Women’s health and particularly the application of sophisticated imaging and analysis tools to the female pelvis is recently attracting fast growing interest.

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Taking endometriosis as an example, often referred to as the chameleon disease, research and improvements in care are clearly required: “Endometriosis is one of the most common gynecological diseases, but it can take up to 10 years to get a diagnosis.” Diana W. Bianchi, M.D., former NICHD Director. 

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The female reproductive organs display an extraordinary variability, both between individuals, within the same individual with different stages of the menstrual cycle and even more dramatically over the female patient’s life span.​​ The influence of hormones and the requirement to assess any imaging with respect to the phase to differentiate between normal and pathological findings further complicate diagnosis and decision making. 

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Furthermore, the pelvis is an area of extraordinary dynamic events, from the natural peristalsis to breathing motion, to the influence of surrounding tissues such as the bowel on the imaging process. Both diagnosis and therapies often include laparoscopic interventions, amplifying the challenges stated above and placing further emphasis on the need for individualized imaging and analysis techniques. Robotic surgeries are becoming more complex and new surgical developments lead to highly specialized tools and advanced methods for surgical planning. 

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This area therefore poses excellent challenges, both on the image acquisition side as well as on the analysis side, calling for expertise in advanced methods in these areas, such as perfectly represented in the MICCAI community.

Our MICCAI workshop proceedings are now available online and can be accessed at http://link.springer.com/openurl.asp?genre=issue&issn=0302-9743&volume=16149.

 

We would like to thank Springer for publishing our joint proceedings in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series and for helping to share the workshop’s outcomes with the wider research community.

At this point, we would like to extend our sincere thanks to all authors for their submissions and work in this field, as well as to all participants of the workshop at MICCAI for their thoughtful contributions and active engagement, particularly during the joint panel discussion with the WOMEN workshop, which greatly enriched and enlivened the exchange.