2026 Registered Abstract Submission Guidelines

What is a Registered Abstract?

A Registered Abstract is an abstract where research methods are submitted and assessed by reviewers before the results are known.

What can and cannot be submitted as a Registered Abstract?

This format is open for submissions in any of the standard submission categories. Registered Abstracts are for research that is attempting to validate a carefully defined hypothesis. We especially encourage researchers who want to validate/translate preliminary work (e.g., a previous ISMRM abstract) to submit in this category.

Please note, you cannot submit:

• Research where you already have results (if you already have pilot data that will be excluded from the full analysis, the full analysis is allowed).
• The same research as both a standard abstract (with results) and a registered abstract.
• Research you have already published elsewhere with results (both peer-reviewed and pre-prints).

Why should I submit a Registered Abstract?

Pre-registering your research shows credibility and a dedication to best practices. Submitting research in this format has the potential to reduce false positives in results presented at the ISMRM meeting while fostering the translation towards clinical application and more robust research tools. Researchers that have pre-registered their work also report that it helps with clarity of thought, experiment design, and staying on track with the original research question. More info about registrations here: https://help.osf.io/article/603-benefits-of-registration

How do I write a Registered Abstract?

There are many ways to write a pre-registration, which is what a registered abstract really is, but the most important component is a carefully prepared methods section with an explicit hypothesis and data analysis plan. The introduction should motivate the study (why should anyone care about this result?). The Statistical Methods section should include an appropriate statistical plan (e.g., sample size calculation, effect size estimation, etc.). Pre-registration templates that outline core details to include and record in the pre-registration can be found on e.g., OSF (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DaNmJEtBy04bq1l5OxS4JAscdZEkUGATURWwnBKLYxk/edit) and asPredicted.org (https://aspredicted.org/kv692.pdf).

What is the submission process for Registered Abstracts?

Registered Abstracts differ from the conventional abstracts in a few key ways:

• A Registered Abstract should include an Introduction, Hypothesis, Methods, and Statistical Methods sections.
  • Only these sections are peer-reviewed during the initial abstract review.
  • The Results and Discussion sections will be submitted after abstract acceptance and are expected to be presented at the annual conference.
• Author guidelines:
  • The total word count shall not exceed 500 words (unlike conventional abstracts that can be up to 750 words long).
  • Only two figures/tables can be submitted.
• A few important tips:
  • The Registered Abstract must clearly state a hypothesis.
  • Work that is not yet completed needs to be described in the future tense to avoid ambiguity.

How will Registered Abstracts be scored?

Similar to conventional abstracts, reviewers will evaluate the overall quality of the abstract. Additionally, reviewers will confirm that certain minimum requirements for a registered abstract have been met:

1. Does the abstract contain an explicit testable hypothesis/research question?
2. Have the authors explicitly described the necessary conditions for a successful experiment? This could include proposing the relevant statistical analysis and including, where appropriate, power analysis (this may use pilot data excluded from the final analysis) from the minimum effect size.
3. Have the authors shown that they can feasibly complete their experiment in order to present results in time for the annual meeting? If certain circumstances make it particularly easy to collect data that would seem hard for others, authors are encouraged to include this in the abstract to allow reviewers to see the feasibility of the experiments.

Examples:

1. A new method for reducing noise in the measurements on a low field scanner was presented at last year’s ISMRM and is now applied to a different low-field scanner. The registered abstract should contain a clearly defined hypothesis (e.g. does this method work on the other scanner model?) and study design (e.g. how the method needs to be modified if it needs to be modified at all; how much the SNR has to improve to be considered a success; how many times the noise measurement needs to be taken for statistically useful results, etc.)
2. A researcher has developed a new method for reconstructing MRF data that they think is faster than and of equal quality to standard methods. The registered abstract should contain a clearly defined hypothesis (e.g. is my method faster than and of equal quality to standard methods, e.g. low-rank subspace reconstruction implemented in BART?) and study design (e.g. what hardware should the methods be compared on, what data should the methods be compared on, how are these choices justified, which metric will be used to assess quality of results, etc.)
3. A new sequence was published a few years ago that indicates stroke’s onset time, this is now used clinically and a researcher is doing a clinical trial to determine the accuracy of the method. The registered abstract should contain a clearly defined hypothesis (e.g. what is the uncertainty in stroke onset estimation using the new sequence?) and study design (have data been collected but not yet analysed or they need to be collected, full analysis pipeline including data exclusion criteria, sample size justification, sources of uncertainty, sites harmonisation in case of multiple site study, etc.)
4. A newly published CNN model is applied to a new dataset. The registered abstract should contain a clearly defined hypothesis (e.g. does this model outperform previous gold standards, e.g. U-Net) and study design (e.g. training on N-subjects chosen pseudo-randomly, then verified on M-subjects and tested on K-subjects, using PSNR as quality metric, etc.)

Instructions for Reviewing Registered Abstracts

What is a registered abstract?

A Registered Abstract is an abstract where research methods are submitted and assessed by reviewers before the results are known.

How is a Registered Abstract reviewed?

Abstracts are evaluated on their overall quality, similar to conventional abstracts. Additionally, the entire abstract is evaluated as to whether or not it meets the requirements of a Registered Abstract, and the reviewer is asked to evaluate the impact of the abstract.

Registered Abstracts have to achieve three minimum requirements for acceptance:

1. The abstract has to include an explicit testable hypothesis.
2. The abstract has included an explicit protocol for the evaluation of their hypothesis.
3. The abstract has to show feasibility to gather and analyze data in time for the annual meeting.

How to score a Registered Abstract on Quality

The quality score should reflect both the quality of the research (including study design, appropriateness of the research goal/question, rigor of the statistical & data analysis) AND the clarity with which the work is presented (easy to understand and well written text as well as clear and well labeled figures).

Registered Abstracts should use future tense to describe all work that is not yet completed.

Experiments and data analyses must be well defined (all relevant conditions and variables clearly listed) to reduce researcher degrees of freedom after data has been collected. Additionally, reasons for design choices need to be justified (e.g., based on pilot data or previous literature).

How to score a Registered Abstract on Impact

For Registered Abstracts, impact is assessed on the importance of answering the research question. For example, if the answer to “is method A more motion robust than method B?” would allow for clinical translation of the more motion robust method, that could warrant a high impact score. Conversely, an abstract regarding fine tuning of a parameter for a method that is far from clinical translation would have low impact. Impact could also come from the ability to definitively answer a question. For example, a large well-powered study on the effectiveness of some method would yield a higher impact score than a smaller study. In summary, impact is the degree to which the work will influence the field, including how likely the work is to change scientific discovery, clinical practice or further technique development and capability.

How to check a Registered Abstract for minimum requirements

Reviewers of Registered Abstracts are asked to confirm whether minimum requirements have been met.

For a Registered Abstract to be accepted, reviewers need to be able to identify an explicit hypothesis. The reviewer will have to answer yes/no to the question “does the abstract contain an explicit testable hypothesis?”. Then, the reviewer will need to answer whether or not the abstract includes an explicit protocol for the evaluation of their hypothesis.

Finally, to avoid accepting abstracts that fail to submit results in time for the meeting, reviewers will comment on the ability to complete the study in time for the annual meeting. When making this evaluation, reviewers should consider the proposed experiments and whether data collection has started (and the data is just not yet analyzed) and whether the data collection is easy (e.g., phantom data) or hard (e.g., specific patient populations).