAI supports open data; hence, we encourage the organizers to use open-source data licenses and/or keep the challenge open to submissions beyond the conference, providing a sustained platform for benchmarking.

Important Dates

Challenge Proposal Submission Deadline
January 9, 2025
First Round of Feedback and Early Decisions
February 14, 2025
Revised Challenge Proposals Due
February 28, 2025
Final Notification of Acceptance
March 10, 2025
Individual Challenge Websites Opening
April 1, 2025
Challenge Events at MICCAI 2025
September 23 and 27, 2025
(All times are 23:59 Pacific Time)

Proposal Requirements and Submission Process

  1. Either the lead organizer or at least one other organizing team member must be a MICCAI Society member at the time of submission (https://miccai.wildapricot.org/)
  2. Prepare the challenge design by providing at least 90% of the challenge parameters using the structured submission system.
  3. Submit the generated and unchanged challenge design (PDF) to the review platform (CMT).

Note: Uploading a challenge design document to CMT that is incomplete or different from the one generated with the structured preparation system will lead to a desk rejection of the challenge.

Selection Criteria

Proposals will be evaluated based on:

  • Potential impact on research and practice
  • Relevance to the MICCAI community
  • Quality and novelty of the challenge design

As a new initiative for MICCAI 2025, three "lighthouse challenges” have already been selected based on an earlier, dedicated review process. The proposals for these lighthouse challenges may be useful to prospective organizers as examples of high-quality submissions which received positive feedback from the reviewers.

At least two reviewers will provide feedback and assist the challenge organizing committee in making a final decision. To ensure a rich and diverse program, we reserve the right to ask the applicants of proposals with substantial overlaps to merge or alter their scopes. We also reserve the right to ask applicants to provide supplementary materials and to revise their proposals, in order to ensure the quality and standard of the MICCAI challenges.

Post-Acceptance Process

Upon acceptance of the challenge, the complete design of the challenge will be registered on Zenodo. Changes to the design (e.g., to the metrics or ranking schemes) must be well-justified, documented, and officially re-registered by contacting the MICCAI challenges team (miccai-challenges-2025@dkfz-heidelberg.de).

Authors assign to the MICCAI Society the right to distribute challenge materials (such as the agenda or the challenge design document) to MICCAI members and to challenge and conference attendees, independently of the copyright ownership planned by the challenge organizers.

All organizers and speakers who plan to attend a MICCAI 2024 Challenge in which they are involved are expected to register for the event.

Organizer Responsibilities

Accepted challenge organizers will be responsible for:

  • Providing high-quality datasets and ground truth
  • Sharing their annotation protocol
  • Defining clear evaluation metrics
  • Managing the challenge website and submission system
  • Evaluating submissions and determining winners
  • Organizing a session at MICCAI 2025 to present and discuss results

Contact

For any questions or clarifications, please contact the MICCAI 2025 Challenges Team at miccai-challenges-2025@dkfz-heidelberg.de.