Phases and Rules 📑¶

The PANTHER challenge takes place in two phases:

• Open Development Phase: Anyone can participate in this phase of the challenge.Interested teams must join the PANTHER challenge here. Teams can download the Public Training Dataset and start developing and training AI models using their private or public compute resources (e.g. Google Colaboratory, Kaggle). Teams may use aditional publicly available data.

• Closed Testing Phase: Each registered team may submit a single AI algorithm (presumably their top-performing model) for evaluation on the hidden testing cohort. The Development Phase remains open, allowing teams to run final trials and verify that their algorithm works as expected.

Rules🚨📜:

• All participants must form teams (even if the team is composed of a single participant), and each participant can only be a member of a single team.

• Any individual participating with multiple or duplicate Grand Challenge profiles will be disqualified.

• Anonymous participation is not allowed. To qualify for ranking on the validation/testing leaderboards, true names and affiliations [university, institute, or company (if any), country] must be displayed accurately on verified Grand Challenge profiles for all participants.

• Members of sponsoring or organizing centers (Radboud University Medical Center, Odense University Hospital) may participate in the challenge but are not eligible for prizes or the final ranking in the testing phase.

• This challenge only supports the submission of fully automated methods in Docker containers. It is not possible to submit semi-automated or interactive methods.

• All Docker containers submitted to the challenge will be run offline (i.e., they will not have access to the internet and cannot download/upload any resources). All necessary resources (e.g., pre-trained weights) must be uploaded to GC or encapsulated in the submitted containers apriori.

• Participants competing for prizes can use pre-trained AI models based on computer vision and/or medical imaging datasets (e.g. ImageNet, Medical Segmentation Decathlon). They can also use external datasets to train their AI algorithms. However, such data and/or models must be published under a permissive license (within 3 months of the Open Development Phase deadline) to give all other participants a fair chance at competing on equal footing. They must also clearly state the use of external data in their submission, using the algorithm name [e.g., "Segmentation Model (trained w/x data)"], algorithm page, and/or a supporting publication/URL.

• Researchers and companies interested in benchmarking their institutional AI models or products but not competing for prizes can freely use private or unpublished external datasets to train their AI algorithms. They must clearly state the use of external data in their submission, using the algorithm name [e.g., "Segmentation Model (trained w/ private data)"], algorithm page, and/or a supporting publication/URL. They are not obligated to publish their AI models and/or datasets before or anytime after the submission.

• Every team must complete the technical report form provided by the organizers to participate in the Testing Phase. Within the form, teams can either provide a link to a 2–3-page technical report on arXiv or directly fill in the form with the detailed information about the model and methodology.

• Organizers of the PANTHER challenge reserve the right to disqualify any participant or participating team at any time on grounds of unfair or dishonest practices.

• All participants reserve the right to drop out of the PANTHER challenge and forego any further participation. However, they will not be able to retract their prior submissions or any published results till that point in time.

• All teams are strongly encouraged to share their code, although it is not mandatory. However, top-performing teams must publicly release their code, enabling future use of their algorithms, within 14 days of the winners announcement.