The 4th ETSI Hackathon Is Happening: Hybrid Event On Nov 9-10th, 2025 at Chiba, Japan

On behalf of the ETSI leadership, we are very excited to announce the 4th ETSI hackathon (hybrid) event taking place on Nov 9th-10th 2025 at Chiba, Japan.

4th ETSI Hackathon

The 4th hackathon event of the Emission Tomography Standardization Initiative (ETSI) will be in hybrid format supporting both in-person (encouraged) and remote participation. The event is organized by the ETSI Consortium Leadership Team (Hackathon Chairs: Nicolas A. Karakatsanis and Kris Thielemans) with the valued support of the:

Location: This event will be held at the National Institutes for Quantum Science and Technology (QST) at Chiba, Japan, a city west of Tokyo. Local hotel recommendations in Chiba for the accommodation of in-person participants will be announced soon here. Chiba is about 45min from downtown Tokyo and 1.5 hours from Yokohama and can be easily accessed by public transportation.

All in-person hackathon participants will have the opportunity to have a free tour of the QST facilities on Monday (2nd day of the event). This will be part of the QST tour announced at the IEEE NSS/MIC/RTSD website.

We would like to specially thank the event’s local organizers from NIRS QST facility for their valuable assistance: Hideaki Tashima, Taiga Yamaya and Go Akamatsu

On-line pre-registration is free and is required for all participants (in-person and remote) to allow us to promptly prepare for this event. All important instructions to attend this hackathon in-person or remotely, including the online meeting links, will be sent directly only to the registered participants. We will make a separate announcement when registration is open.

The event is free to attend in-person or remotely. All activities including the breakfast/lunch/dinner and the facility tour are free for registered participants. Transportation and hotel accommodation are not included. However, eligibility for reimbursement of such expenses for certain participants based on our sponsors directives may be possible and we will soon make related announcements. 

The main scope of this hackathon event is to continue the development of meaningful and practical use cases for the PETSIRD standard since our last virtual ETSI hackathon on July 2025, utilizing all latest features and elements definitions added to the standard in the meantime.

Building upon the success and progress of the past ETSI hackathons, the focus in this particular event will be the complete validation of the latest PETSIRD standard through:

  • realistic end-to-end Monte Carlo simulations of synthetic PET data involving cylindrical and brain PET phantoms as well as
  • real experimental and clinical scans obtained with commercial human PET scanners.

More specifically, our main objectives for this hackathon are:

  • Update Monte Carlo GATE ROOT-to-PETSIRD data format converter and end-to-end validation using realistic simulation data with applied corrections 
  • Develop converters from industry proprietary list-mode data formats to the PETSIRD standard and validation on real experimental and clinical data
  • Update analytic simulation use-case to generate PETSIRD data 
  • Expand PETSIRD Input/Output Interfaces for open-source reconstruction packages (e.g. CASToR, PyTomography and STIR)
  • Update list-mode analysis and operations use-case (count statistics, splitting, merging, sub-sampling, gating, physiological signal extraction etc.) 

All important details regarding the exact time slots for each developers subgroup, and the agenda will be provided soon to the registered participants. For regular updates please subscribe to ETSInitiative.org or visit the official 4th ETSI Hackathon (hybrid) event webpage.

Hackathon Organizing Committee

Chairs: Nicolas A Karakatsanis and Kris Thielemans

General Organizing Committee: ETSI Leadership Consortium: R Glenn Wells, Adam L. Kesner, Kris Thielemans, Michael Hansen, Nicolas A. Karakatsanis

Local Organizing Committee: Hideaki Tashima, Taiga Yamaya, Go Akamatsu