Medical Image Understanding and Analysis: 22nd Conference, MIUA 2018, Southampton, UK, July 9-11, 2018, Proceedings

This volume comprises the proceedings of the BMVA-sponsored conference Medical Image Understanding and Analysis (MIUA) 2018. It was both an honor and a pleasure to hold Medical MIUA 2018 in Southampton. This was the 22nd in this series of conferences, and that is a long list indeed. Medical imaging modalities have come a long way in the past 22 years as have the ways to understand and to analyze them. Back in 1997 when MIUA started we were just enjoying Windows 95, which was a considerable advance on its predecessor (Windows 3.1). The memory space to store images was a couple of gigabytes and that would struggle with a modern 3D stack. Fastforward to 2018 and we have terabytes of storage and tons of processing power: the advances of the next decades could be awesome too. MIUA 2018 was organized by the University of Southampton in collaboration with Aberystwyth University and supported by the British Machine Vision Association, BMVA. The conference proceedings are published in Springer’s Communications in Computer and Information Science series, and later in association with the Journal of Imaging. We were also pleased to welcome our gold sponsors Mathworks and MedIAN, our silver sponsors OCF and the Journal of Imaging. We look forward to their ongoing support of the conference. We were delighted to have Alison Noble, Anant Madabhushi, and Tom Wilkinson as invited speakers at the conference. With Alison, it was certainly an honor to have the first chair of MIUA 1997 as an invited speaker. She is the Technikos Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the Oxford University Department of Engineering Science
and a Fellow of St. Hilda’s College, Oxford. Anant is the F. Alex Nason Professor II of Biomedical Engineering at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and director of the university’s Centre for Computational Imaging and Personalized Diagnostics. Tom is Professor of Respiratory Medicine at the University of Southampton, Faculty of Medicine, and Honorary Consultant at University Hospitals Southampton. New to the MIUA series, the program was enriched by two Special Sessions: one on liver analysis and the other on ocular imaging. With grateful thanks to our review committee, we had a program of 38 papers, made up of 27 oral papers, seven posters, and four clinical abstracts. This proceedings contains the papers which had oral and poster presentation. We are pleased to note that there are 15 countries represented among the authors, and there are many top institutions in the list. This spread is also repeated in the reviewers; we had over 80 reviewers from 12 different countries who provided at least three reviews per paper, and many had five. We could not have done this alone. The Program Committee were excellent (their reviews were prompt and high level) and they are listed later. We are grateful to the two Special Sessions organizers Michael Brady and Benjamin Irving for the liver session and Yalin Zheng for the ophthalmic imaging session. The MIUA Committee were very helpful too and we are grateful to them. In Southampton we are very grateful to Cui Zheng and to Vicki Bennett and to our research student volunteers for keeping the conference together. Time to move on now: next year MIUA 2019 will be at the University of Liverpool.