Authors: Commowick O, Kain M, Casey R, Ameli R, Ferré JC, Kerbrat A, Tourdias T, Cervenansky F, Camarasu-Pop S, Glatard T, Vukusic S, Edan G, Barillot C, Dojat M, Cotton FI
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.
PubMed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34563682/
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2021.118589