MICCAI 2026 Challenge

Benchmarking Medical MLLM Reasoning under Domain Shift

A benchmark challenge evaluating whether specialized medical reasoning remains reliable when evidence quality drops and clinical data shift.

Key Dates Registration deadline Jul 15, 2026 Pre-evaluation submission Jul 15, 2026 Final submission Jul 22, 2026 Contact medreason26@googlegroups.com

Updated timeline and pre-evaluation leaderboard

The registration deadline and pre-evaluation submission deadline are both set to July 15, 2026. The final submission deadline is currently set to July 22, 2026.

The pre-evaluation leaderboard is now available on Synapse and will be dynamically updated until July 15, 2026. New teams may still submit for pre-evaluation before July 15, but each team has only one organizer-side pre-evaluation opportunity.

View Pre-evaluation Leaderboard on Synapse

Why MedReason?

MedReason evaluates whether medical MLLM systems can perform clinically grounded visual question answering when image quality and acquisition conditions shift.

The challenge builds on Med-CMR and focuses on one medical VQA task, while extending evaluation to more difficult out-of-distribution settings such as low-dose X-ray and 7T brain MRI.

The central question is not only whether a model can answer correctly, but whether its reasoning remains reliable, visually grounded, and robust under domain shift.

At-a-glance challenge task

Participants build one medical multimodal system for two question formats: multiple-choice and open-ended questions grounded in medical imaging evidence.

What the system receives

One medical image, one question, and optional context depending on the case.

What the system must return

For multiple-choice questions, the system returns one option. For open-ended questions, the system returns both a reasoning_trace and a final answer.

How performance is evaluated

Official ranking is based on MCQ Accuracy, Open-ended GT, and Open-ended VA, with organizer-side evaluation on hidden public and private evaluation datasets that contribute equally to the final ranking.

Challenge timeline

The challenge follows a simple progression: registration and data releasepre-evaluationfinal submission and workshop.

1

Launch and registration

Website and registration open on Apr 22, 2026.

2

Train release

Public materials and train split are released on Apr 22, 2026.

3

Validation release

Participant-facing validation resources open on May 15, 2026.

4

Pre-evaluation submission

Pre-evaluation submissions are accepted until Jul 15, 2026. New teams may submit before this date, with one organizer-side pre-evaluation opportunity per team.

5

Final submission

The final Docker submission deadline is currently set to Jul 22, 2026.

6

Workshop and final results

The MICCAI workshop and final leaderboard release take place in October 2026.