Project summary

I am requesting travel and registration support to attend the "Mechanistic Interpretability for Medical Foundation Models" workshop at MICCAI 2026 in Strasbourg, France. I have applied for conference financial assistance but have not yet received a decision. Paper link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16196

What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?

I am investigating how mechanistic insights from the internal representations of neural networks can be used to design out-of-distribution (OOD) detection methods that are interpretable by design rather than relying solely on post-hoc explanations. Paper link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16196

MICCAI is especially valuable for this work because it hosts the "Mechanistic Interpretability for Medical Foundation Models" workshop, one of the few venues specifically focused on connecting mechanistic understanding of model representations with questions of robustness, clinical validity, and deployment safety.

Attending MICCAI will enable me to:

1. Obtain feedback and use this feedback to refine the next phase of the project, including evaluation protocols, ablation studies, and future research directions.

2. Identify potential collaborators working on related problems in interpretability, robustness, and healthcare machine learning.

The project has already progressed substantially: a full manuscript has been completed, experiments have been conducted, and the interpretability component has been validated in collaboration with an expert gastroenterologist using endoscopic imaging data. The clinician confirmed that the extracted concepts correspond to clinically meaningful visual patterns, providing an important real-world validation of the method.

How will this funding be used?

(Exchange rate used: 1 EUR = 1.15 USD)

• Registration

  • Main Conference – Student MICCAI Member (early fee, before Aug 17): €500 (~$575) . More details: https://conferences.miccai.org/2026/en/REGISTRATION.html

  • Student Booked with Main Conference: € 130 (~$150)

• Round-trip flights (Nepal -  Paris) (Sep 25 – Oct 3): $2,193

• Meals and local transport: $250

• Accommodation near Strasbourg Convention Center (Sep 26 – Oct 2, 6 nights): €500 (~$575)

• Visa & Entry Requirements fee (visa processing, service fee, travel medical insurance): ~$182

  Estimated Total: ~$4,000

Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?

I am the only recipient of these funds.

More on me: https://anjuchhetri.com.np/

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?

The most likely outcome if this project fails is insufficient funding for travel and conference participation. As an early-career researcher from Nepal, international conference attendance represents a significant financial burden. If I am unable to attend, the research will continue, but I will lose the opportunity to receive timely feedback from domain experts, build collaborations, and refine the work using insights from the broader MICCAI community. This would likely slow the project's development.

How much money have you raised in the last 12 months, and from where?

I have not raised external funding yet.