We are proud to announce that our PhD student Johanna P. Müller has received the MICCAI 2025 WiM Award for Best Paper in AI Democratization.
The award recognises outstanding research that advances the accessibility, inclusivity, and openness of artificial intelligence in medical imaging and intervention. Johanna was honoured for the paper “Diffusing the Blind Spot: Uterine MRI Synthesis with Diffusion Models” presented at MICCAI 2025. The selection committee commended the work for its strong contribution to reducing barriers to AI adoption and for proposing practical, impactful solutions that support underserved and underrepresented communities.
Her publication advances AI democratisation by addressing a critical bottleneck in women’s health imaging: the scarcity of accessible, high-quality uterine MRI data. Using diffusion-based methods to generate anatomically realistic synthetic images, the work provides a practical solution to data limitations while preserving patient privacy. By openly releasing reproducible workflows and datasets (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18297879) associated with the paper, she enables broader participation in AI research and supports institutions with limited resources. This combination of methodological rigour and real-world applicability demonstrates how her research directly promotes more equitable and inclusive use of AI in medical imaging.
As one of the top three award recipients, Johanna will receive an official WiM Award certificate, $500 and has been invited to present the work at an upcoming WiM webinar, providing an opportunity to share these ideas with the wider international community.
We gratefully acknowledge our collaborators from the Smart Imaging Lab at University Hospital Erlangen, especially Anika Knupfer and Prof. Jana Hutter, for their invaluable contributions to this project.
This recognition highlights both the scientific quality of the research and its broader vision of making AI technologies more inclusive and accessible. We warmly congratulate Johanna on this well-deserved achievement.
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