Semantic segmentation of medical images aims to associate a pixel with a label in a medical image without human initialization. The success of semantic segmentation algorithms is contingent on the availability of high-quality imaging data with corresponding labels provided by experts. We sought to create a large collection of annotated medical image datasets of various clinically relevant anatomies available under open source license to facilitate the development of semantic segmentation algorithms. Such a resource would allow: 1) objective assessment of general-purpose segmentation methods through comprehensive benchmarking and 2) open and free access to medical image data for any researcher interested in the problem domain. Through a multi-institutional effort, we generated a large, curated dataset representative of several highly variable segmentation tasks that was used in a crowd-sourced challenge - the Medical Segmentation Decathlon held during the 2018 Medical Image Computing and Computer Aided Interventions Conference in Granada, Spain. Here, we describe these ten labeled image datasets so that these data may be effectively reused by the research community.
@article{arxiv.1902.09063,
title = {A large annotated medical image dataset for the development and evaluation of segmentation algorithms},
author = {Amber L. Simpson and Michela Antonelli and Spyridon Bakas and Michel Bilello and Keyvan Farahani and Bram van Ginneken and Annette Kopp-Schneider and Bennett A. Landman and Geert Litjens and Bjoern Menze and Olaf Ronneberger and Ronald M. Summers and Patrick Bilic and Patrick F. Christ and Richard K. G. Do and Marc Gollub and Jennifer Golia-Pernicka and Stephan H. Heckers and William R. Jarnagin and Maureen K. McHugo and Sandy Napel and Eugene Vorontsov and Lena Maier-Hein and M. Jorge Cardoso},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.09063},
year = {2019}
}