MICCAI 2026 — Program Notes (Pre-Meeting Prep)¶
Internal working file. Updated incrementally as the proceedings list, workshop sites, and challenge leaderboards go public through summer 2026. Today's state: T-20 weeks, early-accept notifications just went out (May 7), rebuttal window open through May 14, final decisions land Jun 12.
Verified core facts¶
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Edition | 29th MICCAI |
| Dates | Sunday September 27 – Thursday October 1, 2026 |
| Venue | Strasbourg Convention Center, Strasbourg, France |
| Organizing society | MICCAI Society |
| Proceedings publisher | Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), multi-volume set posted no earlier than Sep 21, 2026 |
| Local representative | Caroline Essert (Université de Strasbourg) |
| Expected attendance | ~3,000 |
| Theme | not announced as of May 11, 2026 |
| Relocation note | Originally awarded to Abu Dhabi; relocated by MICCAI Board due to regional uncertainty. Abu Dhabi rescheduled to 2029. |
Key dates (verified from Important Dates page)¶
| Milestone | Date |
|---|---|
| Abstract registration | Thursday February 12, 2026, 23:59 PT |
| Paper submission | Thursday February 26, 2026, 23:59 PT |
| Early acceptance notification | EOD May 7, 2026 PT |
| Rebuttal period | May 8 – 14, 2026 |
| Final decision | EOD June 12, 2026 PT |
| Camera-ready (early-accepted) | Monday May 25, 2026 |
| Camera-ready (all other) | Friday June 26, 2026 |
| Author registration deadline | Friday June 26, 2026 |
| Proceedings available | No earlier than September 21, 2026 |
| Workshop LOI deadline | December 15, 2025 |
| Workshop full proposal | January 15, 2026 |
| Workshop final acceptance | March 13, 2026 |
| Registration Grant deadline | May 17, 2026 |
| Travel Grant deadline | July 1, 2026 |
| Startup Village applications | June 1, 2026 |
Day-by-day shape (working hypothesis from prior-year patterns)¶
Final program goes live mid-summer. Working from the standard MICCAI structure (carried over from 2024 Marrakesh and 2025 Daejeon):
- Sunday Sep 27 — Satellite Events Day 1
- Half-day and full-day tutorials (~8–12 tutorials, all day, parallel)
- Workshops day 1 (subset of the ~35–60 workshop slate)
- Challenges on-site phase begins (live submissions, leaderboard sessions)
- Monday Sep 28 — Main Conference Day 1
- Opening + Keynote 1 (TBA)
- Main proceedings oral sessions (3–4 parallel)
- Poster Session 1 (afternoon)
- Tuesday Sep 29 — Main Conference Day 2
- Keynote 2 (TBA)
- Main proceedings oral sessions
- Poster Session 2
- MICCAI Society business meeting (typical)
- Wednesday Sep 30 — Main Conference Day 3
- Keynote 3 (TBA)
- Main proceedings oral sessions
- Poster Session 3
- Closing plenary + Awards (Best Paper, Young Scientist, MICCAI Fellow inductions)
- Thursday Oct 1 — Satellite Events Day 2
- Workshops day 2 (remaining workshops)
- CliniCAI / Clinical Day (often lands here; clinician-facing)
- Challenge result sessions (final leaderboards, prize ceremonies)
- Wrap-up
Anticipated cancer-relevant work — watch list¶
Forward-looking; subject to final-accept list Jun 12 and workshop-program publication. Conservative — only items with prior-year precedent or already-public 2026 signals.
Pathology foundation models (COMPAY workshop + main proceedings)¶
The pathology-FM cycle (CHIEF, Prov-GigaPath, UNI / UNI2) has been a dominant axis at MICCAI 2023–2025 and is highly likely to extend. Watch:
- Updated tile-encoder pretraining — larger curated WSI cohorts, multi-magnification, multi-stain. The Mahmood Lab (UNI), Microsoft Research / Providence (Prov-GigaPath), and the broader DINOv2 / iBOT pathology adaptations have all been incrementally publishing methods papers at MICCAI.
- Slide-level aggregation methods — TITAN, PRISM, ABMIL extensions, attention-MIL variants. The "tile-to-slide" step is the active methodology frontier post-FM.
- Pathology-radiology multimodal — bridges between pathology FMs and radiology FMs (Merlin-style). The 2026 cycle is when these typically debut.
- Multimodal pathology-text — PathChat / pathology VLM extensions; report generation from WSI.
- Hyperion / spatial-omics integration — pathology FM features feeding into spatial transcriptomics / spatial proteomics analysis.
Radiology FMs (main proceedings + DGM4MICCAI workshop)¶
- RadFM / Med-PaLM-M / MAIRA-class updates — report generation, multimodal radiology VLMs
- MedSAM / SegVol evolutions — promptable medical segmentation, follow-ups to the 2024–2025 cohort
- CT / MR foundation models — self-supervised pretraining on large unlabeled scan cohorts
- Diffusion priors for medical reconstruction — undersampled MR, low-dose CT denoising
Generative medical imaging (DGM4MICCAI workshop)¶
- Synthetic-data fairness — diffusion-generated data for rare-disease / underrepresented-population augmentation (echoes the 2026 Call for Papers' equity emphasis)
- Counterfactual medical imaging — disease / no-disease counterfactuals for explainability
- Cross-modality synthesis — CT-from-MR, PET-from-CT for surrogate imaging when one modality is unavailable
Radiotherapy planning / IGRT (main proceedings, occasional workshops)¶
- Auto-contouring — deep-learning OAR (organs-at-risk) and GTV (gross tumor volume) segmentation for treatment planning
- Dose prediction — image-to-dose models, especially for proton therapy
- Adaptive radiotherapy — daily / weekly replanning driven by CBCT or MR-linac imaging
Oncology challenge slate (Thursday Oct 1 results)¶
Subject to 2026 challenge acceptance (deadline Jan 9, full results announced Mar 13). Likely recurring:
- BraTS 2026 — brain tumor segmentation; expected sub-tasks Adult Glioma, Meningioma, Pediatrics, BraTS-Africa, BraTS-MET (metastases), Inpainting
- HECKTOR 2026 — head-and-neck PET/CT tumor segmentation + outcome prediction
- KiTS 2026 — kidney tumor segmentation / surgical AI (if running)
- AutoPET 2026 — whole-body FDG PET/CT lesion segmentation; the 2024–2025 cycle introduced PSMA tracer
- PANORAMA — pancreatic cancer detection on CT (PDAC)
- ESR oncology track (new 2026) — three flagged proposals
- Detection / quantification of colorectal liver metastases on CT
- AI-based assessment of PET imaging for oncology
- Automated RECIST assessment on baseline and follow-up Thorax-Abdomen CT
- Top 3 winners co-present at ECR 2027
Surgical AI (CAI half — main proceedings + workshops)¶
- Surgical phase recognition — workflow understanding during oncology surgery (colorectal, hepatobiliary, gynecologic)
- Endoscopic / laparoscopic AI — polyp detection, tumor margin assessment
- Intra-op imaging fusion — pre-op planning to intra-op navigation (ultrasound, fluoroscopy)
Cross-link map (AACR / RSNA / ISMB / NeurIPS)¶
To AACR 2026¶
| AACR dossier | MICCAI 2026 cross-link |
|---|---|
| CHIEF — pathology FM, Mahmood Lab | Watch COMPAY 2026 workshop + main-proceedings for tile-encoder updates, slide-aggregation methods, multimodal extensions |
| Prov-GigaPath — pathology FM, MSR / Providence | Watch main proceedings for any GigaPath-v2 or downstream-task papers; Microsoft/Providence are MICCAI regulars |
| UNI — pathology FM, Mahmood Lab | Watch main proceedings for UNI2 or task-specific UNI adapters |
| AACR bioinfo-tools index | Any new pathology FM at MICCAI 2026 → mirror into AACR vault as a dossier if it's clinically referenced |
To RSNA 2026¶
The MICCAI → RSNA pipeline runs Sep 27 → Nov 29 (8 weeks). Many MICCAI 2026 methods papers will resurface at RSNA 2026 as clinical-deployment readouts. Tracking:
- Imaging FMs in clinical pipelines — MedSAM, SegVol, RadFM-class deployments
- Screening AI — lung-screening AI (NLST / NELSON-derivative), mammography AI-CAD, prostate MRI AI
- Vendor partnerships — any MICCAI tool that lands a commercial deployment shows up in RSNA's AI Showcase
- Radiology-pathology bridges — Merlin-style cross-modality FMs span both vaults
To ISMB 2026 / RECOMB 2026¶
Less direct, but relevant for:
- Computational pathology with multi-omics — pathology FM features cross-referenced with spatial transcriptomics / scRNA-seq (overlaps ISMB MLCSB COSI)
- Foundation models theory — self-supervised pretraining methods cross-cited between MICCAI and ISMB MLCSB / NeurIPS
To NeurIPS 2026¶
- General ML methods (diffusion, transformers, MoE) feed MICCAI medical-imaging applications. Watch DGM4MICCAI workshop especially.
- Medical-imaging tracks at NeurIPS — increasingly significant; cross-citations both ways.
Sources¶
- MICCAI 2026 home
- MICCAI 2026 Important Dates
- MICCAI 2026 Call for Papers
- MICCAI 2026 Call for Workshops
- MICCAI 2026 Call for Challenges
- MICCAI Society challenges registry
- MICCAI Society home
- Springer LNCS
- MICCAI 2025 Daejeon (prior-year shape reference)
- MICCAI 2026 Foundation Model for Ultrasound Biometry challenge (Springer Communities)
Working notes¶
- The workshop-date confusion in some web copy ("Oct 4 and Oct 8") is a stale artifact from the original Abu Dhabi schedule; under the relocated Strasbourg schedule, workshops/satellites are on Sep 27 and Oct 1, with main proceedings Sep 28–30. To be reconfirmed when the program-overview page populates.
- Keynote speakers not yet announced as of T-20 weeks (May 11, 2026). Typical announcement window is T-12 to T-8 weeks.
- The early-accept track (notifications May 7) is a MICCAI mechanism that fast-tracks a subset of clearly-strong submissions; final-decision track for the bulk lands Jun 12.
- Bulk extraction of tool pages should target the week after Oct 1 — proceedings DOIs are live, GitHub READMEs have post-meeting updates, and the challenge leaderboards are final.