South Korean MedTech Firm FlowNix and Asan Medical Center Sweep All Three Accuracy Categories in MICCAI 2026 Blood Flow MRI Challenge

South Korean medical imaging analysis software company FlowNix (플로우닉스), in collaboration with a research team from Asan Medical Center (서울아산병원), won first place in all three accuracy evaluation categories at the official “4D Flow MRI Reconstruction Challenge” hosted by the International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI 2026). The results were reported by Platum on October 29, 2026.

4D Flow MRI is a technology that visualizes blood flow within vessels during a heartbeat in three dimensions, used to assess risks of aortic aneurysms, stenosis, and dissection, and to plan surgeries. However, its high-resolution acquisition typically takes 30 to 60 minutes, limiting widespread clinical use. This year’s challenge focused on drastically reducing acquisition time: participating teams had to accurately restore original blood flow information using AI while reducing acquired data volume to one-tenth to one-fiftieth of the original.

A total of 264 participants registered, with 22 teams making the final rankings, including UCLA, ETH Zurich, and UCSF. The collaborative team comprising FlowNix, Professor Lee Jun-gu’s team from Asan Medical Center’s Biomedical Engineering Research Center, and Kangwon National University secured first place in all three categories: “high-precision reconstruction from sparse data,” “cross-hospital/disease generalization,” and “cross-body-part generalization.” Notably, in terms of generalization performance, although all teams trained only on aortic data, this collaborative team ranked first in four metrics—image similarity, error, magnitude of blood flow velocity, and direction error—when tested on hospitals, equipment, diseases, and different body parts such as cerebral, carotid, portal, and renal arteries that were not part of their training set.