NeuroImage (Dec 2021)

Multiple sclerosis lesions segmentation from multiple experts: The MICCAI 2016 challenge dataset

  • Olivier Commowick,
  • Michaël Kain,
  • Romain Casey,
  • Roxana Ameli,
  • Jean-Christophe Ferré,
  • Anne Kerbrat,
  • Thomas Tourdias,
  • Frédéric Cervenansky,
  • Sorina Camarasu-Pop,
  • Tristan Glatard,
  • Sandra Vukusic,
  • Gilles Edan,
  • Christian Barillot,
  • Michel Dojat,
  • Francois Cotton

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 244
p. 118589

Abstract

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MRI plays a crucial role in multiple sclerosis diagnostic and patient follow-up. In particular, the delineation of T2-FLAIR hyperintense lesions is crucial although mostly performed manually - a tedious task. Many methods have thus been proposed to automate this task. However, sufficiently large datasets with a thorough expert manual segmentation are still lacking to evaluate these methods. We present a unique dataset for MS lesions segmentation evaluation. It consists of 53 patients acquired on 4 different scanners with a harmonized protocol. Hyperintense lesions on FLAIR were manually delineated on each patient by 7 experts with control on T2 sequence, and gathered in a consensus segmentation for evaluation. We provide raw and preprocessed data and a split of the dataset into training and testing data, the latter including data from a scanner not present in the training dataset. We strongly believe that this dataset will become a reference in MS lesions segmentation evaluation, allowing to evaluate many aspects: evaluation of performance on unseen scanner, comparison to individual experts performance, comparison to other challengers who already used this dataset, etc.