SPIE Medical Imaging 2026 in Vancouver

Our group participated in SPIE Medical Imaging 2026, held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, from February 15 to 19, 2026.

SPIE Medical Imaging is one of the major international conferences in the field of medical imaging, bringing together researchers working on image processing, computer-aided diagnosis, image-guided procedures, biomedical imaging, artificial intelligence, and related areas.

Our group contributed a total of 12 presentations to this year’s conference, covering a wide range of research topics in medical image analysis and computer-assisted intervention.

Presenting Our Research on Automated Thrombosis Report Generation

At the conference, I presented our recent research:

Generation of Comparative Thrombosis Reports from Confocal Laser-Scanning Microscope Images Using Large Language Models

Our work investigates the automatic generation of comparative thrombosis reports from confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM) images.

The study combines image analysis with large language models to transform quantitative and visual information obtained from microscopy images into structured descriptions of thrombus formation.

This work is part of our continuing research on the analysis of blood vessels and thrombi in microscopy images, extending our previous work on segmentation, measurement, visualization, and three-dimensional reconstruction toward automated interpretation and report generation.

Presenting our research on automated comparative thrombosis report generation at SPIE Medical Imaging 2026.

Supporting a Colleague’s Poster Presentation

At the request of Prof. Kensaku Mori, I also presented the poster work of our group member Dr. Guannan Yao, since Prof. Mori is busy and Yao can not come on-site:

Bi-Branch Sequential Picking Strategy for Efficiently Processing Long Sequences in Surgical Phase Recognition

The work focuses on efficiently processing long temporal sequences for surgical phase recognition, an important task in surgical video analysis.

Presenting a colleague’s work was also a valuable experience for me. It required me to understand the methodology and experimental results from the perspective of another research topic and to communicate the key ideas clearly to conference participants.

Presenting Dr. Guannan Yao's poster on efficient long-sequence processing for surgical phase recognition.

Learning from the Latest Research in Medical Imaging

An important part of attending SPIE Medical Imaging is the opportunity to learn about research beyond one’s own immediate topic.

During the conference, I attended a number of oral and poster sessions and learned about recent developments in areas related to:

medical image analysis;
artificial intelligence and deep learning;
image-guided interventions;
surgical navigation and robotics;
multimodal and vision-language models;
biomedical image processing;
segmentation, reconstruction, and quantitative analysis.

These presentations provided useful perspectives on current research trends and also gave me new ideas for our own ongoing projects.

Exploring recent research presented at SPIE Medical Imaging 2026.

Meeting Researchers from Japan and Abroad

The conference was also an excellent opportunity for academic exchange.

I had the pleasure of meeting and talking with researchers and students from different universities and countries, discussing both research and future opportunities for collaboration.

Among them, I was very pleased to meet Dr. Kaixu Chen (陳凱旭) from the University of Tsukuba, as well as many other researchers and colleagues working in medical imaging and related fields.

These face-to-face conversations are one of the aspects of international conferences that I value most. They provide opportunities not only to exchange technical ideas, but also to better understand how different research groups approach similar problems.

Congratulations to Dr. Xuguang Zhu

A particularly exciting moment for our group was the recognition of Dr. Xuguang Zhu, whose research received the Cum Laude Poster Award at SPIE Medical Imaging 2026.

His award-winning work was:

RS-SAM: A Surgical Instrument Segmentation Method Based on a Gated Feature Refinement Module

Congratulations to Dr. Zhu on this excellent achievement!

It was wonderful to see the quality of our group’s research recognized at an international conference.

A Memorable Conference Experience

SPIE Medical Imaging 2026 was a productive and memorable experience for me.

In addition to presenting my own research, I had the opportunity to support a colleague’s presentation, learn about many recent developments in medical imaging, and meet researchers from both Japan and abroad.

With 12 contributions from our group and the Cum Laude Poster Award received by Dr. Xuguang Zhu, the conference was also a very successful event for our team.

I look forward to applying the ideas and perspectives gained from these discussions to our future research.