3rd ETSI Hackathon, July 14-18th, 2025 (virtual)

Welcome to the official page of the 3rd ETSI Hackathon!

Organizers: The 3rd hackathon event of the Emission Tomography Standardization Initiative (ETSI) will be virtual-only. The event is organized by the ETSI Consortium Leadership Team with the support of the:

Location: This event will be virtual. Registration is a pre-requisite for participation in this hackathon. All important instructions to attend this hackathon virtually including the meeting links will be sent directly to the registered participants.

Time: July 14-18th 2025. Please note that the 1-week timeframe is a window for the entire event, and it is not expected that each participant will devote the full week to coding (though fabulous if they can!). There will be three defined times (US Eastern Time, GMT-5) to pull together all of the participants:

  • Monday morning: 120-min joint session for updates on PETSIRD, Q&A, final confirmation of subgroup assignments
  • Wednesday morning:  90-min joint session for group updates
  • Friday US morning: 90-min joint session for final results and conclusions

Exact time slots will be decided based on the registered participants time zones. More details will be posted on the website and distributed as they are finalized.

Registration: The event is free to attend in-person or remotely, however registration is required. Please register in the link below:

Registration

Overview

The 3rd hackathon event of the Emission Tomography Standardization Initiative (ETSI) will be virtual and held online during the week of July 14-18th 2025.

This 1-week time window has been chosen after conducting a survey among ETSI general members and the participants from past ETSI hackathons to facilitate participation of attendees available during the mid-year period with an interest in the standardization of emission tomography raw data. An active community of developers has already been created in the last two years (1st ETSI Hackathon Developers Team, 2nd ETSI Hackathon Developers Team) and we are very much looking forward to new members joining in this year’s hackathon developers team to work all together for the next generation of nuclear medical imaging raw data standards as part of ETSI’s mission!

Regarding the virtual attendance format, we expect that:

  • the remote participants will be organized in sub-groups before the hackathon based on their preferred development tasks.
  • each sub-group will then be assigned a leader and together decide on the best time windows to meet as a sub-group during the hackathon week based on their geographical/time-zone representation of their members.
  • each sub-group will produce at least one progress update within the hackathon week and their final progress report towards the end of that week at specific time slots accessible for all participants to allow fruitful interactions, validations and feedback exchange between the sub-groups and the organizers.

Sponsorship: We highly welcome previous and new sponsors to support this year’s virtual ETSI hackathon. Any interested sponsor is welcomed to directly contact for details Kris Thielemans and Nicolas Karakatsanis.

This page will be regularly updated with more details about the registration, the sponsorships and the program of the hackathon in the following weeks. If you would like further information about ETSI’s 2nd Hackathon, please consider subscribing to ETSInitiative.org for automated updates and/or directly contact Kris Thielemans or Nicolas Karakatsanis.

Objectives

The main scope of this virtual hackathon event is to continue the development of meaningful and practical use cases for the PETSIRD standard since our last ETSI hackathon in Tampa, utilizing all latest features and elements definitions added to the PETSIRD standard over the last 6 months.

The focus again will be on in-silico (i.e. simulated) demonstration of the utility of PETSIRD through an end-to-end simulation study of realistic cylindrical and brain PET phantom data, including but not limited to:

  • building of PET list-mode data convertors from simulation output formats (e.g. ROOT) to the PETSIRD format
  • production of synthetic PETSIRD listmode data from known source/activity distributions,
  • performing basic operations on PETSIRD data (e.g. random sub-sampling, gating, splitting and merging),
  • visualizing scanner geometry and analyzing the statistics of the information encoded in the PETSIRD data
  • performing independent quantitative PET image reconstructions with other open-source image reconstruction software libraries by exclusively using the encoded information embedded in the PETSIRD data alone.

We will soon announce a recommended release version of the PETSIRD standard for which we would like to encourage all of you to try to attain compatibility with your current developments BEFORE the virtual hackathon, if possible. This is very important as it will allow all of us to be on the same page and avoid unnecessary incompatibilities between our use-cases tools that could delay the progress during the actual hackathon week and the productive synergy between the subgroups.

It is important to note here that we are still planning to organize a hybrid (in-person and remote) ETSI hackathon event later this year in Japan right after the IEEE MIC meeting this November at Yokohama. More details about the date, location and scope of that event will be announced soon.

We are very excited to organize this virtual hackathon this July and look forward to your participation, enthusiasm, and creativity to build useful and practical use-cases software demonstrating the potential usability of the PETSIRD data standard.

phy such as SPECT and planar imaging raw data standards.

Potential Use-Cases

We intend to mainly update the use-cases developed in the previous ETSI hackathon, taking changes in the proposed standard into account, and exploiting new functionality. However, participants are very welcome to suggest other use-cases before or during the hackathon. Potential use-cases include: 

  • Update Monte Carlo GATE ROOT-to-PETSIRD data format convertor 
  • Update analytic simulation use-case to generate PETSIRD data 
  • Visualization of scanner geometry and example LORs 
  • Integrate PETSIRD format into open-source reconstruction packages (e.g. CASToR, PyTomography and STIR) taking updated geometry and normalization definitions into account
  • Update list-mode manipulation use-case (splitting, merging etc.) 
  • Gated image reconstruction 
  • Data-driven motion signal extraction  

Use-Cases GitHub Repository

In the ETSIhacker’s GitHub public repository we share a set of software tools developed during our ETSI hackathon events demonstrating a set of expanded practical use-cases for the data standard since the previous hackathon, including

  • update of convertors from simulated or real list-mode data into the latest standard format (e.g. from Monte-Carlo simulations or vendor scanners)
  • expansion of the list of basic list-mode data operations (e.g. subsampling, gating etc.),
  • upgrading of user-friendly interfaces linking the data standards with existing open-source image reconstruction software (e.g. CASToR, PyTomography, STIR etc.), and
  • visualization of the scanner geometry description embedded in the data standard

In this year’s virtual hackathon event we plan to expand the developments on those tools and update accordingly this repository

Hackathon Program

To be announced by the middle of June.

All (both on-site and on-line) attendees

We strongly advise to create a free GitHub account if you don’t have one yet. See Signing up for a new GitHub account – GitHub Docs.  You will need to have this to use GitHub Codespaces for cloud access. (Advanced users can of course install software on their own machine).

  • Note: if you’re a student or academic staff, you can apply for GitHub Education, which gives you some extra features, but this will not be required for this hackathon.

Discord platform was proven to be very useful last year for the efficient collaboration within and across the different subgroups during and after the 1st and 2nd hackathons. We will therefore use the same Discord server that was originally set-up for the past ETSI hackathons to prepare for, collaborate during and follow-up after this hackathon event. This will allow seamless continuation of the discussions between the developer sub-groups, as initiated from last year. Please join our Discord server, if you have not done so, and start discussing with your peers and subgroup leaders about potential use cases you would like to work on during this virtual hackathon.

PETSIRD Standard

We will soon announce the major release of ETSI’s PETSIRD standard for PET list-mode data that will be used as base reference in this virtual hackathon featuring:

  • major updates to the model: coincidence and triple events, scanner geometry, detection efficiencies and external signals. These are the result of discussions within the Data Elements (core members) sub-group of the ETSI Consortium.
  • auto-deployment to PyPI, i.e. pip install petsird.
  • updates to some support software, including yardl and conda

Data Repositories

Below you may find the published Zenodo repositories for the Monte Carlo (GATE) data built for the 2nd ETSI Hackathon use cases:

  • GATE simulation data (ROOT format) of a 3min PET scan of a modified NEMA IEC phantom filled with 18F radioactive water solution acquired with “ETSIPETscanner” model (520mm TFOV, 128mm AFOV): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13941538
  • GATE simulation data (ROOT format) of a 6min PET scan of a moving (1cm translation across all three Cartesian directions occurring at the start of the 3rd min of acquisition) voxelized brain Hoffman phantom with a 18F e+ source distribution acquired with “ETSIPETscanner2” model with a bit more extended AFOV to include the entire brain Hoffman phantom (520mm TFOV, 256mm AFOV)  https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13963697

One of the use-cases during the hackathon will be to develop a convertor from ROOT format to our newly updated PETSIRD format definition and the subsequent production of PETSIRD demo list-mode data reflecting the above simulation cases to allow testing of some of our developed use-cases.

Hybrid meeting invitations

All registered participants will receive specific Teams meeting invitations few days prior to the online event. In addition, these meeting will be recorded and shared via email to all registered participants.

  • We will make every effort to have the recordings of each day available several hours before the next day sessions begin in order to facilitate task synchronization among remote attendees from different time zones

We are very much looking forward to this virtual meeting, and hope you are too!