iMED Challenge 2026

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Overview of the iMED Challenge

Description

The iMED Challenge is a sub-challenge of EndoVis 2026 at MICCAI 2026. Vision-based 3D reconstruction is critical for real-time guidance systems, autonomous camera control, and digital twins in robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery. Surgical environments remain especially challenging because of constrained viewpoints through narrow trocar ports, tissue deformation from respiratory motion and tool interactions, non-Lambertian surfaces with strong specularities, and transient phenomena such as smoke and bleeding.

Tasks

Task 1: iMED PE

Metric: ATE

Estimate accurate per-frame relative camera poses between two endoscopes in deformable surgical environments.

69 train 21 test

Task 2: iMED NVS

Metrics: PSNR, SSIM

Synthesize novel views of deformable surgical scenes from a held-out endoscope viewpoint using a train-on-one-endoscope, test-on-another protocol.

20 sequences

Key Dates

  • April 15, 2026 Registration opens and the dataset is released on Synapse.
  • May 15, 2026 Docker Containers for subtasks will be released on Synapse.
  • June 30, 2026 Public validation leaderboard opens.
  • September 1, 2026 Structured methods report due.
  • September 27, 2026 Challenge Day at MICCAI 2026 / EndoVis Strasbourg, France.

Organizers

Name Institution
Sierra Bonilla University College London
John Han Vanderbilt University
Tianyi Song University College London
Adam Schmidt Intuitive Surgical, Inc.
Omid Mohareri Intuitive Surgical, Inc.
Francisco Vasconcelos University College London
Sophia Bano University College London

Sponsors