This year all satellite events are required to submit a Letter of Intent (LOI). If you are considering submitting a Workshop proposal for MICCAI 2026, you must send an LOI by December 15, 2025 to the following link: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/MICCAISAT2026/Submission/Index.
Full proposals are due January 9, 2026.
MICCAI Challenges provide a fair, transparent, and robust environment for evaluating solutions to common problems in our field. They have become a cornerstone of the MICCAI conference, bringing together diverse teams worldwide to work on shared benchmarks and exchange ideas—accelerating state-of-the-art progress and enabling efficient dissemination of new results.
We are pleased to announce the Call for Challenges for the MICCAI 2026 conference in Abu Dhabi, UAE. We invite researchers, clinicians, and industry professionals to propose innovative challenges for MICCAI 2026 that address timely problems in medical image analysis (MIC) and computer-assisted interventions (CAI). We welcome challenges in all areas relevant to MICCAI, including but not limited to:
Proposals that explicitly address fairness, global health, and barriers to clinical translation are especially welcome. Regarding overcoming barriers to clinical translation, proposals may for instance address: clinically informed choice of metrics and outcomes, real-life data, systematic assessment of out-of-distribution generalization (different devices, diverse populations…), well-powered challenges allowing robust statistical conclusions etc.
We highly encourage the proposition of challenges from the Middle East area. Potential organizers may contact the Challenge Organizing Team MICCAI Challenges Team (miccai-challenges-2026@dkfz-heidelberg.de) for assistance in preparing their proposal.
In collaboration with European Society of Radiology (ESR), we also announce special clinical interest topics with associated clinicians who can help with the preparation of the proposals; the best 3 challenge proposals on these topics will get the opportunity to also present their challenges at the European Congress of Radiology (ECR) 2027 in a special session:
If you want to organize a challenge in collaboration with ESR on one of these topics, please reach out to the MICCAI Challenges Team (miccai-challenges-2026@dkfz-heidelberg.de) and we will put you in contact with the corresponding clinician.
MICCAI supports open data; we encourage organizers to use open-source data licenses and/or keep challenges open beyond the conference to provide a sustained benchmarking platform.
MICCAI membership: Either the lead organizer or at least one other organizer must be a MICCAI Society member at the time of submission (https://miccai.wildapricot.org/).
Note: Uploading a design document that is incomplete or differs from the one generated by the structured system will result in desk rejection.
Make sure you select the "CHALLENGES” track in CMT
Proposals will be evaluated on:
To ensure a rich and diverse program, the committee may request mergers for substantially overlapping proposals, scope adjustments, supplementary materials, or revisions prior to acceptance.
Accepted challenge organizers are responsible for:
Organizing a challenge may be time-consuming, especially when large-scale data annotation is necessary. To address the traditionally tight schedule between MICCAI challenge acceptance and organization we offer an early review of MICCAI 2027 challenge proposals this year. Organizers interested in organizing a challenge in 2027 may use this year's submission system and thus receive an early acceptance that leaves time for careful preparation of the challenge.
Publishing a proceedings volume is optional and at the discretion of each workshop's organizers. At a minimum, organizers must make abstracts of all accepted presentations publicly available. Organizers who wish to publish MICCAI Springer LNCS proceedings should use OpenReview as the official submission and peer-review platform, to help ensure a rigorous and transparent review process. We will provide short tutorials and step-by-step instructions for creating the OpenReview submission page and configuring tracks.
For questions, please contact the MICCAI 2026 Challenges Team at miccai-challenges-2026@dkfz-heidelberg.de.