While Nick Heller was unable to attend our annual Scholar event this year, he wrote a wonderful summary of the conference that he attended in China:

"I am sorry I was unable to attend the Scholar Award Event on Oct. 24, but I was in China giving a presentation at the International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Interventions(MICCAI). The presentation was about a competition I organized called the 2019 Kidney and Kidney Tumor Segmentation Challenge, abbreviatedKiTS19. This was a plenary talk at the conference, and the audience was roughly 2,000 attendees.

The purpose of the competition was to evaluate the wide array of algorithms that have been proposed for segmentation of regions of interest in cross-sectional imaging. We released a dataset with "ground truth" segmentations for participants to use to train their learned algorithms, then we ask them to run their algorithms on a collection of images without the ground truth segmentations, which we hold secret. They submitted their predictions to us and we evaluated and ranked the submissions.

Challenges like this have been going on in conjunction with this conference for about a decade now, but our challenge in particular was recognized because we had more participants than any other in the history of the MICCAI conference. My talk was about the design of the challenge and its major findings."