IBME student wins Best Poster Award at Computing in Cardiology (CinC) 2026

The “Gary and Bill Sanders Poster Award” is presented at the annual Computing in Cardiology (CinC) conference, which is focused on applications of computing in clinical cardiology and cardiovascular physiology. The award was established to recognise, celebrate, and promote excellence in poster presentations. At this year’s CinC conference, held from 20th to 23rd September, the Gary and Bill Sanders Poster award was awarded to Oxford MRes student Adrian McIntosh from the Institute of Biomedical Engineering’s MultiMeDIA Lab supervised by Prof Abhirup Banerjee.

Adrian’s work, titled “End-to-End ECG Digitisation with Soft Segmentation and BiLSTM Signal Reconstruction”, presented an end-to-end system for the digitisation of paper electrocardiographs (ECGs). As the most widely used modality for cardiovascular diagnosis, there have been many developments in automating their analysis, but most ECGs remain available only in paper form, not in the digital format required for deployment of these automated methods.

The team, also including Dr Mojtaba Lashgari from IBME’s MultiMeDIA Lab and Longa Maimbo from University of Cape Town, collaborated with clinicians to develop a method to convert paper ECG signals into their time-series form using a deep learning framework. During the poster presentation, Adrian demonstrated the method through a mobile application that captures photos of paper ECGs, and using the framework the team developed, digitally flattens the paper, automatically extracting the associated high resolution digital signals. The presentation received enthusiastic feedback from several clinicians attending the conference.

This award marks the third consecutive year that the MultiMeDIA Lab has won a presentation award at CinC. Adrian, who led the project, said:

“I am very grateful for the opportunity to receive this award, the team behind the paper and the MultiMeDIA Lab who supported us throughout.”

The MultiMeDIA lab delivered a total of three posters and one oral presentation at CinC this year, including poster presentations from previous award winners Thalia Seale and Dr Alexander Sharp. Thalia’s poster analysed the motion of the heart muscle using tagged magnetic resonance imaging to understand differences between healthy individuals and those suffering with myocardial infarction. Alex’s poster presented a statistical framework for reconstructing dense conduction velocity maps of the left atrium from sparse clinical measurements. Charlotte Richardson, 4th year undergraduate student at the lab, was selected for oral presentation for her work presenting a multi-modal deep learning framework to classify myocardial infarction. This presentation was delivered by the paper’s second author Thalia Seale. Further details on these presentations can be found on the MultiMeDIA Lab’s website.

Professor Banerjee commented on the event:

“I am extremely honoured to see the continuous appreciation of the MultiMeDIA Lab in the CinC Family. What Thalia (CinC 2024 Best Poster Award) and Alex (CinC 2025 Young Investigator Award) started, Adrian and others are taking them forward! Already feeling excited for the next year…”