Published on 28.09.2026
Helmholtz Imaging Newsletter Issue No. 29
Dear Imaging Enthusiast,
There is more time to help shape the Helmholtz Imaging Conference 2026: the call for scientific talks and posters has been extended to September 30. We’re looking forward to your contributions and seeing you in Leipzig on November 10-12.
And our Open Office Hour is back! Starting October 13, you can once again drop by regularly with your imaging questions and challenges and talk directly to our experts online – no registration needed.
Beyond these highlights, this issue brings you upcoming training and events, new faces on our Steering Board and team, a new tool spotlight, updates to our solutions portfolio, and plenty of opportunities from across the imaging and data science community.
Here’s what’s inside this issue:
- Helmholtz Imaging Conference 2026: Submit your talk or poster by September 30 and discover what to expect in Leipzig.
- Introduction to Image Registration: Save the date for our virtual course on November 4; registration opens October 7.
- Open Office Hour: Bring us your imaging questions and challenges – our virtual drop-in format returns on October 13.
- Webinar – How to Design a Challenge: Join experienced challenge organizers for talks and a community-driven panel discussion.
- Data Science Unlocked: Meet us at our virtual Helmholtz Platforms Roadshow on November 24.
- Helmholtz Imaging on the Road: Catch up on our recent roadshow at DLR in Cologne.
- Tool Spotlight – GloViTa: Discover a reusable framework for image classification and regression across imaging domains.
- Double Recognition for Lena Maier-Hein: Celebrate her 2026 EMBS Technical Achievement Award and a Nature Biomedical Engineering cover feature on xeno-learning.
- Team Updates: Welcome our new Steering Board members and new colleagues.
- Explore Our Solutions: Discover our newly restructured solutions portfolio, including cloud-based resources.
- Without Research, Something Is Missing: Explore our contributions to the Alliance of German Science Organisations’ summer campaign.
- Meet Us: Say hello to us in Strasbourg, Kiel, Leipzig, and Bruges.
- Partner Platform Updates: A new lecture from HIDA and a save-the-date for HMC’s next conference.
- Funding, External Events & Opportunities: Explore current calls, external events, and job postings.
As always, we welcome your contributions. Share your imaging-related news and events with us at support@helmholtz-imaging.de. Let’s keep building our vibrant imaging community together.
Happy reading!
Your Helmholtz Imaging team
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A personal note from us:
Do you have an imaging challenge, no matter how big or small? Professional imaging support for Helmholtz researchers, offered by Helmholtz Imaging at no cost. Contact us via our support hub.
Also, if you haven’t yet, join our network of experts, modalities, instruments, and facilities! CONNECT with us.
Interested in receiving our newsletter directly in your mailbox? Subscribe here.
Visit our Helmholtz Model Zoo, the new platform for Helmholtz employees for AI-powered research: easy access, user-friendly, strong data protection, and a growing set of validated models from different domains. Join the community!
Explore your image dataset before diving into analysis with PixelPatrol! The tool for quality control and quick results.
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Helmholtz Imaging Conference 2026: Call for Abstracts Extended to September 30
Good news: the deadline for scientific talk and poster submissions for the Helmholtz Imaging Conference 2026 on November 10-12 has been extended to September 30, 2026.
Take the opportunity to help shape the program and share your research, methods, tools, or applications with the imaging community.
Submit your contribution hereHighlights include:
- Keynote speakers include Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb (University of Cambridge) and Miguel Mahecha (Leipzig University)
- New formats such as the Daily Brew, Networking Carousel, Poster Pitches, and presentations of scientific visualizations
- Many opportunities to connect and exchange with familiar and new colleagues
- Hands-on workshops prior to the conference
We look forward to welcoming you in Leipzig.
Submit your abstract by September 30
Introduction to Image Registration
Learn the fundamentals of image registration in this 90-minute online course on November 4, 2026, focusing on applications in microscopy, material science, and earth science.
Instructor Ella Bahry from the Helmholtz Imaging Engineering and Support Unit at MDC will introduce classical and deep learning-based approaches for aligning multiple datasets into a common coordinate system, enabling accurate comparison and analysis.
Registration opens October 7, 2026 at 12 PM CEST (first come, first served).
More information & registration
This course is free of charge and open to individuals affiliated with Helmholtz or a HIDA Partner. It is part of the data science course portfolio offered by the platforms of the Helmholtz Information and Data Science Framework.
Our Open Office Hour Is Back
Got an imaging-related question, a tricky dataset, or a challenge you are not quite sure how to tackle? Our Helmholtz Imaging Open Office Hour is back, giving you an easy way to talk directly to our imaging experts. No challenge or task is too big or too small.
Starting October 13, join us every second Tuesday of the month at 1 PM CET for an informal virtual exchange with our experts from the Helmholtz Imaging Support Hub. Talk to us about your data, methods, workflows, or other imaging challenges, and discuss questions around AI in imaging, the Helmholtz Model Zoo, data acquisition, image processing and analysis, visualization, and other imaging-related topics. Together, we can explore possible approaches, solutions, and opportunities for further support or collaboration.
No appointment or registration is needed – just drop by our Zoom room!
Join us hereYou are also welcome to send us some information about your challenge in advance at support@helmholtz-imaging.de. And if you cannot make it to the Open Office Hour, you can always get in touch with us directly.
We look forward to hearing about your imaging challenges.
Webinar: How to Design a Challenge
What makes an image analysis challenge successful? Join our joint webinar with the MICCAI SIG for Challenges on October 15, 2026, and hear from experienced challenge organizers Noel Codella, Ian Stavness, and Alessa Hering as they share lessons learned from designing and running challenges with different goals and settings.
The talks will be followed by a panel discussion shaped by questions from the community.
Register for the online webinar and submit your questions in advance
Data Science Unlocked: Helmholtz Platforms Roadshow 2026
Do you work with data, code, images, or metadata? If so, make sure you attend the virtual roadshow hosted by the five Helmholtz Information and Data Science platforms – designed to connect you with the right resources to elevate your research.
Save the date: November 24, 2026
Whether you are just starting your career or leading your own lab, each platform offers free specialized resources to meet your needs.
What’s in store:
- Fast-track introductions: Hear a short, dynamic overview of each platform’s focus and strengths.
- Interactive breakouts: Talk directly with platform representatives and explore the tools, resources, and expertise that can boost your research.
Take this chance to explore Helmholtz’ data science ecosystem!
We look forward to seeing you there.
More information & registration
The Helmholtz Information and Data Science Platforms consist of Helmholtz AI, HIDA, HIFIS, Helmholtz Imaging and HMC, operating across the entire Helmholtz Association to advance artificial intelligence, imaging, metadata, research software and training.
Helmholtz Imaging on the Road: Visiting DLR
On September 1, Helmholtz Imaging visited DLR in Cologne to introduce our free support for imaging-related research challenges for Helmholtz employees. Kris and Sebastian from the Engineering and Support Unit at DKFZ shared examples from our support portfolio, followed by an open exchange with DLR researchers about their imaging questions and potential collaborations.
Read the full recap and learn more about our support opportunities
Tools & Resources, from the Community, for the Community
In this section, we highlight open and practical tools, resources, and solutions developed across the imaging community. Here is this issue’s selection:
Tool spotlight: GloViTa
Got a pile of images, scans, or video clips and a question like “which category is this?” or “how severe is this?”, but no interest in building a training pipeline from scratch? That’s the gap GloViTa is meant to fill.
GloViTa is a reusable framework for training deep learning models on classification and regression tasks — and it doesn’t care what field the images come from. Microscopy, satellite imagery, medical scans, wildlife camera traps, industrial inspection photos, pathology slides: as long as the task is “look at this and predict something about it,” the same framework applies.
It supports 2D images, 3D volumes, video, and bag-of-patches setups like whole-slide pathology images. Instead of writing a new script for every project, you set a few basic options — where your data lives, how many classes you’re predicting, which pretrained model to start from — and run one command. It takes care of loading the data, training, and validating, and it automatically saves the exact settings used for each run, so results stay traceable later on.
A solid starting point if imaging AI keeps showing up in your work, regardless of domain, and you’d rather not reinvent the training loop each time.
Developed within the Applied Computer Vision Lab, the Helmholtz Imaging Engineering and Support Unit at DKFZ. Apache-2.0 licensed.
Image: Sebastian Ziegler, Helmholtz Imaging, DKFZ
Have a tool, dataset, software package, or other resource you’d like to share? Submit your solution via CONNECT and help grow the collection of open and easy-to-use imaging resources. We look forward to featuring more community-driven tools in upcoming issues!
Double Recognition for Lena Maier-Hein
Two reasons to celebrate: Helmholtz Imaging Center Coordinator Lena Maier-Hein has received the 2026 EMBS Technical Achievement Award for her pioneering contributions to the validation and clinical translation of AI in biomedical imaging and surgery. At the same time, research by Lena and colleagues on xeno-learning, an approach for transferring knowledge from preclinical animal data to human medical imaging, is featured on the cover of the August issue of Nature Biomedical Engineering.
Read more about the achievements of Lena and her team
Welcome: Steering Board & Team Updates
Three new members join our Steering Board
We are delighted to welcome Ralf Mikut, Katharina Nöh, and Jian Peng to the Helmholtz Imaging Steering Board. With their expertise spanning imaging and data analysis, computational modelling, and environmental remote sensing, they bring valuable perspectives from different Helmholtz research fields to the strategic development of our platform.
Ralf Mikut is Head of the Research Area Automated Image and Data Analysis at KIT and joins the Steering Board as representative of the Research Field Energy.
Katharina Nöh is Head of Modeling of Biochemical Networks and Cells and Vice Head of Modeling and Simulation at Forschungszentrum Jülich. In her role as Steering Board member she represents the Research Field Information.
Jian Peng is Head of the Department of Remote Sensing at UFZ and Professor for Hydrology and Remote Sensing at Leipzig University. He joins the Steering Board as representative of the Research Field Environment.
Both Ralf and Katharina have been connected to Helmholtz Imaging for years now and have contributed as PIs to several Helmholtz Imaging projects. Jian is contributing to the development of Helmholtz Imaging activities around scientific data curation and management.
Please join us in warmly welcoming Ralf, Katharina, and Jian to the Steering Board!
Welcome to the team, Karan and Nick
We are happy to welcome Karan Mahajan, who joined our Helmholtz Imaging Support Hub as a Scientist in Visual Analytics for Earth System and Geospatial Data. Originally from India, Karan completed his M.Sc. in Environmental Engineering at the Technical University of Munich and has a background in water resources management, with a focus on (eco-)hydrological and flood modelling. His research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning and process-based modelling, particularly for improving the parametrization of land-surface processes. He also works with large-scale geospatial datasets and looks forward to further exploring these types of data in his new role.
“I really like the flexibility Helmholtz Imaging offers in choosing projects, as this facilitates flow of independent ideas that can come to fruition using the provided resources and network. Looking forward to meeting colleagues in the coming months and to exciting collaborations across the community.“
We are delighted to also have Nick Lechtenboerger on board as a PhD student at Helmholtz Imaging Research Unit at MDC. He recently completed his Master’s degree in Data Engineering at Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI), where he first started working on self-supervised learning (SSL) foundation models with Dagmar Kainmüller as part of a student project. Now, two years later, he is continuing this work in his PhD, focusing on advancing self-supervised learning for messy, real-world datasets. His research addresses open questions that arise when methods developed primarily on natural images and well-curated datasets are applied to more complex scientific data.
“Current SSL algorithms make so many assumptions about the underlying data that pre-training on scientific data, such as plankton or microscopy images, becomes extremely difficult. However, I am confident that we can find more general algorithms that will enable domain scientists to make use of their large unlabelled datasets.“
A warm welcome to Karan and Nick! We look forward to working with you.
Explore Our Solutions – Now in One Place
We have restructured our website to make it easier to discover the resources Helmholtz Imaging provides. Our new solutions page brings together Helmholtz Imaging Solutions, software maintained by us, new cloud-based solutions, and resources available through Helmholtz Cloud – all in one place.
Take a look and explore what is available for your research.
And as always: if you are facing an imaging challenge – big or small – we are here to help, at no cost for Helmholtz employees. You can also reach out to us if you would like support with registering your solutions or expertise on Helmholtz Imaging CONNECT.
Campaign: Without research something is missing
This summer, the Alliance of German Science Organisations is highlighting why free and independent research matters with its campaign “Ohne Forschung fehlt was / Without research something is missing“.
Helmholtz Imaging is contributing with stories from our community: Samira Kabri from our Research Unit at DESY shows how mathematics and machine learning can help reconstruct reliable images from measurement data, while our Helmholtz Imaging projects AutoCoast and JIMM demonstrate how imaging research can help us better understand coastal change and the human brain.
Discover our contributions on LinkedIn
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Interested in a Helmholtz Imaging Project of your own? Our next call is planned for spring 2027. A great place to meet potential project partners is the Helmholtz Imaging Conference 2026, taking place on November 10–12 in Leipzig. Call for contributions is open until September 30.
Meet Helmholtz Imaging
Say hello to Helmholtz Imaging team members at the following events:
- Meet Annika, Kris, Sebastian, Karol and Carlos at MICCAI2026 on September 27-October 1 in Strasbourg (France).
- Say hello to David at the Data Science Symposium 2026 on October 8-9 in Kiel. We’re looking forward to meeting you at the joint booth with our partner platforms Helmholtz AI, HIDA, HIFIS and HMC.
- Meet the entire team for our Helmholtz Imaging Week 2026 from November 9-12, 2026 in Leipzig. At the heart of Helmholtz Imaging Week 2026 is the Helmholtz Imaging Conference on November 10-12. Call for contributions is open until September 30.
- Say hi to Lisa and Ole at 7th World Conference on Marine Biodiversity on November 17-20 in Bruges.
News from our Partner Platform HIDA
HIDA Lecture: Controlled AI-Assisted Coding
How can you use AI coding tools without losing control? Join us on October 28 at 11 am for a lecture by Diaoulé Diallo (DLR), who will present a practical framework for integrating LLMs into coding workflows while ensuring reliability and security.
Image: HIDA
Save the Date: HMC Conference 2027
Save the date for the HMC Conference 2027, taking place March 10–12 at KIT in Karlsruhe. Under the theme “From Metadata to Meaning,” we will explore how metadata creates context, enables interoperability, and turns research data into knowledge that can be understood and reused by people and machines. The Call for Abstracts will open in early October.
Save the date & stay tuned
Image: HMC
Funding Opportunities
Apply AI: Piloting AI-based image screening in medical centres. Deadline: October 1, 2026
Volkswagen Foundation: Join the live webinar on October 7, 2026 at 2 PM to learn more about the foundation’s funding portfolio.
Helmholtz ELLIS PhD Program in AI: Bringing together the strengths of Helmholtz and ELLIS to support doctoral researchers working at the intersection of cutting-edge AI methods and scientific applications. The next ELLIS PhD call opens in October 2026. Helmholtz PIs can participate as main or co-supervisors (ELLIS Members required).
Carl Zeiss Award for Young Researchers: Are you an early-career researcher working in optics, photonics, precision mechanics, electronics, or a related field? Consider applying for this award, which recognizes outstanding research achievements. Deadline: October 16
Wellcome Photography Prize: Submit your most compelling photography and scientific imagery that bring to life the ways health and science influence our lives. Deadline: October 21, 2026
CIFAR Global Scholars Program: Opportunity for early-career researchers from across the natural, biomedical, and social sciences, as well as the humanities to develop and lead high-risk, high-reward interdisciplinary research. Application deadline: November 4.
External events
- Leibniz Meets AI: October 5, 2026, Hannover; event will be held in German
- 2026 vEM Technology Forum: October 11-15, 2026, Beijing, China; registration now open
- EMBL Imaging Centre Symposium 2026: October 13-14, 2026, Heidelberg
- DeepMI FastSurfer / FreeSurfer: October 14-16, 2026, DZNE, Bonn; introductory course on state-of-the-art deep-learning methods for fast and reliable neuroimage analysis
- AI in Science Summit: October 15, 2026, Dublin, Ireland; register your interest here
- 10th BigBrain Workshop: October 21-22, 2026, Montréal, Canada
- Conference: Impact of Big Data & AI analytics on healthcare: November 19-20, 2026 in Luxembourg
- Bayesian Methods for Biomedical Data Science: November 30-December 4, 2026, online course
- Image analysis for Correlative Light and Electron Microscopy (CLEM): November 30-December 4, 2026, London, UK (£550)
Do you know of any imaging-related events that could be of interest to our imaging community? We’d love to hear from you. Share the details with us at support@helmholtz-imaging.de.
New publication
Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation Facilitates Model Understanding by Xiaoyan Yu et al. (accepted ECCV 2026)
Discover all publications by Helmholtz Imaging
Job openings
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PhD Candidate (f/m/x) in Data Science for Biomedical Imaging
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