From Competition to Collaboration: TNI at the OHBM Brainhack in Bordeaux

While most of our lab was going from the DGfE meeting in Würzburg to the main Organization for Human Brain Mapping conference, our PhD researcher Paul travelled to Bordeaux a few days early to take part in the OHBM Brainhack 2026. From 11 to 13 June 2026, hackers, tool builders and neuroimaging enthusiasts gathered in Bordeaux for the collaborative coding event that precedes the OHBM annual meeting, working side by side on open-source software.

Because the Brainhack overlapped almost exactly with the 64th Annual Meeting of the German Society for Epileptology (DGfE) in Würzburg, where much of the lab was presenting at the same time, Paul represented the Translational Neuroimaging group as its only hacker on site. In doing so he continued a tradition that Lennart Walger began when he attended the OHBM Brainhack in Glasgow in 2022.

Where Lennart’s Brainhack had revolved around a competitive lesion-segmentation challenge, this year’s event had a distinctly more collaborative spirit. Rather than competing for leaderboard positions, participants teamed up around shared goals, contributing together to community neuroimaging libraries and helping one another push forward the open-source tools that the whole field depends on.

Paul brought his own project to the table: Bids-Eye, an LLM-powered free-text search engine for medical neuroimaging data stored in the BIDS format. Bids-Eye lets researchers explore large imaging datasets by asking questions in plain language instead of writing manual queries, making it much easier to find the scans and subjects that matter for a given analysis. The project sparked useful feedback from a crowd that knows the pain of navigating messy neuroimaging archives.

Bordeaux welcomed the hackers with excellent weather. Between commits and coffee breaks, Paul met an open, friendly and genuinely helpful community.

Paul returned from Bordeaux with new contacts, fresh ideas and a reminder of just how much the neuroimaging community can achieve when it builds together rather than apart.