The International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) is a premier international meeting that focuses on computer-assisted interventions, medical robotics, and biomedical image analysis. MICCAI 2007, the tenth meeting in the series, was held from October 29 to November 2, 2007 in Brisbane, Australia. The executive committee, which included Drs. Anthony Maeder (CSIRO, Australia), Terry Peters (Robarts Research Institute, Canada), Nicholas Ayache (INRIA, France), and Sebastien Ourselin (CSIRO, Australia), did a terrific job of bringing together clinicians, computer scientists, engineers, physicists, and other researchers in the field of biomedical image analysis and computer-assisted interventions.
MICCAI 2007 received a record number of 637 submissions from 35 countries and six continents. Two-hundred thirty-seven papers were selected from these for publication in the conference proceedings. Thirty-eight papers were presented in a single-track oral presentation sessions. In addition, a lot of lively discussion happened at the 199 poster presentations, as is always the case at MICCAI conferences. The multistage paper selection process was based on at least three expert reviews for each submission. This resulted in an excellent set of high-quality papers representing the state-of-the-art work in the field.
With the help of the program committee chairs, Drs. Nicholas Ayache and Sebastien Ourselin, we selected eight papers to be invited to this special issue of Academic Radiology . We carefully chose the papers to best match the scope of the journal and the interest areas of its readership. The submitted papers went through a thorough peer review process. We required that the authors expand their conference articles to reach the quality level of an archived journal publication. Six of the submitted papers ( ) were accepted for publication in this special issue. This special issue follows a well-established tradition of bringing selected papers of interest from MICCAI to the audience of Academic Radiology . Eight papers from MICCAI 2006 ( ) were well received by the readers, and we hope that the six papers in this issue ( ) will be equally of interest.
This collection of papers represents well-established challenges in the area of image-based analysis and intervention, as well as new emergent trends. The work of Leung and Bosch ( ) and Wachinger et al. ( ) makes advances in the well-established areas of ultrasound image segmentation and registration. The paper by Avants et al. ( ) focuses on the challenge of characterizing brain injury from anatomic and diffusion magnetic resonance imaging. Other papers in this issue highlight new imaging modalities and their use in clinical practice, including the work by Sato et al. ( ) on fast computed tomographic imaging and the work by Raniga et al. ( ) on a new radio tracer in positron emission tomographic imaging. A different new trend is highlighted in the paper by Rajagopal et al. ( ), which utilizes recent advances in computing technologies to improve biomechanical modeling.
We would like to thank all the reviewers who contributed their time and efforts to help us. We strongly believe that their work, together with the efforts by the publishing office, MICCAI program board, and MICCAI organizing board made this special issue best possible, ultimately helping expand the impact of the meeting on healthcare.
References
1. Leung K.Y.E., Bosch J.G.: Segmental wall motion classification in echocardiograms using compact shape descriptors. Acad Radiol 2008; 15: pp. 1416-1424.
2. Wachinger C., Wein W., Navab N.: Registration strategies and similarity measures for three-dimensional ultrasound mosaicing. Acad Radiol 2008; 15: pp. 1404-1415.
3. Avantis B., Duda J., Kim J., et. al.: Multivariate analysis of structural and diffusion imaging in traumatic brain injury. Acad Radiol 2008; 15: pp. 1360-1375.
4. Okada T., Shimada R., Hori M., et. al.: Automated segmentation of the liver from 3D CT images using probabilistic atlas and multi-level statistical shape model. Acad Radiol 2008; 15: pp. 1390-1403.
5. Raniga P., Bourgeat P., Fripp J., et. al.: Automated 11 C-PiB standardized uptake value ratio. Acad Radiol 2008; 15: pp. 1376-1389.
6. Rajagopal V., Lee A., Chung J.-H., et. al.: Creating individual-specific biomechanical models of the breast for medical image analysis. Acad Radiol 2008; 15: pp. 1425-1436.
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9. Groher M., Jakobs T.F., Padoy N., Navab N.: Planning and intraoperative visualization of liver catheterizations: new CTA protocol and 2D-3D registration method. Acad Radiol 2007; 14: pp. 1325-1340.
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12. Zhan Y., Ou Y., Feldman M., et. al.: Registering histological and MR images of prostate for image-based cancer detection. Acad Radiol 2007; 14: pp. 1367-1381.
13. Ross J.C., Miller J.V., Turner W.D., Kelliher T.P.: An analysis of early studies released by the lung imaging database consortium (LIDC). Acad Radiol 2007; 14: pp. 1382-1388.
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