Request to add medical image analysis as an area

[emeryberger]

Forwarded from e-mail:

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Dear Prof. Berger,

Thank you for establishing, running, and maintaining the csrankings.org website. Your website has become a highly valuable resource for prospective computer science students to assess computer science departments and take a major first step in their academic careers.

We would like to request adding medical image analysis as one of the computer science subject areas. In particular, we suggest considering publications in the MICCAI, IPMI, and ISBI conferences within csrankings.org.

We believe that these conference are consistent with your inclusion criteria. The attached letter describes why we think this is the case in detail.

Many thank in advance for considering our request.

Best regards,

Marc

Signees of the attached letter:

Ron Alterovitz, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Stephen Aylward, Senior Director of Strategic Initiative at Kitware and Adjunct Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill James C. Gee, Associate Professor of Radiologic Science in Radiology and in Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania Guido Gerig, Institute Professor and Department Chair, Computer Science & Engineering, New York University Polina Golland, Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Gordon L. Kindlmann, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Chicago Michael I. Miller, Director of the Center of Imaging Science, Herschel and Ruth Seder Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Johns Hopkins University Marc Niethammer, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Stephen M. Pizer, Kenan Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Dinggang Shen, Jeffrey Houpt Distinguished Investigator, Professor of Radiology and Adjunct Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Martin Styner, Associate Professor, Departments of Computer Science and Psychiatry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Baba Vemuri, Wilson and Marie Collins Professor in Engineering; Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville Rene Vidal, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, and Electrical and Computer Engineering, Johns Hopkins University

csranking_petition.pdf

[emeryberger]

To set expectations here, note that adding a new area of computer science not backed by an ACM SIG or similar is a big ask for CSrankings. With regards to the FAQ: it first indicates that ACM SIGs are its primary organizing principle. Also, I apologize if there is some ambiguity about the inclusion criteria; these were meant both as minimum requirements and were intended as a filter for the inclusion of ACM SIGs (and also to mean publications by CS faculty from R1 departments).

[marcniethammer]

What counts as "similar to an ACM SIG"? The FAQ states that "Nearly all categories are based on research-focused ACM SIGs. Areas not represented by ACM SIGs are intended to span most established research-centric areas of computer science." I would argue (see also the petition letter) that medical image analysis is a very well established area of computer science just as computer vision is.

[emeryberger]

Just for comparison, see https://github.com/emeryberger/CSrankings/issues/438 for another request. Note that there are currently 26 areas listed in CSrankings. Of these, 21 correspond to an ACM SIG. The other five are computer vision, natural language processing, cryptography, robotics, and visualization (with two of these listed as being interdisciplinary). I would say that these are clearly mainstream CS topics at this point (not meaning any disrespect to any other areas); I think most people would agree that CSrankings without some of these areas would be clearly deficient.

In any event, can you please clarify if 50 R1 CS departments have publications in these topics? (Not just institutions). Thanks.

[marcniethammer]

This will take me some time and work, but I can search for these publications and will get you the data. If there is a particular format you would like me to provide the data in to make a compelling case, please let me know. I would be extremely surprised if there are not 50 R1 CS departments (this includes adjunct faculty, I assume) that publish in these conferences.

[emeryberger]

A csv would be fine, preferably with DBLP names canonicalized to those already in the CSrankings database.

[marcniethammer]

I went through the MICCAI main conference (i.e., not workshop) publications for R1 CS departments over the last ten years. 52 R1 CS departments have such papers in MICCAI alone. Were one to add publications in IPMI and ISBI this number would likely go further up. I did not do this, because this search was quite labor intensive. But I am happy to do it if desired.

The attached document lists one arbitrary MICCAI publication for each institution as an example. There are frequently many more.

I am not exactly sure what you mean by DBLP names, but I believe the names for these three conferences would be: "MICCAI", "MICCAI (1)", "MICCAI (2)", "MICCAI (3)", "IPMI", "ISBI"

CS_department_MICCAI_publications.pdf

[aylward]

Regarding ACM SIGS that back medical image analysis, I was able to find the following:

1) SIGBIO specifically mentions medical image analysis in its charter: http://www.sigbioinformatics.org/Main/About

2) SIGSPATIAL also mention several active medical imaging research areas in its proposal for formation: http://www.sigspatial.org/ACMSIG-Spatial-Proposal.pdf

3) There are also ACM publications on medical image analysis and computer-assisted intervention, including a 2017 ACM Opinion article in the Communications of the ACM: https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/articles/217725-medical-microbots-need-better-imaging-and-control/fulltext

4) ACM has also published two "ACM Speaker" presentations in 2016 and 2017 that would have fit very well into the conference programs at MICCAI, ISBI, or IPMI: https://speakers.acm.org/lectures/9164 "Medical image analysis using deep learning" https://speakers.acm.org/lectures/10004 "Medical Image Processing: Analysis and Visualization"

5) In general, the terms "medical+imaging" occur together over 4000 times on the ACM website: https://www.acm.org/search?q=medical+imaging

[marcniethammer]

What may also be relevant is that while there is technically not a dedicated ACM SIG for medial image analysis (though some related SIGs exist, see post by @aylward above) MICCAI, for example, is backed by the MICCAI society ( http://www.miccai.org/missionstatement ).

The MICCAI society is, in my understanding, very much in the spirit of an ACM SIG: "The Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention Society (the MICCAI Society) is dedicated to the promotion, preservation and facilitation of research, education and practice in the field of medical image computing and computer assisted medical interventions ..."

[marcniethammer]

@emeryberger : Was the document with the CS department MICCAI publications all you needed at this point? Or would you like me to gather more supporting information?

[affrangi-zz]

I am writing to give my strong support for the petition to have the MICCAI, IPMI, and ISBI conferences considered in the CS Rankings process. These conferences are significant resources for my computer science research, collaborators, students, and staff; and we present major components of our computer science research and applications at these conferences. They are instrumental in the advancement of the scholarly works of my laboratory, the Centre for Computational Imaging & Simulation Technology in Biomedicine www.cistib.org at the University of Sheffield, UK. It is crucial that these conferences are recognised in your ranking as otherwise our community will suffer: key contributions to medical image computing and computer assisted interventions that rely on computer science area (e.g. in computer vision, machine learning, robotics, and visualization and graphics) will be hindered by their not being recognised in academic promotions that look up at this ranking. We need more and more conferences like these where the best of computer science meets societal challenges in healthcare.

[pjannin]

As member of the MICCAI society and President of the International Society of Computer Aided Surgery, I give my support to this request. Best regards

[hjmjohnson]

Dear Marc,

I am writing to give my most emphatic support for the petition to have the MICCAI, IPMI, and ISBI conferences considered in the CS Rankings process. These conferences are significant resources for my computer science research, collaborators, students, and staff; and we present major components of our computer science research and applications at these conferences. They are instrumental in the advancement of the scholarly works of my computer science and engineering department.

Thank you, Hans J. Johnson Associate Professor, University of Iowa Insight Software Consortium Treasurer

[fichtinger]

As a charter member of the MICCAI Society and a Board Member for many years, I have had the privilege to witness MICCAI to grow into a preeminent scientific organization. I lend my full support to the petition that is expected to foster further growth of MICCAI.
--Gabor Fichtinger, Queen's University, Canada.

[flaczko]

I am writing to give my strong support for the petition to have the MICCAI, IPMI, and ISBI conferences considered in the CS Rankings process. These conferences are significant resources for my computer science research, collaborators, students, and staff; and we present major components of our computer science research and applications at these conferences. They are instrumental in the advancement of the scholarly works of my computer science department.

Regards Frank Laczko

[ulasbagci]

I am writing to give my strong support for the petition to have the MICCAI, IPMI, and ISBI conferences considered in the CS Rankings process. These conferences are significant resources for my computer science research, collaborators, students, and staff; and we present major components of our computer science research and applications at these conferences. They are instrumental in the advancement of the scholarly works of my computer science department.

Thank you,

Ulas Bagci, PhD Assistant professor of computer science, Center for research in computer vision, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL

[anubhaa]

I am writing in strong support for the petition to have the MICCAI, IPMI, and ISBI conferences considered in the CS Rankings process. These conferences are extremely significant providing an excellent platform to the biomedical engineering community to showcase research, learn from each others' technical expertise, and network with the right people. These are really noteworthy conferences for the advancement of the scholarly works of students and faculty working in this area.

[HzFu]

I am writing to give my strong support for the petition to have the MICCAI, IPMI, and ISBI conferences considered in the CS Rankings process. These conferences are significant resources for my computer science research, collaborators, students, and staff; and we present major components of our computer science research and applications at these conferences. They are instrumental in the advancement of the scholarly works of my computer science department.

Thank you.

Huazhu Fu

[tigerlelu]

I am writing to give my strong support for the petition to have the MICCAI, IPMI, and ISBI conferences considered in the CS Rankings process. These conferences are significant resources for my computer science research, collaborators, students, and staff; and we present major components of our computer science research and applications at these conferences. They are instrumental in the advancement of the scholarly works of my computer science department.

Sincerely, Le Lu

[dcmoyer]

Dear Prof. Berger,

Thank you for hosting the CS Rankings. As illustrated by the recent USNWR rankings, having a relatively fair and open system for these lists is very helpful to the community, and I have directed multiple undergrads to your lists for their applications.

As a researcher in a Computer Science department I would like to express my support for the inclusion of MICCAI, IPMI, and IEEE-ISBI. While they do cross into other fields, the same might be argued of ICWSM, CHI, and other "applied" conferences. These conferences are instrumental in the advancement of medical imaging, a field whose faculty are often housed in the Computer Science department.

Thank you, Daniel Moyer

[mpnash]

I also give my strong support for the inclusion of MICCAI, IPMI, and IEEE-ISBI conferences in the CS Rankings for the reasons outlined in the petition above.

Regards, Martyn Nash Professor of Biomedical Engineering, University of Auckland, New Zealand.

[metaxas-dimitris]

I ave been working for close to 25 years in medical image analysis and while I am a prof in CS, medical image analysis is not included explicitly as a CS area. I am therefore writing to give my strong support for the petition to have the MICCAI, IPMI, and ISBI conferences considered in the CS Rankings process. These conferences are the most important avenues for publishing my computer science research, as well as of many of my collaborators, students, and staff; we present major components of our computer science research and applications at these conferences. They are instrumental in the advancement of the scholarly works of my computer science department as well as for my students to be educated properly and find proper academic and industrial positions.

Dimitris Metaxas Distinguished Prof. of CS Director Center for Computational Biomedicine, Imaging and Modeling Rutgers University

[moradi2004]

I also think that medical image analysis is a very important area of computer science. MICCAI and IEEE ISBI are definitely forums for presentation of new computer science knowledge. MICCAI is listed as a top conference within IBM Research list of top conferences for computer scientists. MICCAI is a selective forum and competes, in terms of quality of the review process, with other top CS conferences in vision and learning.

Mehdi Moradi, PhD Research Manager and Scientist IBM Almaden Research Center San Jose, CA http://researcher.ibm.com/researcher/view.php?person=us-mmoradi

[karteekpop]

I am writing to give my strong support for the petition to have the MICCAI, IPMI, and ISBI conferences considered in the CS Rankings process. These conferences are significant resources for my computer science research, collaborators, students, and staff; and we present major components of our computer science research and applications at these conferences. They are instrumental in the advancement of the scholarly works of my computer science department.

Karteek Popuri, PhD Adjunct Professor, Functional & Anatomical Imaging and Shape Analysis Lab School of Engineering Science, Simon Fraser University

[fagonzalezo]

I just want add my voice to request the inclusion of MICCAI, IPMI, and ISBI conferences in the CS Rankings process. These conferences are significant resources for my computer science research, collaborators, students, and staff; and we present major components of our computer science research and applications at these conferences. They are instrumental in the advancement of the scholarly works of my computer science department.

Fabio A. González Full Professor Computer Systems and Industrial Engineering Dept Universidad Nacional de Colombia

[wentaozhu]

I am writing to give my strong support for the petition to have the MICCAI, IPMI, and ISBI conferences considered in the CS Rankings process. These conferences are significant resources for my computer science research, collaborators, students, and staff; and we present major components of our computer science research and applications at these conferences. They are instrumental in the advancement of the scholarly works of my computer science department.

[uverma]

I am writing to give my strong support for the petition to have the MICCAI, IPMI, and ISBI conferences considered in the CS Rankings process. These conferences are significant resources for my computer science research, collaborators, students, and staff; and we present major components of our computer science research and applications at these conferences. They are instrumental in the advancement of the scholarly works of my computer science department.

Dr. Ujjwal Verma

Manipal University, Manipal (India)

[SHMCU]

I am writing to give my strong support for the petition to have the MICCAI, IPMI, and ISBI conferences considered in the CS Rankings process. These conferences are significant resources for my computer science research, collaborators, students, and staff; and we present major components of our computer science research and applications at these conferences. They are instrumental in the advancement of the scholarly works of my computer science department.

Hai Su

[noelcodella]

I am writing to give my strong support for the petition to have the MICCAI, IPMI, and ISBI conferences considered in the CS Rankings process. These conferences are significant resources for my computer science research, collaborators, students, and staff; and we present major components of our computer science research and applications at these conferences. They are instrumental in the advancement of the scholarly works of my computer science department.

Dr. Noel C. F. Codella Research Staff Member, IBM Research AI

[crjsci1]

Dear Professor Berger,

I too am writing to give my strong support for the petition to have the MICCAI, IPMI, and ISBI conferences considered in the CS Rankings process. These conferences are significant resources for my computer science research, collaborators, students, and staff; and we present major components of our computer science research and applications at these conferences. They are instrumental in the advancement of the scholarly works of my computer science department.

Sincerely,

Chris Johnson, Ph.D. Director, Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute Distinguished Professor, School of Computing University of Utah www.sci.utah.edu crj@sci.utah.edu

[yzgao]

I graduated from the CS department at UNC-Chapel Hill. I have been working in medical image analysis since my PhD admission. When I attended MICCAI, ISBI and IPMI conferences, I found a lot of attendees are with computer science background. Clearly, medical image analysis now becomes a very active and quickly-growing research field in computer science. Therefore, I am writing to give my strong support for the petition to have the MICCAI, IPMI, and ISBI conferences considered in the CS Rankings process. These conferences are significant resources for my computer science research, collaborators, students, and staff; and we present major components of our computer science research and applications at these conferences. They are instrumental in the advancement of the scholarly works of my computer science department.

Yaozong Gao, PhD United-Imaging, Shanghai, China

[Kuzphi]

I am writing to give my strong support for the petition to have the MICCAI, IPMI, and ISBI conferences considered in the CS Rankings process. These conferences are significant resources for my computer science research, collaborators, students, and staff; and we present major components of our computer science research and applications at these conferences. They are instrumental in the advancement of the scholarly works of my computer science department.

[ghcarneiro]

I am writing to give my strong support for the petition to have the MICCAI, IPMI, and ISBI conferences considered in the CS Rankings process. These conferences are significant resources for my computer science research, collaborators, students, and staff; and we present major components of our computer science research and applications at these conferences. They are instrumental in the advancement of the scholarly works of my computer science department.

Gustavo Carneiro Associate Professor School of Computer Science University of Adelaide

[JianCheng]

Dear Professor Berger,

I am writing to strongly support the petition to have MICCAI and IPMI conferences in the CS rankings process. I graduated from CS institutes (INRIA in France and Chinese Academy of Sciences in China). I worked in UNC-Chapel Hill and National Institutes of Health in US with colleagues who also have CS background. We developed novel algorithms and software to model and process bio-medical data (CT, MRI, etc.), and helped doctors to deal with real clinical problems. Medical image analysis is an active Interdisciplinary area of CS. These conferences (MICCAI/IPMI) are significant resources for my computer science research, collaborators, students, and staff; and we present major components of our computer science research and applications at these conferences.

Regarding to conference ranking, MICCAI is ranked as "A" conference based on Australian conference ranking list. http://portal.core.edu.au/conf-ranks/?search=miccai&by=all&source=CORE2017&sort=atitle&page=1 http://www.conferenceranks.com/?searchall=miccai#data

Sincerely,

Jian Cheng, Ph.D.

[ajoshiusc]

I am writing to give my strong support for the petition to have the MICCAI, IPMI, and ISBI conferences considered in the CS Rankings process. These conferences are significant resources for my computer science research, collaborators, students, and staff; and we present major components of our computer science research and applications at these conferences. They are instrumental in the advancement of the scholarly works of my computer science department.

[hamarneh]

I strongly support this petition.

Ghassan Hamarneh Professor of Computing Science Simon Fraser University Canada

[szunidong]

I am writing to give my strong support for the petition to have the MICCAI, IPMI, and ISBI conferences considered in the CS Rankings process. These conferences are significant resources for my computer science research, collaborators, students, and staff; and we present major components of our computer science research and applications at these conferences. They are instrumental in the advancement of the scholarly works of my computer science department.

[kannanuv]

I am writing to give my strong support for the petition to have the MICCAI, IPMI, and ISBI conferences considered in the CS Rankings process. These conferences are significant resources for my computer science research, collaborators, students, and staff; and we present major components of our computer science research and applications at these conferences. They are instrumental in the advancement of the scholarly works of my computer science department.

Kannan Senior Research Scientist Certerra Inc. NY USA

[pierreguyubc]

I fully support the petition to have MICCAI and other imaging conferences considered in the CS ranking process. Acceptance of scholarly work at a conference with clinical focus is a sign of impact, an aspiration for many students. It is a sign of Knowledge Transfer or Translation of one's work. Thank you for the opportunity to feedback

Pierre Guy MDCM, MBA, FRCSC Associate Professor, University of British Columbia Head, Division of Orthopedic Trauma UBC Dept of Orthopedics Co-Director, Centre for Hip Health and Mobility

[fycus-tree]

@pierreguyubc @kannanuv @szunidong @JianCheng @ghcarneiro @rustylogic33 @wentaozhu @yzgao @moradi2004 @ulasbagci @fagonzalezo @haltair

Just FYI.. Emery has a paper deadline (I'd guess PLDI, due Thur Nov 16? CVPR was due Wed Nov 15) that I think has him fairly occupied the last week. You know, being a full-time faculty member with ongoing research and whatnot. He's not ignoring you guys.. he's just busy. I'm sure you all know what life is like near deadlines. And I'm not sure copy+pasting some form letter helps the cause.

[guoyanzheng]

I would like to add here my strong support for the petition to have the MICCAI, IPMI, and ISBI conferences considered in the CS Rankings process.

Guoyan Zheng Associate Professor University of Bern Switzerland

[zj00377]

I am writing to give my strong support for the petition to have the MICCAI, IPMI, and ISBI conferences considered in the CS Rankings process. These conferences are significant resources for my computer science research, collaborators, students, and staff; and we present major components of our computer science research and applications at these conferences. They are instrumental in the advancement of the scholarly works of my computer science department.

Sincerely, Jie Zhang

[danielrueckert]

As Head of Department of Computing at Imperial College London I strongly support the petition to have the MICCAI, IPMI, and ISBI conferences considered in the CS Rankings process. Our CS department has more than five faculty members that publish in the area of medical image analysis and there is a strong feeling that CS Rankings shoud reflect the entire spectrum of CS research as well as its interdisciplinary nature.

Daniel Rueckert Professor of Visual Information Processing Head, Department of Computing Imperial College London

[albarqouni]

I am writing to give my strong support for the petition to have the MICCAI, IPMI, and ISBI conferences considered in the CS Rankings process. These conferences are significant resources for my computer science research, collaborators, students, and staff; and we present major components of our computer science research and applications at these conferences. They are instrumental in the advancement of the scholarly works of my computer science department.

Shadi Albarqouni Postdoctoral Research Associate Chair for Computer Aided Medical Procedures Faculty of Informatics Technical University Munich

[mkozubek]

Dear Professor Berger,

I would also like to strongly support this petition for recognizing medical image analysis (or maybe even better biomedical image analysis to include also bioimage analysis together with medical image analysis) as a mainstream area in CS. Medical imaging instruments (as well as microscopes used for bioimaging) produce still more and more data (from 2D imaging we moved to 3D or even time-lapse 3D plus imaging across multiple modalities or multiple imaging modes) and this requires intensifying CS research to analyze the data and also quality control of biomedical image analysis methods (I have myself organized a tutorial on benchmarking in biomedical image analysis at ISBI 2016 and MICCAI 2017 and the number of benchmarking challenges mostly in the frame of MICCAI or ISBI is still growing, see http://grand-challenge.org which demonstrates the growing attention also to quality control in this area).

Unfortunately, the work of CS scientists attending to this topic has not been properly recognized so far and we are often told we are not doing proper computer science. During evaluations (also at our Faculty of Informatics) we are told our conferences can not be found in CS rankings, so they do not count. This is very frustrating. As mentioned above, MICCAI has received rank A in CORE2017, I would add that ISBI also received rank A in CORE ERA2010, so it shows that if these conferences are evaluated, they score high.

Thanks in advance for your attention to this matter.

Michal Kozubek Professor of Computer Science Head of Centre for Biomedical Image Analysis Former Dean of Faculty of Informatics Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

[midmelody]

I would like to add my strong support for the petition to have the MICCAI, IPMI, and ISBI conferences considered in the CS Rankings process. These conferences are significant resources for my computer science research, collaborators, students, and staff; and we present major components of our computer science research and applications at these conferences.

Ziyue Xu Staff Scientist National Institutes of Health

[cememreakbas]

Dear Professor Berger,

I am writing to give my strong support for the petition to have the MICCAI, IPMI, and ISBI conferences considered in the CS Rankings process. These conferences are significant resources for my computer science research, collaborators, students, and staff; and we present major components of our computer science research and applications at these conferences. They are instrumental in the advancement of the scholarly works of my computer science department.

Cem Emre Akbas Centre for Biomedical Image Analysis Faculty of Informatics Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

[dicamala]

I am writing to give my strong support for the petition to have the MICCAI, IPMI, and ISBI conferences considered in the CS Rankings process. These conferences are significant resources for my computer science research, collaborators, students, and staff; and we present major components of our computer science research and applications at these conferences. They are instrumental in the advancement of the scholarly works of my department.

Diana Mateus Professor at Ecole Centrale Nantes

[vcheplygina]

I am writing to give my strong support for the petition to have the MICCAI, IPMI, and ISBI conferences considered in the CS Rankings process. These conferences are significant resources for my computer science research, collaborators, students, and staff; and we present major components of our computer science research and applications at these conferences. They are instrumental in the advancement of the scholarly works of my department.

Veronika Cheplygina Assistant professor, Medical Image Analysis group Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands

[fjug]

I am writing to give my strong support for the petition to have the MICCAI, IPMI, and ISBI conferences considered in the CS Rankings process. We are easily appointing full professor positions in the CS department at TU Dresden based on solid publication records in the above mentioned journals. This said, it is unlikely to find such people that do not also publish in ICCV, ECCV, CVPR, etc. It would be sad if the criterion for being listed is not based on content and utility of a venue but rather on membership to an an ACM SIG or similar.

Florian Jug Research Group Leader Center for Systems Biology Dresden/ Max-Planck Institute CBG Dresden

[ghost]

Dear Professor Berger,

I am writing to give my strong support for the petition to have the MICCAI, IPMI, and ISBI conferences considered in the CS Rankings process. These conferences are significant resources for my computer science research, collaborators, students, and staff; and we present major components of our computer science research and applications at these conferences. They are instrumental in the advancement of the scholarly works of my department.

Jun Cheng

Research Lead & Senior Scientist Intelligent Medical Imaging Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR, Singapore