PBDA 2026: 1st Pediatric Brain Data Analysis Workshop

Introduction

Understanding the developing pediatric brain is critical for advancing pediatric healthcare and neuroscience. Early life is a period of rapid brain development and vulnerability, during which structural and functional brain alterations are closely linked to long-term cognitive and motor outcomes. Yet, studying the pediatric brain remains highly challenging due to dynamic morphology, limited data availability, and the lack of specialized analysis tools. Despite progress in neuroimaging, many methods are optimized for adult brains and do not generalize well to pediatric populations. Furthermore, integration of multimodal data—including imaging, electronic health records, radiology reports, genetics, and social determinants—has been limited. This workshop will provide a dedicated forum for advancing pediatric brain data analysis. Over the past three years, we have organized the international BONBID-HIE challenges on International Conference on Medical Image Computing and computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) 2023 and 2024, which focused on neonatal brain injury hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE, affecting 1–5 per 1,000 newborns) and attracted more than 4,000 dataset downloads and over 300 participants from over 20 countries worldwide. Building on this foundation, we hope this workshop will broaden the scope to encompass infant and pediatric brain imaging more generally, addressing diverse conditions, multimodal data integration, and clinically relevant algorithms. In doing so, we aim to unite clinicians, engineers, and scientists to develop machine learning models with strong clinical relevance, promoting reproducibility, explainability, and clinical adoption.

Important Dates

1st Pediatric Brain Data Analysis Workshop

Invited Speakers

Organizers

Senior Organizers

Contact

Rina Bao, rina.bao@childrens.harvard.edu

Acknowledgments

Thanks to visualdialog.org for the webpage format.