4th ETSI Hackathon, Nov 9-10, 2025 (hybrid)

Welcome to the official page of the 4th ETSI Hackathon!

Organizers: 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:

Collaborative Computational Project in Synergistic Reconstruction for Biomedical Imaging (CCP SynerBI)CCP SyneRBI and
Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (SNMMI) including the Physics Instrumentation and Data Sciences Council (PIDSC).

Location: This event will be held at the National Institutes for Quantum Science and Technology (QST) at Chiba, Japan, a city west of Tokyo. Chiba is about 45min from downtown Tokyo and 1.5 hours from Yokohama and can be easily accessed by public transportation.

The Hackathon seminar room is located in the Institute for Quantum Life Science building (Level 1F), inside the QST Chiba campus.

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

Time: Nov 9-10th, 2025. Please note that this is a 2-day full-time event scheduled for the Sunday and Monday after the IEEE NSS/MIC/RTSD meeting in Yokohama, Japan, to allow in-person participation for MIC attendees. A basic 2-day time schedule follows:

Sunday morning: 120-min session for latest updates on PETSIRD, past Hackathon use-cases progress, Q&A, and final confirmation of subgroup assignments
Sunday noon: on-site lunch
Sunday afternoon: 90-min break-out parallel sessions for each subgroup to develop PETSIRD use-cases
Sunday evening: Welcome dinner off-site at a resturant in Chiba
Monday morning: 30-min session with progress updates from 1st day followed by parallel subgroup sessions to continue use-cases development
Monday Noon: lunch on-site
Monday early afternoon: Tour of the QST facilities
Monday afternoon: finalization of use-cases developments for each subgroup and wrap-up of outcomes
Monday evening: Farewell dinner off-site at a restaurant in Chiba

Exact time slots will be decided as we move closer to the event date. Details will be posted here and distributed to the registered participants as they are finalized.

Registration: The event is free to attend in-person or remotely, however registration is required. All activities including the breakfast/lunch/dinner and the facility tour are free for registered participants. Transportation and Hotel Accommodation are not included. However reimbursement may be possible for UK-based participants. The in-person registration deadline is October 10th, 2025 (later extended to October 15th, no further extension possible). Please follow the link below to register by then.

Registration

Important Note: Registration is a pre-requisite for participation in this hackathon. All important instructions to attend this hackathon in-person or remotely including the online meeting links will be sent directly to the registered participants.

Hackathon Program

Start: sUNDAY November 9TH @09:00

End: monday november 10TH @17:00

Sunday Morning: 08:15-12:30

Meet & Greet light Breakfast (08:15)
ETSI’s mission and the PETSIRD raw data format (08:30) – Nicolas Karakatsanis
Yardl overview & updates (08:50) – John Stairs/Joseph Naegele
Updates on PETSIRD definitions (09:15) – Kris Thielemans
Existing Use Cases (10:00) – Nicolas Karakatsanis
Short Break (10:30)
Organization into Developer Subgroups (10:45) – Nicolas Karakatsanis

Sunday Lunch (12:30-13:30)

Group lunch (on-site) (12:30)

Sunday Afternoon (13:30-17:00)

Developer Subgroups formation (13:30)
Software set-up (hands-on) (13:45)
Work in subgroups (14:00)
Short Break (15:30)
Work in subgroups (15:45)
Progress report after first day (17:00)

Sunday Evening (17:30-20:00)

Hackathon Group dinner (on-site, 17:30)

Monday Morning (09:00-12:30)

Light breakfast (07:50)
Recap of previous day activities (08:00)
Work in subgroups (08:15)
Short Break (10:45)
Work in Subgroups (11:00)
Subgroups Progress Report (11:45)

Monday Lunch (12:00-13:00)

Group lunch (on-site, 12:00)

Monday Afternoon (13:00-17:30)

Work in subgroups (13:30)
QST Tour (14:00-16:00)
Work in subgroups (16:00)
Final progress report (16:45)
Next steps and conclusion of the hackathon (17:15)
End of event & farewell (17:30)

Monday Evening (18:00-20:00)

Group dinner (off-site, 18:00)

Overview

The 4th hackathon event of the Emission Tomography Standardization Initiative (ETSI) will be hybrid and take place in Chiba, Tokyo, on November 9-10th, 2025.

The time slot has been selected based on past ETSI hybrid Hackathons to facilitate in-person participation of IEEE NSS/MIC/RTSD Conference attendees from around the world with an interest in the standardization of emission tomography raw data. The hybrid format allows the remote participation of attendees online or offline depending on the time zone difference between their location and Japan.

An active and continuously updated community of developers has been created in the last two years’ Hackathon events. We are very much looking forward to new members joining this event to work all together for the next generation of nuclear medical imaging raw data standards as part of ETSI’s mission for in-depth harnessing of PET information and more complete standardization at the raw data level!

Regarding the hybrid attendance format, we expect that:

all (in-person and remote) participants will be organized in sub-groups with an appointed leader before the Hackathon based on their preferred development tasks
coordination within and across subgroups will be mainly conducted via the ETSI Hackathon’s Discord channel
in-person participants are expected to participate in all live sessions (9am-5pm) for both days
remote participants are encouraged to attend the initial and wrap-up sessions live, if possible, and provide online or offline progress reports at the end of each day

Sponsorship: We highly welcome previous and new sponsors to support this hybrid ETSI Hackathon event. Any interested sponsor is welcomed to directly contact for details Kris Thielemans and Nicolas Karakatsanis.

This the official Hackathon event webpage and 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 4th Hackathon, please consider subscribing to ETSInitiative.org for automated updates and/or directly contact Kris Thielemans or Nicolas Karakatsanis.

Objectives

The main scope of the 4th ETSI Hackathon event is to continue the development of meaningful and practical use cases for the PETSIRD standard since our recent virtual 3rd ETSI Hackathon earlier this summer, utilizing all latest features and elements definitions added to the PETSIRD standard over the last 6 months.

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 Hackathon. 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.

We are very excited to organize this hybrid Hackathon this November 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.

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 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.)

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

During the 4th ETSI hackathon event we plan to expand the developments on those tools and update accordingly this repository

Hackathon Program

To be announced as we move closer to the event.

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 all past 3 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 hybrid Hackathon event.

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 Hackathon featuring:

further updates to the PETSIRD model since the 3rd Hackathon (July 2025)
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 PETSIRD use cases tools validation:

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 involve the development of a standalone convertor from ROOT format directly to the latest 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 (in-person and remote) registered participants will receive specific online meeting invitations few days prior to the event. In addition, these meetings 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 in-person and remote attendees from different time zones

We are very much looking forward to another exciting and successful ETSI hackathon, and hope you are too!

List of Suggested Hotels in Chiba

Important Note: There are no hotels near Inage Station, which is the closest station to QST. Chiba Station is only a 4-minute train ride from Inage Station.

Organizing Committee

Chairs: Nicolas A Karakatsanis and Kris Thielemams

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