5th ETSI Hackathon, Nov 15-16, 2026 (hybrid)

Welcome to the official page of the 5th ETSI Hackathon!

Organizers: The 5th 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 Hotel Saray in Granada, Spain, which is located in front of the Granada Conference centre, a 5-minute walk from the city center and 12 miles from Granada Airport.

Time: Nov 15-16th, 2026. 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 Granada, Spain, to allow in-person participation for MIC attendees. A tentative 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 restaurant in Granada.
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 afternoon: finalization of use-cases developments for each subgroup and wrap-up of outcomes

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 lunches and the dinner are free for registered participants. Transportation and Hotel Accommodation are not included. The registration form will open soon. We will make an announcement of the registration process and deadline when registration for this event opens.

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 (tentative)

Start: Sunday November 15th 2026 @09:00

End: Monday November 16th 2026 @17:00

Sunday Morning: 08:15-12:30

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)

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)
Final progress report (16:45)
Next steps and conclusion of the hackathon (17:15)
End of event (17:30)

Overview

The 5th hackathon event of the Emission Tomography Standardization Initiative (ETSI) will be hybrid and take place at Hotel Saray (next to the Convention Center) in Granada, Spain, on November 15-16th, 2025, right after the 2026 IEEE MIC meeting.

The time slot has been selected based on past ETSI hybrid Hackathons to facilitate in-person participation of the 2026 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 Spain.

An active and continuously updated community of developers has been created in the last three 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 Nicolas Karakatsanis and Kris Thielemans.

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 5th Hackathon, please consider subscribing to ETSInitiative.org for automated updates and/or directly contact Nicolas Karakatsanis or Kris Thielemans.

Objectives

The main scope of the 5th ETSI Hackathon event is to continue the development of meaningful and practical use cases for the PETSIRD standard since our recent 4th ETSI Hackathon hybrid event last year, utilizing all latest features and elements definitions added to the PETSIRD standard over the last year.

Potential Use-Cases

We intend to mainly update the ETSI’s GitHub use-cases repository developed in previous ETSI hackathons, 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:

Develop converters from industry proprietary list-mode data formats to the PETSIRD standard and validation with real experimental phantom and clinical data
Expand PETSIRD Input/Output Interfaces of open-source reconstruction packages (e.g. CASToR, PyTomography and STIR) to real measurements from commercial or prototype PET scanners
Build automated validation tools for PETSIRD data
Design of PET acqusition protocols for experimental phantom and clinical test data
Maintain current Monte Carlo GATE ROOT-to-PETSIRD data format converter and its end-to-end in-silico validation using realistic simulation data with applied corrections
Update list-mode analysis and operations use-case (count statistics, splitting, merging, sub-sampling, gating, physiological signal extraction etc.)
Update analytic simulation use-case to generate PETSIRD data

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 4th Hackathon (Nov 2025)
auto-deployment to PyPI, i.e. pip install petsird.
updates to some support software, including yardl and conda

Practical Information

We will soon announce a recommended release version of the PETSIRD standard for this hackathon development tasks. All participants are highly recommended to try to attain compatibility to this version for all your current PETSIRD developments before this hackathon event. 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 strongly advise all (both on-site and on-line) attendees to create a free GitHub account if they 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.

We will use the same ETSI’s Discord server that was originally set-up for the past ETSI hackathons to prepare for, collaborate during and follow-up after this Hackathon event. 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.

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!

Organizing Committee

Chairs: Nicolas A Karakatsanis and Kris Thielemams

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