Colleagues Win Prestigious MIDL Best Poster Paper Award

Thijs P. Kuipers and his collaborators Praneeta R. Konduri, Erik J. Bekkers, and Henk Marquering have been awarded the Best Poster Paper Award at MIDL (Medical Imaging with Deep Learning) 2025 for their groundbreaking work on synthetic cerebral vessel generation.

Their paper, Self Supervised Synthetic Cerebral Vessel Tree Generation using Semantic Signed Distance Fields, introduces a novel method that generates highly realistic, topologically complex synthetic cerebral vessel trees without relying on separate post-processing steps. By combining a variational autoencoder with a latent diffusion model, their approach can be trained directly on surface geometry, a significant step forward for in-silico simulations and virtual patient modeling.

This breakthrough has important implications for stroke treatment research, as it enables more precise simulation of vascular occlusions and intervention strategies using anatomically realistic synthetic vessel trees.

Image: Thuijs Kuipers (on the left) receiving award. MIDL 2025 Awards. (Image source: https://2025.midl.io/awards)