Ethical and Philosophical Issues in Medical Imaging

Medical image computing and computer-assisted interventions (MICCAI) have transformed medicine by introducing new ways to use imaging to address pressing clinical problems. As new techniques have been developed in computer science and in medical physics, the MICCAI community has also evolved, embracing new technologies, new applications, and even new medical domains. Unsurprisingly, this means that the MICCAI conference has been largely focused on proposing cutting-edge research methodologies for solving medical-data driven problems rather than on the human aspect of those problems and those solutions:

MICCAI often asks "how?" but rarely "why?"

The humanistic concerns underlying medical imaging technologies are critical to translating MICCAI research into the clinic and into society as a whole. Asking fundamentally human questions about medical technology can also lead us to identify challenges and new scientific domains that ensure that what we are researching can truly have the positive impact on society that all researchers hope for.

Why EPIMI?

Traditionally, MICCAI workshops/tutorials and research papers have focused on proposing cutting-edge research methodologies for solving medical-data driven problems. However, such pioneering works come with a pool of overlooked challenges and issues that need to be carefully addressed if we were to take MICCAI to the exciting and mostly needed step of translational medicine as a community. Developing new technologies for the healthcare sector, particularly in medical imaging, is paired with fundamental questions and big unsolved challenges that need to be spotlit for our MICCAI community. These include ensuring fairness in AI and medical technology, circumventing gender/race/socioeconomic biases embedded in medical data, understanding the role of human clinicians in increasingly computerized healthcare, defining the relationship between medical knowledge derived from AI and human experts, the lack of robust evaluation frameworks, policy ambiguity, and the pressing need for comprehensive regulations to guide the responsible development and deployment of these technologies. Such fundamental questions remain scattered across different MICCAI papers, meetings, and keynote talks over the past several years; they have yet to find a singular forum where they can be defined, debated, and discussed in a detailed and principled manner by all members of the MICCAI community. 

This will be an interdisciplinary event, combining elements of empirical and clinical research with rigorous philosophical analysis, and attracting participants not only from the MICCAI community but beyond. Such a vision has motivated us to propose a primer workshop on the “Ethical & Philosophical Issues in Medical Imaging (EPIMI)”, which will promote the positive change we need within our MICCAI community at a global level. The workshop will also explore the critical role of policies and regulations in shaping the responsible development and deployment of medical imaging technologies. 

Research topics:

EPIMI topics of interest include traditional bioethical concerns related to medical imaging and medical artificial intelligence such as:

• Biases in medical data technologies relating to gender, race, socioeconomic status, or other critical aspects of the human experience;

• Fairness, affordability, and reproducibility of healthcare technologies including AI;

• Environmental and ecological impact of medical technology and research;

as well as those in the philosophy of medicine, such as:

• Public perception of medicine and the changing role of the clinician in increasingly computerized practice;

• Epistemology and justification in medical image processing and machine learning;

• Semiotics, visualisation, interpretability, and human-computer interaction in MICCAI;

• Data privacy, ownership, and model/data dissemination in the age of machine learning;

and broader questions in the humanities surrounding medical imaging:

• Health economics and public health policy;

• Intellectual property, law, and regulation;

• Pedagogy and medical imaging education; and

• The history and future of medical data technologies.

Important Dates:

• May 2026 - Advice on writing EPIMI position papers

• July 1, 2026 - Paper submission deadline for position papers and empirical papers

• July 21, 2026 - Double-blind paper reviews sent to authors

• July 29, 2026 - Author rebuttals due

• July 31, 2026 - Paper decision notifications sent to authors

• October 2026 - The 4th EPIMI workshop begins!