The MICCAI Young Researcher Excellence Training Program offered online mentoring and small group training to guide young researchers through the entire MICCAI paper preparation process, from paper design and writing to presentation, viewed from both author and reviewer perspectives.
Prior to the conference, thanks to an impressively large number of mentor applications, 50 mentors and 51 mentees were matched, enabling an almost 1:1 ratio. About 40% of the mentees are affiliated with Pan-Asian countries (South/Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East), regions historically underrepresented in MICCAI.
Abdourahmane Baldé, currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence at the Université Assane Seck de Ziguinchor in Senegal, is grateful to his mentor for providing guidance, constructive feedback, and encouragement throughout the process. His research focuses on AI for hematology and medical imaging in low-resource settings, particularly on designing deep learning models to support the diagnosis of sickle cell disease and brain tumors.
Through the program, he gained valuable skills in advanced machine learning techniques, research reproducibility, and scientific communication. While his paper, DREPADetect: An Optimized YOLOv8 Model for High-Precision Detection of Sickle Cell, was not accepted at MICCAI due to a late submission, it was accepted and presented at the IEEE BigDataService 2025 Conference in August.
"This experience has significantly influenced my academic and career goals,” said Abdourahmane. "It strengthened my motivation to pursue an academic career at the intersection of AI and healthcare, while also developing platforms that can be deployed in resource-constrained environments such as sub-Saharan Africa. It also inspired me to mentor younger students in my region, to multiply the benefits of the program.”
Matching criteria included the alignment of research areas between mentors and mentees, as well as overlapping time zones to facilitate coordination. Mentor-mentee pairs contacted each other and scheduled meetings based on the mentees' MICCAI 2025 submission goals—such as the main conference, workshops, or satellite events.
"I am very grateful to MICCAI and the mentors for offering such an enriching experience,” concluded Abdourahmane. "I strongly believe that this initiative is shaping a new generation of researchers who are both technically strong and socially impactful.”
During MICCAI 2025, in collaboration with the MICCAI Student Board (MSB), mentors and mentees will meet in person on Wednesday, September 24th at 6:30 PM in DCC1 - 105/106. If you are a mentor or mentee in the program, or are interested in connecting with them, please join the event!