PedAItrics 2026 — AI and Imaging for Childhood Diseases and Pediatric Cancers

Overview

About the Workshop

Artificial intelligence has the potential to transform care delivery in diverse medical specialties by enabling more advanced characterization of biomedical data. However, applications in pediatrics lag behind due to the rare nature of childhood diseases and disorders, the high variability of pediatric patients due to growth and development, as well as unique clinical workflows relative to adults.

Pediatric diseases present distinct challenges including rapid developmental changes, smaller anatomy, motion artifacts, and the limited availability of large, well-annotated datasets. These considerations complicate tasks such as segmentation, registration, and classification, and undermine direct reuse of adult-trained models.

The PedAItrics workshop focuses on the application of medical imaging and artificial intelligence to pediatric, neo/prenatal, and childhood diseases, where imaging plays a central role in diagnosis and longitudinal management. It will showcase recent advances in AI integrating multimodal data — including imaging, digital pathology, -omics, and EHR data — through deep learning and classical machine learning.

By bringing together clinicians, imaging scientists, and AI researchers, PedAItrics aims to identify shared methodological challenges across pediatric diseases and cancers, promote reproducible and trustworthy AI, and accelerate translation into clinical practice.

Half-Day

Workshop Duration

~60

Expected Attendees

~30

Expected Submissions

Springer

LNCS Proceedings

Disease Areas

Neurologic Cardiac Renal Congenital Inflammatory Brain Tumors Lymphoma Rhabdomyosarcoma Wilms Tumor Osteosarcoma

Scope

Topics of Interest

We welcome original research, methods, and applications addressing the following themes:

Pediatric-Specific Challenges

Methods addressing anatomical variability, developmental changes, motion artifacts, and limited cohort sizes in the pediatric domain.

Model Adaptation & Transfer

Novel algorithms or adaptations of adult-trained models for pediatric cohorts, including domain adaptation and transfer learning strategies.

Multimodal Data Integration

Combining imaging, digital pathology, -omics, and clinical EHR data for treatment response assessment, outcome prediction, and precision medicine.

Small Sample & Longitudinal Studies

Approaches for small and heterogeneous datasets, longitudinal analysis, and multi-institutional data specific to the pediatric domain.

Clinical Translation

Translation and commercialization of AI solutions in pediatric care settings, including regulatory considerations and large-scale validation.

Synthetic Data & Augmentation

Novel strategies for synthetic data generation and augmentation to address data scarcity in pediatric datasets and improve model training.

Collaboration & Open Science

Overcoming barriers in pediatric research, best practices for cross-institutional collaboration, and technical innovations enabling data sharing.

Timeline

Important Dates

All deadlines are at 11:59 PM AoE (Anywhere on Earth) unless otherwise stated.

Paper Submission Deadline

July 10, 2026 July 16, 2026 (Extended)

Notification of Acceptance

August 17, 2026

Decisions Released

Camera-Ready Submission

August 21, 2026

Workshop Day

Oct 1, 2026 — Strasbourg, France

All deadlines are 23:59 Pacific Time.

Schedule

Workshop Program

October 1, 2026 · 8:00 AM – 12:30 PM · Schuman — Satellite Event Room 1 (First Floor), Strasbourg, France

Important Information for Presenters

Presentation Setup: Presenters will have two options:

Option 1 — Use the available presentation computer: Bring your presentation on a USB flash drive. A presentation remote will be available on the desk to control your slides, and a large monitor will allow you to use Presenter View and see your notes.

Option 2 — Use your own laptop/device: You may connect your device directly to the main screen using HDMI or USB 3.

Presentation Timer: For both options, a separate timer will be available so you can easily keep track of your presentation time.

Power: Electrical outlets with European-style plugs will be available. Please bring an appropriate adapter if your device uses a different plug.

Posters: Poster boards will be available directly next to Schuman — Satellite Event Room 1 (First Floor). Presenters are encouraged to display their posters there during the workshop for increased visibility. After the workshop, please remove your poster and bring it to the main MICCAI poster session in Hall Rhin (Ground Floor).

Questions / Setup: Amir Sadri will be at the workshop venue starting at 7:30 AM. Please feel free to reach out with any questions or if you would like to test your presentation setup before the workshop begins.

Time

Event

8:00 – 8:15

Opening Workshop Introduction

8:15 – 9:00

Oral Oral Presentations — Part 1

3 presentations · 10 min presentation + 5 min Q&A each

8:15 – 8:30 Growth modelling of children's ear canals using implicit neural distance representations Guldhammer-Skov, Karen; Sørensen, Kristine Aavild; López Diez, Paula; Palama, Christian; Kjærbøl, Erik F.; Encina-Llamas, Gerard; Paulsen, Rasmus R.; González Ballester, Miguel A.

8:30 – 8:45 Region-Wise Age Progression in Disentangled VAEs for 3D Face Meshes Reissis, Athena; Smith, Luke; Schievano, Silvia; Foti, Simone

8:45 – 9:00 Predicting the Progression of Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis Pullen, Owen; Jamaludin, Amir; Zisserman, Andrew

9:00 – 10:00

Keynote Keynote Address

Dr. Adam Resnick
Director, Center for Data-Driven Discovery in Biomedicine (D3b)
Children's Hospital of Philadelphia / University of Pennsylvania, USA
9:00 – 9:45 Talk · 9:45 – 10:00 Q&A

10:00 – 10:30

Poster Coffee Break & Poster Session

8 poster presentations

Poster Presentation Information:
During the PedAItrics workshop, poster boards will be available directly next to Schuman — Satellite Event Room 1 (First Floor). Presenters are encouraged to display their posters there during the workshop for increased visibility.

After the workshop, presenters should remove their posters and bring them to the main MICCAI poster session in Hall Rhin (Ground Floor).

#8 — Task-Aware Modality Contribution Fusion Framework for Pediatric Postoperative Gross Tumor Volume Segmentation Hou, Zhuo; Liu, Xing'an; Zhang, Xuanrong; Shimizu, Shosei; Shimizu, Akinobu

#16 — Do Medical Vision-Language Models Work for Children? Evaluating MedGemma on Pediatric Pneumonia Zeghlache, Rachid; Al Musleh, Mohamed; Ahmed, Rehan; Oroumchian, Farhad; Alshryda, Sattar; Elserafi, Ahmed; Abdulaziz, Nidhal

#19 — Sequence-Agnostic MRI Segmentation of Pediatric Renal Tumors for Postoperative Flank Irradiation Ding, Mianyong; Radu, Adrian-Marian; van den Heuvel-Eibrink, Marry M.; Janssens, Geert O.; Maspero, Matteo

#10 — Radiomic Prediction of Chronic Kidney Disease Progression in Children with Posterior Urethral Valves Logan, Joseph; Jeong, Stacy; Heller, Nick; Dortche, Kristina; Klock, Julie; Rickard, Mandy; Erdman, Lauren; Lorenzo, Armando; Hannick, Jessica; Woo, Lynn; Tasian, Greg; Weaver, John

#21 — Data-Efficient Pediatric Demyelinating Lesion Segmentation with Cross-Age Lesion Augmentation and Trustworthy Predictions Taneja, Arti; Omer, Hasmila A.; Vasikarla, Shantaram

#15 — Cross-cohort Transfer for Label-efficient Neonatal HIE Lesion Segmentation with Weak Supervision and Pseudo-normative Spatial Priors van Altena, Benjamin; van der Aa, Niek E.; de Haan, Timo R.; Alderliesten, Thomas; Benders, Manon J.N.L.; Išgum, Ivana; Venkatraghavan, Vikram

#4 — PSCT-Net: Geometry-Aware Pediatric Skull CT Reconstruction via Differentiable Back-Projection and Attention-Guided Refinement Kim, Dong Yeong; Choi, Jaewon; Shin, Youmin; Lee, JunGyu; Kim, Myeongseop; Choi, Jinwook; Kim, Joo Whan; Kim, Young-Gon

#26 — Ordinal regression of Robarts histopathology index for pediatric inflammatory bowel disease Heekin, Sixten; Gordon, Ilyssa; Denson, Nicholas; Denson, Lee; Bruining, David; Rieder, Florian; Dillman, Jonathan R.; Dhaliwal, Jasbir; Erdman, Lauren

10:30 – 11:05

Panel Panel & Group Discussion

Panelists: Adam Resnick, Marius Linguraru, Pallavi Tiwari, Natasha Lepore
Moderator: Satish Viswanath

11:05 – 12:20

Oral Oral Presentations — Part 2

5 presentations · 10 min presentation + 5 min Q&A each

11:05 – 11:20 Modeling Cardiac Normality for Neonatal CHD Screening on a Portable Single-View Device: Challenges of a Small-Sample Pediatric Pilot Medellin-Robles, Rodrigo; Bukhari, Mohammad Abdullah; Torres-Martel, Jose Miguel; Victorova, Maria; Gutierrez-Alvarez, Isidro; Tovar-Arriaga, Saul; Saarinen, Annamarie

11:20 – 11:35 Transformer-Based Manifold Modeling of Novel Image Quality Metrics For Pediatric Brain MRI Sadri, Amir Reza; Viswanath, Satish E.

11:35 – 11:50 Enhancing Clinically-relevant Quality Control Through Automated Segmentation Performance Prediction (Paper #24) Laslo, Daria; Strijbis, Victor IJ; Haddadi Avval, Atlas; Vogt, Franziska; Fathi Kazerooni, Anahita; Jiang, Zhifan; Parida, Abhijeet; Kann, Benjamin; Linguraru, Marius George; Franson, Andrea; Müller, Sabine; Rauschecker, Andreas M.; Jutzeler, Catherine R.; Brüningk, Sarah

11:50 – 12:05 Latent Space Oversampling for Adult–Pediatric Imbalance in Brain Tumor Segmentation Ghanbari Azar, Saeideh; Nyholm, Tufve; Löfstedt, Tommy

12:05 – 12:20 Privacy-Preserving Federated Distillation of Foundation Models for Multi-Institutional Pediatric Glioma Recurrence Prediction Wang, Jiying; Liu, Anbang; Ji, Zheyi; Chikontwe, Philip; Yang, Jiancheng; Zhu, Biyue; Pytel, Peter; Damodharan, Sudarshawn; Xu, Ziyue; Yu, Kun-Hsing; Volchenboum, Samuel L.; Zhao, Junhan

12:20 – 12:30

Closing Closing Remarks

Invited Talk

Keynote Speaker

Adam C. Resnick, PhD

Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP)
Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

Dr. Resnick is Director of the Center for Data-Driven Discovery in Biomedicine (D3b) at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and Professor at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on understanding the molecular mechanisms driving pediatric brain tumors through the integration of genomics, computational biology, and artificial intelligence.

Through D3b, he leads multidisciplinary teams that develop scalable data science platforms to accelerate biomedical discovery, precision medicine, and patient-centered healthcare while advancing collaborative translational research across academia and clinical practice.

Accepted Papers

Camera-Ready Submission

Authors of accepted papers must submit their final camera-ready materials by August 24, 2026.

Important Public Release Notice
An open-access version of all accepted papers from the MICCAI 2026 Satellite Event PedAItrics will be made available on the MICCAI Society website no earlier than one week before the first day of the conference. Authors intending to file patents are responsible for ensuring that all necessary filings are completed prior to this public release.

Required Camera-Ready Materials

Final camera-ready paper PDF
Complete manuscript source files
LaTeX users should provide a ZIP containing all source files, figures, bibliography files, and other files necessary to compile the manuscript. Word users should provide the final DOCX file.
Signed Springer License to Publish (LTP)
The form must be completed and signed by the corresponding author. Please do not modify information already prefilled in the form.

Springer License to Publish

Download the official prefilled Springer License to Publish form below. The corresponding author must complete and sign the form and submit it together with the camera-ready materials.

Download Springer LTP Form

Camera-Ready Deadline

All required camera-ready materials must be submitted by:

August 21, 2026

Please ensure the final paper, source files, and signed Springer License to Publish are complete before submission.

Questions?

For questions regarding camera-ready submission or the Springer License to Publish, please contact the organizing committee.

Contact Organizers

Team

Organizing Committee

SV

Satish Viswanath

Emory University / Children's Healthcare of Atlanta

LE

Lauren Erdman

Cincinnati Children's Hospital

AM

Anant Madabhushi

Emory University

PT

Pallavi Tiwari

University of Wisconsin-Madison

MI

Marwa Ismail

University of Wisconsin-Madison

CA

Charlems Alvarez-Jimenez

Colombia

NL

Natasha Lepore

USC / Children's Hospital Los Angeles

ML

Marius Linguraru

Children's National Hospital

JW

John Weaver

Cleveland Clinic

RR

Rahimeh Rouhi

Children's Hospital Los Angeles

SS

Sana Syed

Duke University

Coordination

Workshop Coordinators

BF

Brennan Flannery, PhD

Emory University

TD

Thomas DeSilvio, PhD

Emory University

AS

Amir Reza Sadri, PhD

Emory University