NEWS!

  • 18.09.2025: 📚 Great news! The GRAIL 2025 and RIME 2025 proceedings will be published soon by Springer. The digital publication "Reconstruction and Imaging Motion Estimation, and Graphs in Biomedical Image Analysis" will be available online before the conference starts on September 27th. Conference participants will receive free access for 4-6 weeks via the workshop website link!
  • 05.09.2025: Preliminary program is now available! Check the detailed schedule with keynote speakers and oral presentations in the Program section.
  • 14.07.2025: Reminder: The submission deadline is 16 July 2025. Please check the Important Dates.
  • 18.06.2025: TGI and Hypergraph will run under GRAIL this year. We’re excited to welcome both tracks!
  • 18.06.2025: Submissions are now open! Submit your paper via the CMT portal.
  • 04.03.2025: Excellent News - our proposal for GRAIL 2025 was accepted as an in-person workshop at MICCAI 2025. Stay tuned for further announcements!

SCOPE

GRAIL 2025 is the seventh international Workshop on GRaphs in biomedicAl Image anaLysis, organised as an in-person satellite event of MICCAI 2025 in Daejeon, Korea. This year, GRAIL returns as a dynamic full-day workshop, also featuring three specialized tracks: (1) Graphs in Biomedical Image Analysis, (2) Topology- and Imaging-Informed Graph Informatics (TGI), and (3) Hypergraph Computation for Medical Image Analysis. These focused sessions will spotlight the latest advancements in graph-based AI for medical imaging, bringing together leading researchers and innovators for a day of cutting-edge insights and collaboration.

Graphs provide a flexible and scalable mathematical framework to model complex, unstructured data in an interpretable manner. They serve as a foundation for advanced computational models, enabling key techniques such as spectral analysis, dimensionality reduction, and network analysis. Since 2017, geometric deep learning has revolutionized the field by integrating graph signal processing with deep neural architectures, driving innovation in various medical domains. Today, GNNs are widely applied in medical imaging, shape analysis, brain connectomics, population models, patient multi-omics, and drug discovery. Their impact has grown significantly, with increasing visibility at leading machine learning and computer vision conferences such as CVPR, ICLR, and NeurIPS, where they have emerged as a dominant research area in recent years. GRAIL aims to bridge the gap between theory and application, creating a space where scientists developing graph-based models can collaborate with researchers tackling complex clinical challenges across diverse biomedical datasets. GRAIL 2023 featured keynote talks from leading experts and showcased groundbreaking research in brain connectomics, whole-slide image analytics, biomedical knowledge graphs, explainable AI for GNNs, and multi-omics patient representations. GRAIL 2024 continued this momentum with contributions spanning multimodal fusion in GNNs, topological deep learning for drug discovery, disease classification in ophthalmology and Parkinson's disease, and histopathological graph-based analysis. For GRAIL 2025, we aim to expand the workshop's reach and impact by introducing several new initiatives. Our GRAIL Journal Club, launched in 2024, will continue with regular sessions throughout the year, fostering ongoing discussions beyond the MICCAI event. We are also extending our "Getting Started with GNNs" initiative, providing curated resources—including tutorials, code repositories (e.g., PyG/DGL), multimodal datasets, and highlighted papers—to support newcomers and experts alike. Additionally, we are launching a Spotlight Track for MICCAI main conference papers, allowing authors to present short abstracts and single-slide spotlights to enhance visibility and cross-pollination between conference and workshop attendees. To ensure broader accessibility, we will video-record all sessions and improve AV quality for publishing on a dedicated GRAIL YouTube channel. This year, we further broaden our scope to include Topological Deep Learning (TDL), Knowledge Graphs (KGs), Foundation Models (FMs), and the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) with graphs/GNNs/KGs, particularly in areas such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for biomedical applications. Through these efforts, GRAIL 2025 aims to remain at the forefront of graph-based research in biomedical image analysis, providing a dynamic and inclusive platform for advancing this rapidly evolving field.

For GRAIL 2025, we welcome submissions on a wide range of cutting-edge topics, including but not limited to:

  • Graph analytics and machine/deep learning on graphs
  • Signal processing on graphs for biomedical image and data analysis, including non-learning-based approaches
  • Signal processing on PolyConnect graph structures (hypergraphs, multiview, and multiplex graphs)
  • Topological deep learning (TDL)
  • Probabilistic graphical models for biomedical data analysis
  • Big data analysis with graphs
  • Improving graph analytics/learning on small data sets in medicine
  • Semantic graph research in medicine: Scene graphs and knowledge graphs (KGs)
  • Modeling and applications of graph symmetry and equivariance
  • Graph generative models (diffusion, adversarial, etc.)
  • Graph foundational models (FMs) and integration of graphs with non-graph FMs
  • Graph datasets and benchmarks
  • Combination of graphs with other state-of-the-art (SOTA) domains (e.g., self-supervised learning, federated learning)
  • Statistical testing on graph structures (e.g., graph metrics, group-level comparisons)
  • Explainable AI (XAI) methods in geometric deep learning
  • Unifying graphs, GNNs, and Knowledge Graphs (KGs) with Large Language Models (LLMs)
  • Applications of graphs and KGs in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems
  • Inductive biases of graph-based models and controversial discussions of graph approaches

Applications covered include but are not limited to:

  • Image segmentation, registration, classification
  • Graph representations in pathology imaging and whole-slide image analysis
  • Graph-based approaches for intra-operative surgical support
  • Graph-based shape modeling and dimensionality reduction
  • Graphs for large-scale patient population analyses
  • Combining multimodal/multi-omics data through graph structures
  • Graph analysis of brain networks and connectomics

REGISTRATION

As GRAIL 2025 will be an in-person workshop, registration will happen via the main conference website.

Workshop Agenda
Joint Workshop GRAIL/TGI/HGMIA
Workshop Date: 27/09/2025 - Full day workshop 8:00-18:00

Session 1 Title: Track 1: GRAIL Session Chairs: Dr. Seyed Ahmad Ahmadi

Time Paper Title / Description Speaker / Details
08:00-08:15 Opening
08:15-09:00 Keynote 1: Multi-resolution Learning on Graphs for Connectomic Features in Neuroimaging Prof. Won Hwa Kim (Postech)
09:00-09:15 Oral: Skip priors and add graph-based anatomical information, for point-based Couinaud segmentation Xiaotong Zhang
09:15-09:30 Oral: Prompt-Driven Multi-View Representation Learning for Clinical Progression Prediction of Significant Memory Concern Cui Wang
09:30-09:45 Oral: Improving Late-Life Depression Analysis with Collaborative Domain Adaptation: Learning from Heterogeneous Structural MRI Yuzhen Gao
09:45-10:00 Oral: Decoder-Free Supervoxel GNN for Accurate Brain-Tumor Localization in Multi-Modal MRI Andrea Protani
10:00-10:30 Coffee Break
10:30-11:15 Keynote 2: Graph Neural Networks in Medicine - Prospects, Pitfalls, and Privacy Dr. Tamara Muller
11:15-11:45 Oral: Graph Conditioned Diffusion for Controllable Histopathology Image Generation Sarah Cechnicka
11:45-12:30 Oral: X-Node: Self-Explanation is All We Need Prajit Sengupta
12:30-13:30 Lunch

Session 2 Title: Track 2: TGI Session Chairs: Prof. Johannes C. Paetzold

Time Paper Title / Description Speaker / Details
13:30-14:15 Keynote 3 Dr. Jong Chul Ye (KAIST)
14:15-14:30 Oral: Spectral Graph Autoregressive Modeling for Conditional Brain Network Augmentation Hayoung Ahn
14:30-14:45 Oral: HFR: Hemodynamic Feature Regression for Physically Constrained Pressure Drop Estimation Jakub Chojnacki
14:45-15:00 Oral: WANCDR: Wasserstein Adversarial Network for Cancer Drug Response Mansu Kim
15:00-15:15 Oral: Population-graph post-hoc corrections of survival predictions for improved risk stratification Oriane Thiery
15:15-15:30 Open Q&A/discussion
15:30-16:00 Coffee Break

Session 3 Title: Track 3: Hypergraph Session Chairs: Dr. Seyed Ahmad Ahmadi

Time Paper Title / Description Speaker / Details
16:00-16:45 Keynote 4 / Tutorial Prof. Mustafa Hajij (Hybrid)
16:45-17:15 Invited orals from the main conferences
17:15-17:45 Posters presentation
17:45-18:00 Closing (GRAIL, TGI, Hypergraph)

Keynote Speakers

Prof. Won Hwa Kim
Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH)

Talk title: Multi-resolution Learning on Graphs for Connectomic Features in Neuroimaging

Abstract: Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's Disease (AD) are recognized as disconnection syndrome, as they damage to the white matter connectome connecting different brain regions of interest (ROIs) and disrupt information flow. To characterize such pathology, the brain is represented as a graph, i.e., brain network, whose nodes correspond to the anatomical ROIs and edges are derived from connectivity between the ROIs. In this talk, I will cover a variety of graph machine learning (ML) methods --- from statistical methods to deep learning --- under the concept of multi-resolution representation in traditional signal processing. These methods are designed to learn scale-specific parameters for multi-resolution representation of graphs rather than exhaustive parameterization with complicated architectures. This principled approach leads to more efficient, interpretable, and robust models, particularly well-suited for the small-sample regimes commonly found in medical imaging studies.

Bio: Won Hwa Kim is an Associate Professor in Graduate School of Artificial Intelligence (GSAI) / Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) / Medical Science and Engineering (MED) at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH). Prior to joining POSTECH, he was a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington (2018 – 2023, last 2 years on leave-of-absence), and he was a Researcher in Data Science Team at NEC Labs., America (2017-2018). He obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Sciences from University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2017, an M.S. in Robotics from KAIST (2010) and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Sungkyunkwan University (2008). He developed Hybrid Vehicles at Hyundai Motors Company in 2010-2011 before he dived into Artificial Intelligence. He is a recipient of prestigious grants such as NSF CISE CRII (2020) in the US, NRF Mid-Career Researcher Program (2021) and Basic Research Lab (2025) in South Korea.

Dr. Tamara Muller
Korro AI

Talk title: Graph Neural Networks in Medicine - Prospects, Pitfalls, and Privacy

Abstract: TBD

Bio: Tamara Müller is a researcher in Artificial Intelligence for Medicine and Healthcare, with a Ph.D. from the Technical University of Munich (2024), where she worked in the lab of Professor Daniel Rueckert. Her doctoral research explored how graph neural networks (GNNs) can be applied to medical applications — from modeling population graphs that capture relationships across large patient cohorts, to analyzing anatomical mesh data and designing clinically relevant predictive models. She also contributed to advancing privacy-preserving techniques, namely differential privacy, for GNNs, ensuring that sensitive medical data can be protected while enabling graph learning. Tamara is currently applying her expertise as a senior research scientist at Korro AI, where she works on developing next-generation AI technologies for occupational therapy for children.

Dr. Jong Chul Ye
Graduate School of Artificial Intelligence (AI), KAIST

Talk title: Geometric View of the Diffusion Models for Image Reconstruction

Abstract: The recent emergence of diffusion models has driven substantial progress in image and video processing, establishing them as powerful generative priors. However, it is still not well understood why diffusion models outperform GANs or how they relate to traditional signal processing approaches. In this talk, we present a geometric perspective on diffusion models to uncover these connections. First, we highlight a close relationship between diffusion models and classical quantum mechanics, revealing intriguing discrete orbit geometries. We then show that diffusion models naturally constitute a scale-space representation of the data distribution, in contrast to the classical scale-space representation of the samples themselves. This geometric understanding makes conditional sampling for image reconstruction not only more intuitive but also more firmly grounded in theory.

Bio: Jong Chul Ye is a Professor at the Kim Jaechul Graduate School of Artificial Intelligence (AI) of Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Korea. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from Seoul National University, Korea, and his PhD from Purdue University. Before joining KAIST, he worked at Philips Research and GE Global Research in New York. He has served as an associate editor of IEEE Trans. on Image Processing, IEEE Computational Imaging, IEEE Trans. on Medical Imaging and a Senior Editor of IEEE Signal Processing and an editorial board member for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. He is an IEEE Fellow, was the Chair of IEEE SPS Computational Imaging TC, and IEEE EMBS Distinguished Lecturer. He is the Fellow of the Korean Academy of Science and Technology, and National Academy of Medicine in Korea, and was the President of the Korean Society for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine. He received various awards including Merck Fellow Award, and Choi Suk-Jung Award- one of the most prestigious awards for mathematicians in Korea. His research interest is in generative AI for biomedical imaging and computer vision.

Prof. Mustafa Hajij
University of San Francisco

Talk title: TBD

Dr. Hajij is an Assistant Professor specializing in AI and Data Science at the University of San Francisco's Master of Science in Data Science Program. With over 9 years of research and industrial experience, he has delved into graph neural networks, topological data analysis, intelligent transportation, and topological deep learning. His expertise extends to industrial AI applications, with a focus on topological deep learning, geometric data processing, time-varying data, and predictive modeling. He co-founded AltumX, a startup utilizing deep learning for intelligent road network systems, and actively participates in AI-related workshops and conferences. He published more than 70 publications in journal and conference papers, as well as patents. Dr. Hajij served as the main organizer for MICCAI TDA workshops in 2021 and 2022. He made contributions to the tech industry, spearheading the development of innovative software solutions for both KLA Corporation and AltumX Inc.

Submit a paper

We’re excited to pilot three dedicated submission tracks at GRAIL this year—designed to foster deeper engagement and highlight diverse research themes. In the author's console, three tracks are available for submission. Authors can now select the track of their choice. Submissions should be done for all tracks through the GRAIL 2025 CMT portal.

This year we will accept papers in the following format:

  • Complete papers: Papers describing original research with MICCAI length (max 8 pages text + max 2 pages references, supplemental material allowed). Papers are eligible for the "Best Paper Award" and will be published in the GRAIL Open Proceedings and Lecture Notes in Computer Sciences (LNCS) series. Submissions should be anonymous, and formatted following the LNCS Style. Style. All complete papers will be peer-reviewed by 3 members of the program committee, with a double-blinded review process. The selection of the papers will be based on the significance of results, technical merit, relevance, and clarity of presentation.

The Microsoft CMT service was used for managing the peer-reviewing process for the GRAIL 2025 workshop. This service was provided for free by Microsoft and they bore all expenses, including costs for Azure cloud services as well as for software development and support.

Important dates

16 May 2025 Submission opening
16 July 2025 Submission deadline, 23:59 pm, PST
4 August 2025 Notification of acceptance, 23:59 pm, PST
11 August 2025 Camera-ready deadline, 23:59 pm, PST
27 September 2025 Workshop date (Full-day event)

GRAIL Journal Club

Welcome to the GRAIL Workshop Journal Club! Our mission is to create a vibrant and engaging community where we read and discuss the latest cutting-edge papers, bringing the Graph Deep Learning (GDL) community closer together. Join us monthly to foster collaborations, brainstorm innovative ideas, and connect with fellow GDL researchers. Whether you're looking to stay updated on the newest advancements or seeking a platform to share your insights or discuss your research and gain feedback, the GRAIL Workshop Journal Club is the perfect place for you. Let's advance the frontiers of GDL together! If you cannot access the form and want to be part of the journal club, please send an email to akazi1@mgh.harvard.edu and niharika.dsouza@ibm.com

Registration: Register here

Next Meeting: Kindly sign up to receive the most up-to-date information.

Meeting platform: Via Zoom

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Organising Committee

General Chairs: Co-Chairs:

Proceedings and Past Events