Our research group presented a 6-hour tutorial entitled: “An overview of max-tree principles, algorithms and applications” at the 2016 Conference on Graphics, Patterns and Images (SIBGRAPI). The tutorial deals with the use of a data structure called max-tree and its application to medical image processing tasks. The hands-on portion of the tutorial was developed using an open-source max-tree toolbox named siamxt. This toolbox was developed by our research group. During the tutorial, we illustrated how to use the max-tree for segmentation problems, two practical applications were detailed: carotid and brain segmentation from magnetic resonance images.