MSChallenge

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The 2015 Longitudinal Multiple Sclerosis Lesion Segmentation Challenge

I. Introduction

The Longitudinal MS Lesion Segmentation Challenge will be conducted at the 2015 International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging in New York, NY, April 16-19. Competing teams will apply their automatic lesion segmentation algorithms to MR neuroimaging data acquired at multiple time points from MS patients. Algorithms will be evaluated against manual segmentations from multiple raters in terms of their segmentation accuracy and ability to track lesion evolution. This website is undergoing construction so please check back for new information.

II. Data

The overall data will be composed of three parts: 1) Training data consisting of longitudinal images from 5 patients; 2) Test data 1 consisting of longitudinal images from 10 patients; and 3) Test data 2 consisting of longitudinal images from 5 patients. Only the training data will include manual delineations when it is released to teams. These delineations will be performed by at least 2 trained raters. Test data 1 will be released in advance of the challenge day and test data 2 will be released on or shortly before the challenge day to discourage patient-specific tuning of the algorithms and computationally inefficient approaches.

Each longitudinal dataset will include T1-weighted, T2-weighted, PD-weighted, and T2-weighted FLAIR MRI with 3-5 time points acquired on a 3T MR scanner. T1-weighted images will have approximately a 1mm cubic voxel resolution, while the other scans will be 1mm in plane with 3mm sections. Accounting for the multiple time points, this constitutes approximately 80 individual data sets. To minimize the dependency of the results on registration performance and brain extraction, all images will be provided already rigidly co-registered to the baseline T1-weighted image with automatically computed skull stripping masks that may optionally be used by the teams.

The training and test data will continue to be made publicly available following the challenge, similar to the |MICCAI 2008 Lesion Challenge data. Manual delineations on the test data will not be made available to the public but the organizers will provide evaluation results for any submitted segmentations.

III. Key dates

Release of training data	February 1, 2015
Release of test data 1	March 15, 2015
Submisssion of manuscript	April 1, 2015
Submisssion of test data 1 results	April 6, 2015
Release and submission of test data 2	April 16, 2015
Challenge Day	April 16, 2015

IV. Organizers

Primary Organizer:
Dzung Pham, Center for Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine, Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine, Bethesda, MD

Organizing committee members:
Pierre-Louis Bazin, Department of Neurophysics, Max Planck Institute, Leipzig, Germany
Aaron Carass, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD
Peter Calabresi, Department of Neurology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD
Ciprian Craniceanu, Department of Biostatistics, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD
Lotta Ellingsen, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Iceland, Reykjavik, Iceland, Baltimore, MD
Qing He, Center for Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine, Henry Jackson Foundation, Bethesda, MD
Jerry Prince, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD
Daniel Reich, Translational Neuroradiology Unit, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD
Snehashis Roy, Center for Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine, Henry Jackson Foundation, Bethesda, MD