HINT.GENT Science Conference

HINT.Science Conference 2026: AI in Healthcare

On 11 September 2026, HINT.GENT will host its first HINT.Science Conference on AI in healthcare. The conference will bring together researchers, clinicians, engineers, industry partners, and other stakeholders for an afternoon of keynote lectures, scientific presentations, poster pitches, parallel sessions, and networking.

The conference will take place at UGent Campus Ardoyen in Zwijnaarde, in the iGent building, Auditorium 1. The location and programme have now been finalised.

The selected abstracts reflect the broad and interdisciplinary character of AI in healthcare. Topics include clinical AI, natural language processing for electronic health records, large language models, acute kidney injury prediction, synthetic clinical trial data, medical imaging data management, geometric deep learning for surgical planning, spatial transcriptomics, PET/CT reconstruction, and more.

The call for abstracts is now closed. Selected contributions will be presented during the poster rapid fire, poster session, and parallel oral abstract sessions. A best poster award will also be handed out during the conference.

The event offers an opportunity to discover ongoing AI and health research, meet both engineering and medical partners, exchange ideas across disciplines, and strengthen the connection between academia and the clinic.

Registration for the event is mandatory. Please register here.

Instructions for abstract submission (before 26/06/2026)

The call for abstracts has now closed. Thank you to everyone who submitted their work for consideration.

Programme

• 13:00: Introduction by Celine Everaert and Tom Braekeleirs
  Members of HINT.GENT Steering Committee
• 13:10: Keynote by Wouter Saelens
  Group leader in Causal Systems Biology at VIB
• 13:50: Keynote by Vincent Keereman
  Founder and CEO at XEOS
• 14:20: Poster rapid fire
• 14:40: Coffee break
• 15:15: Parallel sessions with oral abstracts
  • Track 1: Clinical AI
    • "A Natural Language Processing Tool to Support Rare Disease Detection in Electronic Health Records" by Arne Beelaert
    • "Does AI use help or harm memory? Investigating the neural impact of Large Language Model use in healthy individuals and patients with epilepsy" by Louise De Waele
    • "Multi-step, multivariate distributional regression for acute kidney injury prediction" by Jef Jonkers
    • "The similarity-utility-privacy trilemma of synthetic data generated from 115 phase 3 oncology trials" by Alexander Decruyenaere
  • Track 2: Health Data & Imaging AI
    • "Geometric deep learning enables real-time prediction of hip cartilage contact stress for patient-specific surgical planning" by Roel Huysentruyt
    • "UGent XNAT: Secure Medical Imaging Data Management" by Pim Pullens
    • "Predicting subclonal TP53 mutations from tumor spatial transcriptomics data using a graph convolutional neural network" by Tom Luijts
    • "Deep learning artefact correction for sparse-view PET/CT reconstruction" by Robine Janssen
• 16:30: Keynote by Niki Rashidian
  HPB Surgeon-Scientist at UGent/UZ Gent
  Director of Research & Skill Development at Orsi Academy
• 17:15: Networking reception
• 18:00: End