Note to authors: Please note the changes in the guidelines with respect to previous years, particularly regarding the indication of a paper's primary/secondary areas of relevance, the use of the required MICCCAI2026 template, and co-author review obligations. We kindly remind authors that violation of any of the guidelines may lead to desk rejection of their submission.
This document contains information for authors preparing submissions to MICCAI 2026 and should be read in conjunction with the MICCAI Review Process document.
MICCAI welcomes both methodological works and application studies, including works focusing on translation.
Methodological works should represent innovative methods, technologies, or systems in the areas of interest to the MICCAI Society. These manuscripts should clearly demonstrate innovations and contributions over state-of-the-art methodologies. The evaluation and performance assessment of presented works can potentially be limited to proofs of concept or small-scale validation studies.
Application studies should demonstrate the impact or clinical value of one or more existing techniques, or adapt/adopt state-of-the-art methods for a new problem or context. These include performance evaluations on large datasets or in-human feasibility studies that rigorously and reproducibly demonstrate clinical relevance/viability in medical practice or research settings. These studies will be assessed by the appropriateness of experimental design, the soundness of their conclusions, and the existence of prior similar studies.
Topics of interest for MICCAI include, but are not limited to:
Highlighting clinical translation and MICCAI 2026 themes: - This edition of the conference will emphasize the progress of MICCAI research from theory to practice by showcasing efforts reflecting the real-world impact of the field in clinical evaluations and workflows. We will also spotlight research addressing global health challenges, with a particular emphasis on Asia & Middle East, aiming to balance high standards in methodological innovation with a strong focus on clinical and global health applications, while bringing important clinical challenges to the attention of the MICCAI community.
The submission process will comprise two phases:
Please check the conference timeline on the website for further details on the review schedule. To ensure fairness, late submissions will not be accepted.
The Conference Management Toolkit (CMT) will be used for both phases of the submission process - please see the CMT instructions for authors page for detailed instructions on how to register your intention-to-submit and how to navigate the CMT submission site.
Listed below are the official requirements for preparing and submitting a manuscript to MICCAI 2026. Failure to abide by any of the following requirements may result in desk rejection of the manuscript:
Anonymization: The MICCAI Conference review process is double-blinded, i.e., the names of the authors, reviewers, and Area Chairs are not revealed to each other. Authors must therefore ensure that all submitted content is anonymized. Please note that the author section is already anonymized in the newly provided templates. Editing or removing the anonymized author section to save space will be considered a format violation. If you are including a link to your code repository or datasets or submitting supplementary materials, you must ensure your repository and supplementary materials are anonymized.
Conference participation responsibilities: All accepted papers must be presented in person by an author registered for physical, on-site participation at the conference. Lack of travel funding or not wishing to travel are not valid reasons for waiver of the requirement to present in person at the conference. In case of an emergency preventing physical participation, authors must contact the MICCAI program committee for a waiver. *NEW & IMPORTANT* The Program Committee reserves the right to withdraw an accepted paper from the proceedings if the authors fail to present it in person. Additional sanctions for non-compliant authors may apply in future editions of the conference. While these formal policies are in place, we strongly encourage all authors to attend the conference, present their work, and actively engage with the community, as the conference is at its best when our community gathers in person.
At the time of paper acceptance, we will notify authors with respect to obtaining the necessary invitation letter for visa applications to help expedite this process. Authors can present multiple papers with a single registration only if they are the first authors on the papers.
Grants will be made available to support the physical participation by authors - especially students and early-career scientists - from underrepresented countries and backgrounds. Application details will become available in May 2026.
MICCAI submissions will be evaluated by on average three external reviewers and 1-3 Area Chairs. Details of this edition's review process can be found here. Below are some important elements to assist authors with a smooth submission and review process.
Primary and Secondary Areas: Each paper must be submitted with Primary and Secondary areas selected from the CMT system. First, authors must select EITHER "MIC” or "CAI” as the primary topic area. Second, authors must also select at least one secondary area in EACH of the following categories: "Body”, "Modalities”, and "Application”. Each paper should therefore have a MAXIMUM of one Primary area (MIC or CAI) and a MINIMUM of three Secondary areas (one each for Body, Modalities, and Application) indicated - you may select any additional secondary areas beyond the required minimum as appropriate. These topics will be used to generate suggested reviewers and Area Chair assignments using the automated Toronto Paper Matching System embedded in the CMT system (see Stages 6 and 7 in MICCAI Review Process). In general, more comprehensive topic selections will lead to better reviewer and Area Chair matches.
Statement of Novelty/Impact: This statement, of up to 500 characters in length, should provide the main argument for the inclusion of the paper in the conference. It should clarify whether the main significance of the contribution is in the novelty of the proposed methodology or the scientific/clinical impact of the conclusions or results. Note that this statement will be visible to reviewers and area chairs and should not identify the authors or their institutions.
Toronto Paper Matching System: By submitting a paper to MICCAI, the authors agree to the review process and understand that papers are processed by the Toronto Paper Matching System to match each manuscript to the best possible Area Chairs and reviewers.
Double-blind Review: Authors must not provide information that may identify them in the acknowledgments (e.g., co-workers and grant IDs), citations, or links to websites that may identify any of the authors. If you need to cite a different paper of yours that is being submitted concurrently to MICCAI, you should (1) cite these papers preserving anonymity, (2) argue in the body of your paper why your MICCAI paper is non-trivially different from those concurrent submissions, and (3) include anonymized versions of those papers in the supplementary material.
Publication of reviews: By submitting a paper to MICCAI, the authors agree to the review process and understand that, if their paper is accepted for publication, the reviews and metareviews of their paper will be published as well, including potentially negative comments.
arXiv/BioRxiv: With the increase in popularity of publishing technical reports and arXiv papers (or other types of preprints), sometimes the authors of a submitted paper may be known to a reviewer or Area Chair. Reviewers are strongly discouraged from searching arXiv for submissions they have been assigned to review. Even if they come across this information accidentally, they are discouraged from using the information in formulating their review.
arXiv papers are not considered prior work since they have not been peer-reviewed. Therefore, citations to those papers are not required, and reviewers are asked not to penalize a paper that fails to cite an arXiv submission.
Dual/Double Submissions: All MICCAI submissions must be original and cannot already be published or considered for publication elsewhere (with the explicit exception of arXiv.org as a form of prepublication of MICCAI contributions). We note that intent-to-submit registrations of papers under review in other venues are acceptable, as long as the submission is withdrawn by the full paper deadline if it is still under review or has been accepted at the other venue. By submitting a full manuscript to MICCAI, authors acknowledge that their work has not been previously published, has not been accepted for publication, and is not under consideration for publication in substantially similar form in any peer-reviewed venue, including journal, conference, or workshop. Furthermore, no paper substantially similar in content is allowed to be submitted to any other conference, workshop, or journal during the review period (February 26, 2026 - June 12, 2026).
The authors also attest that they did not submit substantially similar submissions to this MICCAI edition. Violation of any of these conditions will lead to automatic desk rejection. The goals of the dual submission policy are (i) to have exciting new work be published for the first time at MICCAI, and (ii) to avoid duplicating the effort of reviewers. If authors are submitting more than one paper on a similar topic to this MICCAI edition, they must (1) include an anonymized version of the concurrent submission(s) as supplementary material; (2) cite the paper preserving anonymity; and (3) argue in the body of their paper why this paper is non-trivially different from those concurrent submissions.
Our policy is based upon the following particular definition of "publication”, which, for the dual submission policy, is deemed to be a written work longer than three pages that was accepted for publication following peer review. In particular, this definition of publication does not depend upon whether such an accepted written work appears in formal proceedings or whether the organizers declare that such work "counts as a publication”. Note that such a definition does not consider university technical reports or pre-prints (e.g., arXiv), which are typically not peer reviewed. Likewise, disclosure of the work under review in an oral presentation is NOT considered a prior publication.
This definition of a publication does include peer-reviewed workshop papers if their length is more than 3 pages, including citations, even if they do not appear in the workshop proceedings. Given this definition, any submission to MICCAI should not have substantial overlap with prior publications or other concurrent submissions. As a rule of thumb, the MICCAI submission should contain less than 20 percent of material from previous publications. An extended version of a paper submitted to MICCAI (with sufficiently new material) can be submitted to a journal any time after the MICCAI submission deadline (even before a final decision on the paper is sent to the authors). An author submitting an extended version of a MICCAI paper to a journal must ensure that the paper (a) satisfies all submission requirements of the intended journal, including those regarding possible overlap with conference publications, and (b) does not violate any copyright with Springer. Authors may also wish to notify the MICCAI Program Chairs of their journal submission.
Plagiarism: Plagiarism is a serious offence that consists of using wordings or results of someone else's publication without giving credit or providing appropriate referencing. Self-plagiarism, e.g., reuse of figures and sections of text from the authors' own previous publications, is also not permitted. Reviewers and Area Chairs can recognize such acts of plagiarism, and are asked to refer these to the MICCAI Organizing Committee, which will investigate and, in severe cases, refer these cases to the MICCAI Society to determine further action.
iThenticate: By submitting a paper to MICCAI, the authors understand that papers are processed by iThenticate to ensure the originality of written work before publication.
Conflicts of interest: Conflicts of interest are inevitable in a community as networked as our own. To handle such conflicts, it is critical for the authors to provide a complete list of co-authors and an accurate list of domain conflicts at the time of submission. The author list cannot be modified after the submission. On rare occasions when there may be justifiable reasons to do this, any change in the author list must be justified in writing to the Program Chairs and must be approved. In any circumstances, it is unacceptable to include anyone as a co-author who has been directly or indirectly involved with the manuscript at any stage of the decision process, either as a reviewer, Area Chair, or as part of the organizing committee; this includes any direct follow-on publications (e.g., MICCAI special journal issues).
The use of Large Language Models (LLMs): The use of LLMs (such as but not limited to ChatGPT) is allowed as a general-purpose writing assistance tool. Authors should understand that they take full responsibility for the contents of their papers, including content generated by LLMs that could be construed as plagiarism or scientific misconduct (e.g., fabrication of facts). LLMs are not eligible for authorship.
Publication: All accepted papers will be made available by Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science no earlier than two weeks before the conference. An open-access version of your accepted paper will be available on the MICCAI society website no earlier than two weeks before the conference. Authors wishing to submit a patent should understand that the paper's official public disclosure is two weeks before the conference or whenever the authors make it publicly available, whichever comes first. The conference considers papers confidential until publication two weeks before the conference, but notes that multiple organizations will have access during the review and production processes, so those seeking patents should discuss filing dates with their IP advisors. The conference assumes no liability for early disclosures.
MICCAI papers are subject to the standard Springer LNCS Copyright Agreement. Papers submitted to MICCAI must not be discussed with the media until they have been officially accepted for publication. Violations of the embargo will result in the paper being removed from the conference and proceedings.
*NEW & IMPORTANT* Supplementary materials are limited to multimedia content (e.g., videos) as warranted by the technical application (e.g., robotics, surgery, ...). These files should not display any proofs, analysis, additional results, or embedded slides, and should not show any identification markers either. Violation of this guideline will lead to desk rejection. PDF files may not be submitted as supplementary materials in 2026 unless authors are citing a paper that has not yet been published. In such a case, authors are required to submit an anonymized version of the cited paper. ACs will perform checks to ensure the integrity.
All supplementary material must be self-contained and zipped into a single file. Only the following formats are allowed: avi, mp4, wmv. We encourage authors to submit videos using an MP4 codec, such as DivX, contained in an AVI. A README text file must be included with each video specifying the exact codec used and a URL where the codec can be downloaded.
While the reviewers will have access to such supplementary material, they are under no obligation to review it, and the paper itself must contain all necessary information and illustrations for review purposes.
MICCAI is committed to reproducible research. At MICCAI 2026, we strongly encourage authors to improve the reproducibility of their research along three directions: open data, open implementations, and appropriate evaluation design and reporting. Where possible, we invite authors to use open data or to make their data and/or code available for open access by other researchers. We will instruct reviewers and Area Chairs to take reproducibility of the work into account when assessing a submission.
Authors are strongly encouraged to consider the following rules for scientific reproducibility.
For all models and algorithms, please include
For all datasets used, please include:
For all code related to this work that you have made available or will release if this work is accepted, please include:
For all reported experimental results, please include:
The Microsoft CMT service was used for managing the peer-reviewing process for this conference. This service was provided for free by Microsoft and they bore all expenses, including costs for Azure cloud services as well as for software development and support.