The imaging research community has executed a large number of challenges. Challenges are designed to validate and compare imaging analysis algorithms. The algorithms are applied to a single dataset and the results of the validation are compared against the ground truth, which is a set of validation measures established by the challenges organizers.

The MedICI Help Desk project supports the implementation of challenges using MedICI, which is a custom version of CodaLab, an open-source, challenge management software product. The challenges apply analysis algorithms to understand clinical phenotypes or correlate them with gene–protein signatures that are relevant to prognosis or treatment of cancer patients.