| Challenge | Dates | Submission | Organizers | Venue |
Introduction
Ulcerative colitis (UC) is a chronic intestinal inflammatory disease often developed in the colon and rectum. Colorectal cancer caused by UC causes about 1.8 million deaths each year, accounting for more than 12% of global mortality. As one of the early manifestations of cancer, UC should be diagnosed, monitored, and treated early. Colonoscopy is a gold standard clinical procedure widely used for early screening of UC. Scoring of UC can be extended to several different scoring protocols, of which the Mayo Endoscopic Score (MES) is considered one of the most widely used assessments to measure UC activity. MES will be characterized and graded according to vascular pattern, mucosal topology, structural rectal bleeding, etc. However, the grading and interpretation of UC in colonoscopy highly depends on the clinician's experience level. Although experts can assign follow-up scores, differences in colonoscopy assessments can still affect patient diagnosis. Therefore, deep learning (DL) based automated UC grading methods could help reduce the operator subjectivity observed in complex UC scoring and improve diagnostic quality. Even though some DL methods have been devised, these methods 1) have below 80% classification accuracy and 2) must be rigorously assessed on multi-centre data. One major bottleneck of the technical development in this area is the lack of high-quality multi-centre datasets, which we aim to accomplish with this challenge. Furthermore, assessing the rigour and limitations of current and new methods will be the goal of this challenge.
Challenge
- Task I: Multi-class Mayo Scoring classification accuracy (0-3) of the encoder architecture
- Task II: Image captioning similarity compared to ground truth expert annotations on various severity present in the images for the decoder architecture.
- Task III: Generalisation of task 1 and task 2 on unseen centre ulcerative colitis patient data.
Key Dates
- November 20th, 2025: Registration Opens, Each team needs to register on Synapes challenge before receiving the data
- December 1st, 2025: Dataset Release (Set I)
- December 15th 2025:: First Validation on Leaderboard
- December 20th, 2025: Dataset Release (Set II)
- January 15th 2025:: Final Test results on Leaderboard
- Leaderboard has been out for the final test - Congratulations to all participants!!!
- February 26th, 2026: Paper Submission Deadline (4 pages paper in IEEE ISBI format, EDAS, Challenge Track)
Submit your challenge paper on the EDAS platform. The review period remains open for two weeks, while method evaluations continue in parallel during this time (i.e. challenge is still running). - March 1st, 2026: Reviews Released on EDAS Authors receive reviews and have one week to address comments and make minor updates to the manuscript/method description.
- March 15th, 2026: — Camera-ready Deadline
Upload the final paper on EDAS. Ensure your method artifacts (e.g., code/models) are prepared for possible verification. Organizers finalize the ranking. - March 20th, 2026: — Presentation Format Notification
Authors are informed whether their presentation is oral or poster. - April 8–11th, 2026: — Winners Announced Final results and award announcements during ISBI 2026.
Final dates follow the official ISBI 2026 schedule. Please refer to the ISBI Challenge page for any updates.
Submission
All submissions will be completed through the official submission portal available on Synapse
- Create a Synapse account. An email address is all you need
- Please read the Challange information
- Please sign the Challenge Agreement and and send it to endocv email before joining the challange
- Register by joining our challenge team on Synapse
- Noha Ghatwary Arab Academy for Science and technology (AASTMT), Egypt.
- Jiangbei Yuey Universty of Leeds, UK.
- Gilberto Ochoa-Ruiz Tec de Monterrey, Mexico
- Sharib Ali Universty of Leeds, UK.
- Hanna Nagdy, Internal Medicine,College of Medicine, Arab Academy for Science and technology (AASTMT)
- Venkataraman Subramanian, Leeds Teaching Hospital Trust, Leeds, UK
- Ahmed Galal, Internal medicine, Alexandria University, Egypt
- Thomas de Lange, Department of Molecular and Clinical Medicine, Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
- Hayam Fathy, Internal medicine, Division Hepatogastroenterology, Assiut university, Egypt
- Hussein El-Amin, Internal medicine, Division Hepatogastroenterology, Assiut university, Egypt
Organizing Committee
Clinical Team:
Venue
ISBI 2026 will be held at the ExCeL London Capital Suite