From Grand Challenges

Why organize challenges?

On this page, I want to describe the history of these events, the rationale for organizing challenges, the many useful results these events generate, provide advice for those interested in organizing a challenge and discuss how these events can transform the way in which research in medical image analysis is organized.

But for now, this is just the plan and this page is unfinished.

I only supply the first e-mail I received from Tobias Heimann in December 2006, which started it all for me.

History

from Tobias Heimann <t.heimann@dkfz-heidelberg.de>
to Bram van Ginneken <bramvanginneken@gmail.com>
date Thu, Dec 21, 2006 at 10:33 PM
subject Idea for workshop about clinical segmentation

Hi Bram,

Just before going into Christmas holidays, I'd like to tell you of an idea for an alternative workshop: I remember a comment of you at MICCAI where you said (from my vague memories :-)) that many presentations there were quite theoretical and not really suited for clinical application. Well, my boss (Pitt Meinzer) had the same impression and he told Gabor Szekely (from ETH Zurich) about it, who also agreed. Some weeks later Gabor came up with some ("crazy" as he termed it) ideas what a really nice workshop should look like and my boss delegated it to me to organize something in that direction...

So my current plan is to organize a MICCAI workshop about application-oriented 3D segmentation. There would be one organ of interest (heart, lungs, kidneys, liver) for which some datasets with reference segmentations are uploaded on a website. People can tune their algorithms (automatic or interactive) for these images and write papers about the methods they use to solve the problem. Maybe they could also include their results on the reference data. At the workshop there won't be any talks, just posters. Maybe there's one invited talk about the medical relevance of the problem, if not it would just start with poster teasers. Then some time to look at the posters. The highlight would be a live evaluation of the submitted algorithms on new data, automatic comparison with the new reference and the resulting performance charts :-) Then lunch break.

After lunch, there are a number of (let's say 3) groups where people get assigned to. They discuss the 3 best-working algorithms using the papers the authors submitted. Then everybody comes together again and the groups present the papers they have been working on. Note that the actual authors won't be in the group treating their own papers, so they can kick in during the following discussion to defend their methods. Basically, the rest of the day would be for discussion and exchange of new ideas...

So, do you think that format could work? How many and who might be interested to submit something for a workshop like that? And what would be a good organ of interest to start with? Please let me know what you think of this whole thing, I'm open for all suggestions :-)

Best, Tobias