February 2026 Cycle Report
Published 5 Feb. 2026
✨Automatic hanging protocol selection¶
Hanging protocols articulate how data is shown in the viewer. By default, the Grand Challenge viewer automatically arranges the viewports so the maximum number of images or other data is shown at the same time. For a more nuanced viewing, it is already possible to construct a custom hanging or have the reader select from a set of optional custom hangings.
However, some studies or algorithms have varying numbers of data to be shown and want an automatically nuanced hanging for each of these sets. To enable this we have introduced automatic selection of hanging protocols. This is done under specific conditions, elaborated upon in the documentation.
We hope that it will help showing the data to your readers in exactly the way you intend!
🚀 Preparation for faster CIRRUS launches¶
In preparation of speeding up CIRRUS workstation startups, we removed some legacy requirements of CIRRUS for its startup. Up until last month, CIRRUS required a valid user-api token during the entire lifetime of the application. This API-KEY was used to access the data on grand-challenge. The new method reads a user's browser sessionid for grand-challenge.org when the instances is first accessed and uses that to access the data on grand-challenge.org. In the future, this will allow us to pre-launch CIRRUS instances that users can simply be connected to when a user requests access to CIRRUS, eliminating the long waiting times when connecting to CIRRUS for the first time.
