MICCAI 2016 Daily - Tuesday

Ralph Anzarouth: What will be special this year in MICCAI that you would like to highlight. Sebastien Ourselin: Well, the first is the fact that our first keynote speaker is a woman. I think that’s a great thing. We’re delighted that Clare Tempany agreed to join us. I think one of the big highlights as well of this MICCAI is the fact that we had to organize it twice this year. I had to first organize it in Istanbul. Then we decided to move it to Athens. I think that without Dekon it would have never happened. Ralph: What is new in the program that required particular care for you? Sebastien: I think the amount of workshops is increasing every year. This year we were basically sold out in terms of the amount of workshops. In the workshops, I actually have more registrations this year than the main conference, which is quite surprising. I think this demonstrates that the members of this community are actually quite interested in specialized workshop, and there is more time for them to actually focus on one area that they are interested in. There is at least some lesson to learn there. Ralph: What do you think is the drive that brings so many professionals to MICCAI here in Athens? Sebastien: First of all, I think it would be quite important to highlight that I’m really honored that so many people have come to MICCAI this year. At this point, because of all of the challenges of the organization this year, we did, unfortunately, have a bit less attendees, more than 800 attendees, which I think is quite a big number and shows how MICCAI is really at the core of these people. You can see some trends: you see more and more machine learning, obviously. The two biggest workshops are the one on machine learning and medical imaging and the one on deep learning and medical imaging. We had to put them on the first day and the last day. We could see from the submission papers that we had a flood of papers related to deep learning this year. When you see how CVPR has been absolutely swamped by deep learning, it’s not surprising. There is quite a lot of technology now that could be applied to medical image analysis. This year, we had the President of the MICCAI Student Board, Lena Filatova, coming to the board of the MICCAI Society, the organization running the meeting and organizing the activity of the members. CVPR Daily: Thursday “ The two biggest workshops are the one on machine learning and medical imaging and the one on deep learning and medical imaging ” A Word from Seb 12 MICCAI Daily: Tuesday “ This year we were basically sold out in terms of the amount of workshops ”