The 2026 edition of the MICCAI (Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention) international conference was a resounding success for our ecosystem. Following up on our first news update, we would like to highlight the scope of the achievements and awards earned by our teams and partners during that week in Strasbourg.
The scientific activity at IHU Strasbourg is based on a strong synergy between clinical practice, research, and the sharing of high-quality data. The results achieved at MICCAI 2026 perfectly illustrate the recognition of this work at the highest international level, with a total of 5 papers accepted for the main conference (out of more than 4,600 submissions, representing a highly selective acceptance rate of 27%).
A Hub for International Exchange
As the official sponsor of this year’s event, IHU Strasbourg has also established itself as a true focal point for the scientific community. The week was punctuated by major events alongside the main conference:
- A pre-MICCAI event on Saturday. Coordinated by Prof. Caroline Essert, this event offered participants scientific presentations, a tour of the institute, and demonstrations on our experimental platform, led individually by Dr. Paolo Cabras, Jonas Mehtali, and the companies Scialytics and Iglobe Scientific.
- A post-MICCAI seminar on Friday morning, featuring presentations by Dr. Yueming Jin (National University of Singapore—NUS) and Dr. Sharib Ali (University of Leeds).
A Prestigious “Young Scientist Award” for Liver Tumor Ablation Planning
One of the highlights of the conference was the presentation of the Young Scientist Award to Jonas Mehtali (funded by ITI HealthTech) for his work with Prof. Caroline Essert and Dr. Juan Manuel Verde on the planning of multi-needle thermal ablation.
Photo credit: MICCAI 2026
Beyond the method developed at the ICube laboratory, this award highlights the clinical foundation provided by IHU Strasbourg: a unique, fully annotated, and documented liver dataset (50 cases, 94 tumors classified according to the COLLISION classification, 3D reconstructions, and reference ablation plans), compiled by Dr. Juan Manuel Verde and our teams. These data enabled a rigorous evaluation of the award-winning method, and the institute has published them in open access so that the scientific community can use them to develop and compare their own methods.
A Strong Scientific Presence: Publications and Spotlights
The publication activity involving IHU Strasbourg at this conference was once again remarkable:
- The CAMMA team, led by Prof. Nicolas Padoy, demonstrated its dynamism with strong oral presentations and posters at the main conference and workshops. Among these successes, Julia Alekseenko, a Ph.D. student on the team (funded by the IHU’s DAIOR project), received a spotlight for her work on surgical phase recognition using hierarchical federated learning (Hi-FL). The event also highlighted the excellent contributions of Yaojun Hu and Ayush Gupta.
Photo Credit: MICCAI 2026
- The Mimesis team (Inria / ICube), led by Dr. Stéphane Cotin, distinguished itself as part of the national MediTwin project with two notable papers (an oral presentation and a spotlight, by Francesco Dettori and Ilias Nahmed) on microwave ablation planning. This work draws directly on concepts developed at the institute and on in vivo preclinical data acquired entirely at the state-of-the-art experimental platform at IHU Strasbourg, during experiments on porcine models conducted by Dr. Juan Manuel Verde.
IHU at the Heart of Global Open Data With OpenH-RF
Photo credit: OpenH-RF
IHU’s influence is also evident in its contribution to OpenH-RF, a major international initiative led by Stanford University, Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), and NVIDIA. IHU Strasbourg is one of 38 contributing institutions (alongside Johns Hopkins, Siemens Healthineers, and the NIH) to what constitutes the largest open dataset of raw ultrasound signals ever published (hosted on the Hugging Face platform).
This project aims to train future foundation models for ultrasound. The contribution from IHU Strasbourg, led by Dr. Juan Manuel Verde, stems from its collaboration with the University of Basel (Prof. Philippe Cattin and Sidaty El Hadramy): a dataset of raw ultrasound images dedicated to bone imaging, which is now available to the community. The project was also the subject of a well-received presentation at the ASMUS workshop during MICCAI 2026.
Outreach and Institutional Roundtables
Finally, our teams’ expertise was called upon to enrich the discussions. In particular, Dr. Juan Manuel Verde was invited to serve as a panelist at the roundtable discussion celebrating the 20th anniversary of the AE-CAI workshop (’20 Years of AE-CAI: Looking Back and Looking Forward’), alongside eminent figures such as Prof. Nassir Navab, Prof. Stefanie Speidel, and Prof. Caroline Essert, moderated by Dr. Pierre Jannin.
Congratulations to all the clinicians, researchers, data scientists, and students who work every day to showcase Strasbourg’s university hospital research on the international stage!
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