UNSURE2026
Uncertainty for Safe Utilization of Machine Learning in Medical Imaging

Recent Updates

Important Dates

  • July 8, 2026 Paper Submission Deadline (23:59 PST)
  • July 28, 2026 Reviews due
  • August 5, 2026 Publication of decisions
  • August 14, 2026 Camera ready submissions due
  • September 10, 2026 Summary videos due
  • September 27, 2026 Workshop date

About the MICCAI UNSURE Workshop

Overview

With the rise and influence of machine learning (ML) in medical application and the need to translate newly developed techniques into clinical practice, questions about safety and uncertainty over measurements and reported quantities have gained importance. Obtaining accurate measurements is insufficient, as one needs to establish the circumstances under which these values generalize, or give appropriate error bounds for these measures. This is becoming particularly relevant to patient safety as many research groups and companies have deployed or are aiming to deploy ML technology in clinical practice.

The purpose of this workshop is to develop awareness and encourage research on uncertainty modelling to ensure safety for applications spanning both the MIC and CAI fields. In particular, this workshop invites submissions to cover different facets of this topic, including but not limited to: detection and quantification of algorithmic failures; processes of healthcare risk management (e.g. CAD systems); robustness and adaptation to domain shifts; evaluation of uncertainty estimates; defence against noise and mistakes in data (e.g. bias, label mistakes, measurement noise, inter/intra-observer variability). The workshop aims to encourage contributions in a wide range of applications and types of ML algorithms. The use or development of any relevant ML methods are welcomed, including, but not limited to, probabilistic deep learning, Bayesian nonparametric statistics, graphical models and Gaussian processes. We also aim to ensure broad coverage of applications in the context of both MIC and CAI, which are categorized into reporting problems (descriptions of image contents) such as diagnosis, measurements, segmentation, detection, and enhancement problems (addition of information) such as image synthesis, registration, reconstruction, super-resolution, harmonisation, inpainting and augmented display.

Details

In the last few years, machine learning (ML) techniques have permeated many aspects of the MICCAI community, leading to substantial progress in a wide range of applications ranging from image analysis to surgical assistance. However, in medical applications, algorithms ultimately assist life and death decisions, and translation of such innovations into practice requires a measure of safety. In practice, ML systems often face situations where the correct decision is ambiguous, and therefore principled mechanisms for quantifying uncertainty are required to envision potential practical deployment.

Safety is indeed paramount in medical imaging applications, where images inform scientific conclusions in research, and diagnostic, prognostic or interventional decisions in clinics. However, efforts have mostly focused on improving the accuracy, while systematic approaches ensuring safety of medical imaging-derived automated systems are largely lacking in the existing body of research.

Uncertainty quantification has recently attracted attention in the MICCAI community as a promising approach to provide a reliability metric of the output, and as a mechanism to communicate the knowledge boundary of such ML systems. Spurred on by this emergent interest, the workshop will encourage discussions on the topic of uncertainty modelling and alternative approaches for risk management in a wide range of medical applications. It aims thereby to highlight both fundamental and practical challenges that need to be addressed to achieve safer implementations of ML systems in the clinical world.

Format

The UNSURE workshop will be held as an in-person, satellite event of MICCAI 2026 in Strasbourg. This year, the workshop will be held in conjunction with the Uncertainty Tutorial and the iMimic workshop. For more information on the tutorial and the iMIMIC workshop, please navigate to their dedicated websites

Call for Papers

Scope

We accept submissions of original, unpublished work on safety and uncertainty in medical imaging, including (but not limited to) the following areas:

  • Uncertainty quantification in any MIC or CAI applications
  • Risk management of ML systems in clinical pipelines
  • Out-of-distribution and anomaly detection
  • Defending against hallucinations in enhancement tasks (e.g. super-resolution, reconstruction, modality translation)
  • Robustness to domain shifts
  • Measurement errors
  • Modelling noise in data (e.g. labels, measurements, inter/intra-observer variability)
  • Validation of uncertainty estimates
  • Active Learning
  • Confidence bounds
  • Posterior inference over point estimates
  • Bayesian deep learning
  • Graphical models
  • Gaussian processes
  • Calibration of uncertainty measures
  • Bayesian decision theory

Submission Format

Our submission guidelines follow the guidelines of the main MICCAI conference. Submissions must be 8-page papers (excluding references) following the Springer LNCS format using the LaTex or MS Word template. Author names, affiliations and acknowledgements, as well as any obvious phrasings or clues that can identify authors must be removed to ensure anonymity. Note that the 8 page limit refers only to the main content. Including references and acknowledgements the submission may exceed 8 pages.


We also allow supplementary materials in the form of a pdf (max 2 pages) for additional proofs or explanatory details. For applications relying on video, multi-media material (e.g. surgery video or cell division) are also allowed. Note: Supplementary material cannot be voiced over slides presenting additional clarifications.

How to submit?

Submissions need to be done on the Open Review platform

Submission Deadline: July 1, 2026 - 23:59 (PST)

Publication

Proceedings will be published as part of an LNCS volume by Springer Nature. Accepted papers will also be invited to submit an extended version for publication in a special issue of the MELBA journal

Presentation

All accepted papers will be presented in person at the UNSURE workshop in conjunction with the uncertainty tutorial and the iMiMic workshop. We will select a number of papers for long oral presentation or spotlights based on the reviewers' suggestions. All authors will additionally get the opportunity to present their work as poster during the workshop poster session. To help participants in making the most of the workshop, accepted papers will be made public for comments on open-Review a week before the workshop along with 6 min presentation videos. Please note that the preparation of the video is compulsory for all accepted papers.

Attendance

To attend the workshop, you need to register and pay for attending this satellite event day (student with main conference 130 euros early bird / 190euros after the 17th August). Please navigate to the Registration site to register.

Resources

Program

Date and Location

Sunday September 27 - Start at 11.30 - Boston room

Schedule

11:30 - 11:35 Opening Remarks

11:35 - 12:05 Spotlights

  • Geometric Diversity: Mixed-Curvature Heads as a Substitute for Ensemble Independence – Peter J. Kampen
  • Label-Free Threshold Selection for Out-of-Distribution Detection in Liver CT Segmentation – Marshal Nielsen
  • Beyond Morphological Dilation: Revisiting Conformal Prediction for 3D Tumor Segmentation – Luisa Vargas Daza
  • Spatial Autoregressive Modeling of DINOv3 Embeddings for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection – Ertunc Erdil
  • Example-based Explainable Selective Classification with Graph Neural Networks for Urinary Sediment Examination – Keita Sasaki
  • Sequential Conformal Safety for Trustworthy Clinical Decision Pathways in Ophthalmology – Alejandro Sanchez Guinea

12:05 - 12:25 Long Oral 1

  • Layer Selection in VLMs for Zero-Shot OOD Detection via Multi-Resolution Entropy Estimation – Shyam Nandan Rai

12:30 - 13:10 Lunch

13:10 - 14:40 Poster Session

Poster Session 1 (13:10 – 13:55)
  • 1 - Image Segmentation Calibration Based on Estimated Segmentation Quality
  • 3 - Evaluating and Calibrating Diffusion Model-derived Uncertainty for Quantitative MRI Mapping
  • 5 - Subgroup-Dependent Report-Label Noise Distorts Fairness Audits of Chest X-ray Classifiers: A Prediction-Powered Correction
  • 7 - Counterfactual Marginalisation: Framework for Evaluating Robustness to Nuisance Variables
  • 9 - Bound-Aware Per-Organ Recall Risk Control for Multi-Organ CT Segmentation under Clinical Domain Shift
  • 11 - SegWithU: Deterministic Perturbation Probes for Single-Forward-Pass Risk-Aware Medical Image Segmentation
  • 13 - Uncertainty-Aware Bone Age Assessment: Analysis of Conformal and Bayesian Methods
  • 15 - Contrastive uncertainty learning for robust multi-structure segmentation in lower-pelvic MR
  • 17 - Beyond Morphological Dilation: Revisiting Conformal Prediction for 3D Tumor Segmentation
  • 19 - Not All Errors Are Equal: Threshold-Aware Loss Functions for Opportunistic Osteoporosis Screening
  • 21 - Geometric Diversity: Mixed-Curvature Heads as a Substitute for Ensemble Independence
  • 23 - Uncertainty Estimation in Deep Learning MRI Reconstruction with Focus on Pathologies
  • 25 - Uncertain but Useful: Leveraging CNN Training Variability into Data Augmentation
  • 27 - Layer Selection in VLMs for Zero-Shot OOD Detection via Multi-Resolution Entropy Estimation
  • 29 - FetalEDL: OOD-Aware Evidential Deep Learning for Reliable Fetal Ultrasound Plane Classification
  • 31 - Label-Free Threshold Selection for Out-of-Distribution Detection in Liver CT Segmentation
  • 33 - Foundation Model and Radiomics Distance Scores for Post-Hoc Segmentation Failure Detection
  • 35 - Beyond Uncertainty: Generalizable Failure Monitoring for Surgical Segmentation under Acquisition Degradation
  • 37 - Beyond Mean Uncertainty: Case-wise AUSE for Detecting Failures in 3D Pelvic Tilt Estimation from a Single AP Radiograph
Poster Session 2 (13:55 – 14:40)
  • 2 - Improving Calibration of Black-Box Radiology AI Using Test-Time Augmentation
  • 4 - Well-Calibrated but Unusable: Calibration Error Does Not Certify Zero-Shot Chest X-Ray VLMs
  • 6 - Quantile Regression Enables Reliable, Uncertainty-Aware Endoscopic Scoring in Ulcerative Colitis Clinical Trials
  • 8 - From Generation to Decision: Structure-Aware Reliability for Cardiac MRI Reporting
  • 10 - Reliability, Not Accuracy, Is the Bottleneck in AI-Assisted Post-Treatment Glioma Segmentation: Region-Aware Recalibration and Risk-Controlled Triage
  • 12 - Sequential Conformal Safety for Trustworthy Clinical Decision Pathways in Ophthalmology
  • 14 - When Voxels Are Not Equal: Spacing-Driven Metric Bias and Metric Uncertainty in Segmentation
  • 16 - Example-based Explainable Selective Classification with Graph Neural Networks for Urinary Sediment Examination
  • 18 - Explanation Uncertainty in the Classification of Pulmonary Nodules
  • 20 - Does Inter-Rater Variability Matter? Preclinical MRI Tumour Segmentation and Downstream Analysis
  • 22 - Beyond Dice: A Reliability-Oriented Evaluation of Geometric Test-Time Augmentation in Medical Image Segmentation
  • 24 - Beyond Boundary Noise: Aggregated Aleatoric Uncertainty Fails to Capture Presence Ambiguity in 3D Lung Nodule Segmentation
  • 26 - Uncertainty Identifies Difficult Samples Across Methods: A Multi-Task Study on a Heterogeneous Skin Lesion Dataset
  • 28 - A Principled Approach to Unsupervised Anomaly Detection
  • 30 - Spatial Autoregressive Modeling of DINOv3 Embeddings for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection
  • 32 - When Does Prompt-Perturbation Uncertainty Catch Interactive-Segmentation Failures? An Empirical Study on SAM/MedSAM
  • 34 - Confidence-Tiered Quality Control for Reliable Radiomic Biomarkers in Multicentre PET-CT
  • 36 - Predictive Entropy as a Joint Screen for Error and Paraphrase Instability in Medical Vision-Language Models
  • 38 - Complementary Reliability Axes for Aortic CTA Segmentation: An Empirical Audit

14:45 - 15:05 Long Oral 2

  • Subgroup-Dependent Report-Label Noise Distorts Fairness Audits of Chest X-ray Classifiers: A Prediction-Powered Correction – Han Jay Shu

15:05 - 15:25 Long Oral 3

  • Quantile Regression Enables Reliable, Uncertainty-Aware Endoscopic Scoring in Ulcerative Colitis Clinical Trials – Sara Sangalli

15:25 - 15:30 Awards and Concluding Remarks for UNSURE

UNSURE 2026 Organizing Committee

Organizers

In alphabetical order

Mobarakol Islam

Imperial College London

Raghav Mehta

Imperial College London

Cheng Ouyang

University of Oxford

Chen Qin

Imperial College London

Carole Sudre

Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing, University College London / Hawkes Institute, University College London / Department of Biomedical Engineering, King's College London

William (Sandy) Wells

Radiology, BWH, Harvard Medical School

Program Committee

Name Affiliation
Adrian GaldranUniversitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
Alceu BissotoUniversität Bern, Switzerland
Anna M. WundramUniversität Luzern, Switzerland
Balamurali MurugesanAmazon, Canada
Bernhard KainzImperial College London, UK
Bilal SidiqiUniversity College London, UK
Biraja GhoshalUniversity College London, UK
Cecilia Diana-AlbeldaUniversidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
Chloe HeUniversity College London, UK
Damini RijhwaniAutomation Core Inc., USA
Disi LinUmeå University, Sweden
Dwarikanath MahapatraKhalifa University of Science, Technology and Research, UAE
Ertunc ErdilETH Zurich, Switzerland
Fons van der SommenEindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Francisco VasconcelosUniversity College London, UK
Gabriel Oliveira-StahlUniversity College London, UK
Gonzalo Esteban Mosquera RojasErasmus MC, The Netherlands
Hongwei Bran LiNational University of Singapore, Singapore
Jackie MaFraunhofer HHI, Germany
Jacob J. PeoplesMemorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, USA
James MylesImperial College London, UK
Jinwei ZhangJohns Hopkins University, USA
Johanna Paula MüllerFriedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
John McCabeUniversity College London, UK
Krishna ChaitanyaJohnson & Johnson, Switzerland
Krishnam GuptaAudere, USA
Leo JoskowiczHebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Liane S. CanasKing's College London, UK
Maria MiscouridouUniversity College London, UK
Matt Y. CheungRice University, USA
Matthew BaughImperial College London, UK
Max-Heinrich LavesImFusion, Germany
Moritz FuchsBosch Health, Germany
Omar ToddImperial College London, UK
Paul FischerEberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany
Peter J.T. KampenTechnical University of Denmark, Denmark
Philip J. EdwardsUniversity College London, UK
Rahul VenkataramaniGE Healthcare, India
Robbert Roel StruyvenHarvard University, USA
Rui W. YeowUniversity College London, UK
Shahab AslaniUniversity College London, UK
Shelley Zixin ShuUniversität Bern, Switzerland
Shishuai WangErasmus MC, The Netherlands
Simon BaurFraunhofer, Germany
Thomas SchultzUniversity of Bonn, Germany
Tim FlühmannUniversität Bern, Switzerland
Tristan GlatardConcordia University, Canada
Ufaq KhanMohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, UAE
William ConsagraUniversity of South Carolina, USA
Xinzhe LuoImperial College London, UK
Yasin IbrahimUniversity of Oxford, UK
Yipeng HuUniversity College London, UK
Yong XiaNorthwestern Polytechnical University, China
Zeinab AbboudÉcole Polytechnique de Montréal, Canada

Contact

For general inquiries please send an email to: unsure2026@ucl.ac.uk