MICCAI 2018 Daily - Monday

Professor Alejandro (Alex) Frangi is the Diamond Jubilee Chair in Computational Medicine at the University of Leeds in the UK. He is also MICCAI 2018 General co-Chair. Alex, we are very excited to start this MICCAI 2018 conference. Have you got a word of welcome for participants? It’s great to welcome to everybody to the city of Granada. This is a warm place and we want to give a warm welcome to everybody. Granada is a great place for hosting MICCAI for many reasons. Among many others, on the outskirts of the city was signed off the authorisation for Christopher Columbus to go and discover America. In a sense, this is a place of departure, of discovery, and of daring to go out and make breakthroughs. We want MICCAI to be a place where, through all the interactions that we will have scientifically, people will go away stimulated to make those breakthroughs in the area of medical image computing and computer- assisted interventions. It’s also a great place to learn Spanish! In two years, we’ll have MICCAI in Peru, so maybe we can start now. Yes, exactly! [ they both laugh ] I think you will have plenty of opportunities, because the other thing that Granada is well known for is languages. The university here is particularly well known for that. Students from all over Europe and South America come to learn Spanish and other languages. What are the novelties of this year’s conference and its main highlights? There are many new things and I think you will see these throughout the programme. One thing that is very interesting from the point of view of the scientific programme is that we will have the conventional oral talks, but this year we have around 33% more papers. There were 33% more submissions, so the acceptance rate has remained the same, but the volume of the conference is much bigger. We normally accept 250-260 papers. This year we have 370. As a consequence, we had a practical issue to solve with scheduling the orals over the three days. For the first time ever, on Tuesday we will have a double track of orals. Incidentally, it’s the first year that we have got four volumes of proceedings as well, instead of three which it has been for the last few years. At the oral sessions there will be shorter talks. We call them highlight talks, which are five-minute talks from papers that have been highlighted by the program committee. Also, we have four keynote speakers who are fantastic people from the MIC and CAI areas. We have a clinician who is the chair of the American College of Radiology, plus “ Granada is a great place for hosting MICCAI for many reasons ” 6 Monday A Word from Alex