This document provides detailed guidelines to Area Chairs (AC) for MICCAI 2026. 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 highlights (e.g., orals and awards), and interacting with the Program Chairs (PCs) and other ACs.
Important tasks and schedules for AC duties include the following:
- Late January: You will be asked to update your subject areas in CMT and upload your relevant papers to TPMS.
- Early March: You will be asked to join a teleconference explaining the review process and your role and responsibilities as an AC.
- March 10 - 16: You will make reviewer suggestions and perform additional format checking of submitted papers.
- March 25: You will check assignments to ensure that a paper is not reviewed by two reviewers from the same institution, even if there is a third reviewer from another institution.
- March 27 - April 16: Main review period. 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.
- April 21 - 27: Emergency review period. The submission platform managers will assign missing reviews. During this time, you will continue to assist the submission platform managers in flagging missing reviews and recommending emergency reviewers.
- April 21 - 30: Early accept/reject and rebuttal decision period. You will provide decisions (early accept, early reject, or rebuttal) on papers with 3 reviews. Meta-reviews are required for all papers.
- Apr 30: Paper decisions and meta-reviews are due. To balance your workload, it is strongly suggested that you not wait until the reviewer deadline and instead start your work as soon as a paper has received 3 reviews.
- May 15 - 31: After the rebuttal period, you will work to ensure reviewers carefully consider the rebuttals and finalize their scores. You will also be assigned as a secondary AC for an additional 10-15 rebuttal papers. You will make independent recommendations (accept/reject) for all your assigned rebuttal papers (20-30 papers), make recommendations for highlights (e.g., orals, awards) for papers where you recommended acceptance, and write meta-reviews. Each rebuttal paper will be assessed by one primary and two secondary ACs.
This process was designed to optimize your workload while ensuring a high-quality and fair decision process. During the rebuttal stage, we expect ACs to carefully assess the reviews and the rebuttal, and only if necessary, read the paper in 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 obligations and 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.
- 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 have co-authored together in the past five years,
- You have held or applied for a grant together in the past five years,
- You currently collaborate or plan to collaborate,
- You have a business partnership, or
- 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 ~18 papers as the primary AC. In phase 2, an additional ~15 papers will be assigned to each AC as a secondary AC. Note that about 50% of papers from your first stack may receive early decisions, so the total number of (rebuttal) papers in phase 2 is expected to be around 30. In phase 1, each paper is handled by one AC. In phase 2, each paper will be assigned to one primary AC and two secondary ACs.
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Paper assignments to Area Chairs (paper submission deadline: February 26; paper assignments to AC: March 9)
- Encourage your collaborators and colleagues, including postdocs and students from their group, to sign-up for reviewing.
- Paper assignments to ACs will be completed automatically using CMT and the Toronto Paper Matching System (TPMS). If you have concerns about your assignments (outside your areas of expertise, COI, etc), please inform the program chairs (program_chairs@miccai2026.org) for manual adjustment.
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1st AC Teleconference (TBD)
- All ACs are strongly encouraged to attend this orientation teleconference on AC responsibilities with respect to the MICCAI 2026 review process.
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Phase 1: Reviewer suggestions and paper format checking (March 10 - 16)
- Identify 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 - N,1=best match]. Please note that CMT and TPMS scales are inverted with respect to each other, so a high CMT subject area score but a low TPMS rank indicates a good match.
- Suppose you wish to add a reviewer not in the database to review a particular paper. In that case, you must (1) ensure that the person is willing to review the particular paper, and then (2) contact submission platform manager Kitty Wong at submissions@miccai.org and we will include the reviewer manually within CMT for that paper during Phase 2. This is a complicated and manually tedious process and will therefore only be considered in rare instances
- You will be asked to check papers for formatting violations that may have been missed during the screening stage.
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Phase 1: Check review assignments (March 25)
- You will need to check assignments to ensure that a paper is not reviewed by two reviewers from the same institution.
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Phase 1: Main review period (March 27 - April 16)
- Monitor the reviews received for each assigned paper, and contact the reviewer for corrections as needed (e.g., poor quality, brevity, inappropriate language, etc). Please keep in mind that 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 improvement from the reviewer, please assign a new 4th reviewer immediately, as the availability of three high-quality reviews is paramount for fair and informed paper decisions.
- You should begin making paper decisions as soon as >3 reviews are received for a paper (see 'early accept/reject and rebuttal decisions' below).
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Phase 1: Emergency review period (April 21 - 27)
- Continue to monitor the reviews received for each assigned paper, and help with recruiting emergency reviewers (e.g., from your own lab). In rare cases, ACs will be asked to provide missing reviews.
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Phase 1: Early accept/reject and rebuttal decisions (May 5)
- Provide decisions (early accept, early reject, or rebuttal) on papers with >3 reviews.
- Meta-reviews are required for all papers.
- PCs will issue target early accept/early reject/rebuttal percentages to guide your decision making.
- For early accepted papers, you will make additional recommendations regarding ways in which the paper may be highlighted (e.g., awards).
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Phase 2: Rebuttal period (May 8 - 14)
- You will be assigned an additional ~15 papers as secondary AC.
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Phase 2: Post-Rebuttal review update (May 15 - 20)
- Ensure reviewers carefully consider rebuttals and finalize their review scores during this period.
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Phase 2: Rebuttal paper decisions (May 20 - 31)
- Each rebuttal paper will be assessed by one primary and two secondary ACs
- You will make recommendations (accept/reject) for all rebuttal papers assigned to you both as primary and secondary AC, and make additional recommendations for highlighting (e.g., awards) papers where you recommended acceptance.
- You must write meta-reviews for all papers.
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2nd AC Teleconference (Mid to Late June)
- Participation is voluntary but strongly encouraged. During this teleconference, the PCs will present overall results and review statistics, and will also gather feedback from the AC team about their experience and potential areas for improvement.
3. Area Chair Best Practices
- Paper recommendations and decisions: One of the most crucial duties of ACs is the recommendation for acceptance or rejection of papers. This is where the ACs should carefully assess the reviews, the author response (for rebuttal papers), and if needed, the paper itself. We do not expect ACs to act as an additional reviewer.
- Written reports (metareviews): One of the most crucial duties of ACs is the preparation of metareviews on each paper. This is where the ACs justify their recommendation to accept/reject a paper. If all reviewers agree on a paper, the metareview can be simple, while trying to encourage authors and provide constructive feedback. If there is even a slight disagreement on the reviews, the metareview should reconcile the reviews and make a well-founded justification for the final recommendation. If an AC disagrees with certain reviewer comments, it must be clarified. In case of an invitation for rebuttal, provide a concrete list of points that are important to address and could have a direct impact on whether to accept or reject the paper. For the second report (after rebuttal phase), clarify whether a rebuttal removed the concerns. Please be aware that we intend to make the report (of both primary and secondary ACs) of accepted papers publicly available (without disclosing the ACs' names).
- Conflicts of interest: If you identify any paper with which you might have a conflict of interest, please notify the submission platform manager immediately so that the paper can be re-assigned. DO NOT communicate with any other AC about papers assigned to you without prior approval from the PCs, as there may be several other ACs who conflict with the paper. DO NOT communicate with 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 the entire review 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 PC member; 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.
