TIA Centre: News

30^th UK Conference on Medical Image Understanding and Analysis, Dublin (20^th – 22^nd July 2026)

I was lucky enough to get accepted for an oral presentation at this year’s Conference on Medical Image Understanding and Analysis which was the 30^th Anniversary Conference and the first time it was held outside of the UK. The only problem being for a die-hard football fan that the day of travel was the world cup final, and we had to gamble on whether England would be there. Instead of being sensible and catching a later flight, we chose the 6am start to ensure we made it! In the end this didn’t prove to be a problem as England didn’t make it to the final! The lack of sleep was regrettable, but it did give opportunity to spend the day looking round Dublin with fellow presenter and Assistant Professor, Dr Adam Shephard from the TIA. We enjoyed walking around the city and even had chance to sample a local delicacy called Guinness! We then enjoyed the final as a “neutral” (viva España) and, despite the extra time, managed to have a good night sleep and be ready for the conference the next day.

Monday saw the opening of the conference and what was an interesting first keynote, which reflected on the metrics we use and whether they are meaningful, along with an example of a patient with a surgery object in situ for 20 years before being discovered.

During the coffee break I then realised I didn’t know how to lock my bedroom door and found that another TIA colleague had inadvertently entered my room! I was very pleased that I passed their unintentional inspection, having left the room immaculately tidy.

As my presentation came later in the session, I was able to focus on other presentations in that session with one presenter discussing how the mitochondria were organised within cells which was an interesting computational problem. Before I knew it, it was my chance to present my recent paper co-authored with Piotr Keller “DCAFA: Differential Community Abundance and Feature Analysis for Histological Images” which analyses communities of image objects instead of relying on raw features.

I thoroughly enjoyed the presentation despite feeling somewhat underprepared as I was making edits up to 2 days before in the quest for perfection. With a few practices beforehand I knew it would be fine and managed to present within the time allotted. The presentation was followed by an interesting question on cluster selection which I felt I responded to in a reasonable fashion and was followed by a great discussion following/during the session.

It was then time to enjoy the conference in earnest, not least because the drinks reception followed almost immediately at a great venue on top of the O’Brien Centre which had great views of the mountains. With the adrenaline pumping from my presentation and multiple coffees, I took a chance to have an evening walk around the UCD campus. The campus was really impressive, but I still prefer the University of Warwick, although I will concede having the Leinster rugby team on site is something the University of Warwick can’t match.

Tuesday saw another day of interesting talks, as a PhD student you understandably focus on your area, but the conference provided a great opportunity to see what other disciplines are doing, what their unique problems are, and how they solve them. One thing which stood out was being able to predict fractures from ultrasound to avoid the use of radiation from x-rays which really appealed to my enthusiasm for solving practical problems.

Outside of my presentation I was also given a formal job, before the gala dinner, to make a not-so-secret website live. This was the website for the MIUA 2027 conference that the University of Warwick will be hosting and will be managed by colleagues from the TIA Centre. I have thoroughly enjoyed working on the initial development of the MIUA 2027 website and look forward to working with the team from the TIA Centre to develop this further.

The Gala dinner was at Johnnie Fox's, the highest pub in Ireland, which provided a night full of great entertainment - traditional Irish music and dancing. On the bus to the venue, someone asked about next year and seemed to already know where it was being held. It was then formally announced that MIUA27 will be hosted by the University of Warwick and will be organised by co-chairs Dr Shan Raza and Dr Adam Shephard, with help from Karen Thomas, Lucy Fox, colleagues from the wider Department of Computer Science and myself bringing expertise to build the website.

The final day saw more presentations including the TIAs Dr Adam Shephard, as well as the job of handing out MIUA27 leaflets at the coffee break prior to departing mid-afternoon to catch our flight on board a prop plane to Birmingham. With only a couple of weeks until my Viva, it was a great opportunity to have a change of routine and scenery before the last stretch of my PhD.

Contributions from the TIA Centre

Adam Shephard on behalf of Aldanah Al Saif [Oral Presentation]: Adding Interpretability to Breast Cancer Survival Prediction from Histopathology using Slide‑Level Foundation Models

George Wright [Oral Presentation]: DCAFA: Differential Community Abundance and Feature Analysis for Histological Images"

By George Wright