Introducing the MICCAI Educational Initiative on Medium

Since 2014, the Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) has held a challenge encouraging members to submit their educational materials to benefit the wider community. You can read more about the rules of this year’s challenge here or take a look at previous submissions.

Last year, the scope of the challenge was expanded to include blog posts and text tutorials. This turned out to be a popular option with both the judges and MICCAI community at large, with most of the finalists and the popular vote winner making use of a blog-like format. New in 2019, we are building on this option by introducing the option to publish tutorials through an official MICCAI Educational Initiative publication here on Medium. The aim of this publication is to give all participants a simple option for preparing well-organized blog-style educational materials and to promote all content (regardless of format) generated for this year’s educational challenge.

Why does this exist and why would I use it?

There are lots of good reasons to consider submitting as a Medium post through the MICCAI Educational Initiative publication:

• Simple and clean: The blog post format was extremely popular with the MICCAI community in last year’s challenge, but not everyone has web development skills or knows where to start on creating this type of content. Producing pretty how-to’s on Medium is quick to learn and no more labor intensive than writing your tutorial up in a word document. It’s also mobile friendly, which might be helpful for attendees perusing submissions on their phone during the conference.
• Visibility: While all of the submissions are posted on the Educational Challenge website, we wanted to make things easier to find outside the context of the challenge alone and improve the reach of submissions by increasing google-ability. Medium posts have become a popular format for programming tutorials (see examples below) and will hopefully reach a larger audience than tutorials posted on personal sites or hosted on the MEC website.
• Acknowledgment/Professional Exposure: Posts will be posted through the publication, but linked to the submitter’s account (including photo and bio). Participants will benefit from the credibility and reach of an official MICCAI-affiliated publication, while still prominently promoting the author(s) by displaying their profile and other work.

Here are a couple of nice examples to give you a sense of the possibilities:

An Introduction to Biomedical Image Analysis with TensorFlow and DLTK

Cellular Nucleus Image Segmentation Project

How do I make pretty tutorials like those??

Start a new post by selecting “New Story” under your profile icon. Formatting and adding and arranging images is quick and easy to pick up (no HTML experience necessary). Inline code can be added by beginning a line with ``` (triple backtick).

if 1 < 2: 
    print(‘Hello, world!’)
else: 
    print(‘something has gone terribly wrong.’)

Alternatively, code can be inserted directly from Github using Github Gist (we recommend sharing your code on github regardless!).

How do I submit my post through the MICCAI Educational Initiative publication?

Submitting your work to this publication as a Medium post is super easy:

1. Make a Medium account and start your post by selecting “New story.”
2. Send an email with your Medium username to miccai-student-board@csail.mit.edu with the subject line “MEC Medium Submission.” We will add you as a writer to the MICCAI Educational Initiative publication.
3. Once added as a writer and your post is ready to submit, click the “Submit to Publication” button at the top of the page (see below).

And that’s it! We will review internally and publish your post in the lead-up to the 2019 challenge.

Do I have to submit here?

Absolutely not! Blog submissions in other formats are accepted, and the challenge is additionally also open to educational videos, slides, and documents. This is simply an option that we hope will allow more people to submit their work in a blog format if they wish to and improve the challenge’s overall visibility. We encourage submitting previously developed educational materials for the benefit of the MICCAI community, so no need to recreate things here!

If you choose to submit your work in another format, we will still feature your work in its own Medium post consisting of your submission title, your name(s), a brief summary, and a link to your materials.

More questions? Reach out to us at miccai-student-board@csail.mit.edu