SPARK Impact Numbers and Geographic Distribution of the 2023 BraTS-Africa Program showing in-person laboratories (orange) and virtual (yellow) trainees that participated in the program.

A total of 70 trainees from 12 African nations and 3 South East Asian countries participated in the first SPARK Academy. The 2023 Academy focused on learning deep learning methods for image segmentation of brain glioma tumors, a crucial clinical step in the diagnosis, classification, and treatment management of such tumors.

Each SPARK team undertook the task of designing, adapting, implementing, and evaluating deep learning methods, leading to the development of 10 AI models, 8 of which were part of the MICCAI brain tumor segmentation (BraTs) challenge competitions. One method was ranked in the top 2, and 12 conference papers were presented at annual meetings including at MICCAI where 3 attended from Africa and at regional African AI meetings such as IndabaX. The 2023 training materials and methods developed are accessible in our repository.

Read about our participant's on impressions of SPARK 2023 on Medium and LinkedIn and learn how the experience is enriching their careers.

SPARK Academy provided me with AI knowledge, which couldn't be possible to understand it by myself. Through tutorial, hackathon, weekend seminars, my knowledge regarding AI escalated. SPARK connected me with people all over Africa and opened many doors for collaborations, to take Africa Diagnostic Imaging to the next level".... 2023 SPARK Academy Participant Testimonial.