MICCAI 2026 CARDIAC IMAGING THEME  ·  JOINTLY WITH THE STACOM WORKSHOP

// Guidelines

Official Challenge Rules

To ensure a fair, transparent, and reproducible challenge, all participants must strictly adhere to the following rules. Failure to comply may result in disqualification.

1
Registration & Teams: All individuals wishing to participate must register on Synapse using their real name, complete affiliation details, and institutional email address. Incomplete profiles may be removed without notice. Each team is permitted to have a maximum of six members.
2
Submission Requirements: To be eligible for the final ranking and awards, teams must submit a complete solution consisting of a self-contained Docker image for evaluation, alongside a methodology paper (4–8 pages, LNCS format) detailing their approach.
3
Publication Agreement: By participating, you agree that your submitted methodology paper may be made publicly available on the challenge website. Organizers reserve the right to use information provided by participants, including evaluation scores, predicted labels, and paper content, for the joint challenge summary publication.
4
Account Integrity: Participants are strictly prohibited from registering multiple teams or accounts. Creating alternative accounts to bypass submission limits will lead to immediate disqualification of all associated accounts.
5
Data Usage (DUA): Redistribution, sharing, or transfer of the CARDIOCARE challenge data or data links is strictly prohibited. Participants must use the data solely for their own model development within the context of this specific challenge.
6
Methods & External Data: Solutions must be fully automated during inference with no manual interventions (e.g., manual annotation of test cases). The use of public external datasets and pre-trained models (e.g., EchoNet-Dynamic, foundation models) is permitted, provided they are publicly available to all and explicitly disclosed in the methodology paper.

// Q&A

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I have to participate in all tasks?
No. You may choose to participate in Task 1, Task 2, Task 3, or any combination of them. Each task has its own independent leaderboard, evaluation, and prize pool.
Can I use external data or pretrained models?
Yes, you are allowed to use publicly available external datasets and pretrained weights (like EchoNet or ImageNet). However, you must explicitly disclose all external resources used in your methodology paper.
Is there an online leaderboard during development?
No. Training and validation sets are released with ground-truth labels, allowing participants to conduct their own evaluation locally. Official rankings are determined solely by organiser evaluation of the hidden test set submissions.
What are the computational resources for evaluation?
At minimum, submissions will be evaluated using one dedicated GPU (≥16 GB VRAM), multi-core CPU resources, and ≥32 GB of system memory. Final hardware specifications will be announced no later than 3 months before the test submission deadline.

Note: All submissions must complete inference within the allocated resources. External API calls and internet access are strictly prohibited during inference.
Are organizers allowed to participate?
Members of the organizer institutes are welcome to submit models and participate in the challenge for scientific benchmarking, but they are not eligible for monetary awards and will not be ranked on the public leaderboard.
What is the maximum number of team members allowed?
Each participating team can consist of up to a maximum of 6 people.
Can we preprocess the data?
Yes. During training, participants are allowed to perform standard data preprocessing. We do not restrict any data preprocessing techniques—we only evaluate your final model predictions.
Do we need to upload our training code?
No, we do not require teams to upload their training code. Only your inference code packaged as a self-contained Docker image is needed for challenge participation and final evaluation.
Who should I contact with questions?
For any questions regarding registration, data access, or submission, contact the organising team at echorisk.miccai@gmail.com. We aim to respond within 3 working days.

Ready to participate?

Register on Synapse →

Questions? echorisk.miccai@gmail.com

CARDIOCARE
FORTH
UOI
HMU
NKUA
BOCOC
IEO