The MICCAI Hackathon on reproducibility, diversity, and selection of papers at the MICCAI conference

TL;DR

The MICCAI Hackathon brought together participants to collaboratively address challenges in reproducibility, diversity, and paper selection at MICCAI, proposing initial measures to improve conference practices.

Contribution

This paper reports on the first MICCAI Hackathon, introducing a collaborative format to develop solutions for reproducibility, diversity, and selection issues in MICCAI conferences.

Findings

Proposed initial measures for improving reproducibility.

Suggested strategies to enhance diversity in submissions.

Recommendations for fairer and more effective paper selection processes.

Abstract

The MICCAI conference has encountered tremendous growth over the last years in terms of the size of the community, as well as the number of contributions and their technical success. With this growth, however, come new challenges for the community. Methods are more difficult to reproduce and the ever-increasing number of paper submissions to the MICCAI conference poses new questions regarding the selection process and the diversity of topics. To exchange, discuss, and find novel and creative solutions to these challenges, a new format of a hackathon was initiated as a satellite event at the MICCAI 2020 conference: The MICCAI Hackathon. The first edition of the MICCAI Hackathon covered the topics reproducibility, diversity, and selection of MICCAI papers. In the manner of a small think-tank, participants collaborated to find solutions to these challenges. In this report, we summarize the insights from the MICCAI Hackathon into immediate and long-term measures to address these challenges. The proposed measures can be seen as starting points and guidelines for discussions and actions to possibly improve the MICCAI conference with regards to reproducibility, diversity, and selection of papers.