ImageCAS: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Coronary Artery Segmentation based on Computed Tomography Angiography Images

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) accounts for about half of non-communicable diseases. Vessel stenosis in the coronary artery is considered to be the major risk of CVD. Computed tomography angiography (CTA) is one of the widely used noninvasive imaging modalities in coronary artery diagnosis due to its superior image resolution. Clinically, segmentation of coronary arteries is essential for the diagnosis and quantification of coronary artery disease. Recently, a variety of works have been proposed to address this problem. However, on one hand, most works rely on in-house datasets, and only a few works published their datasets to the public which only contain tens of images. On the other hand, their source code have not been published, and most follow-up works have not made comparison with existing works, which makes it difficult to judge the effectiveness of the methods and hinders the further exploration of this challenging yet critical problem in the community. In this paper, we propose a large-scale dataset for coronary artery segmentation on CTA images. In addition, we have implemented a benchmark in which we have tried our best to implement several typical existing methods. Furthermore, we propose a strong baseline method which combines multi-scale patch fusion and two-stage processing to extract the details of vessels. Comprehensive experiments show that the proposed method achieves better performance than existing works on the proposed large-scale dataset. The benchmark and the dataset are published at https://github.com/XiaoweiXu/ImageCAS-A-Large-Scale-Dataset-and-Benchmark-for-Coronary-Artery-Segmentation-based-on-CT.

EchoCP: An Echocardiography Dataset in Contrast Transthoracic Echocardiography for Patent Foramen Ovale Diagnosis

Patent foramen ovale (PFO) is a potential separation between the septum, primum and septum secundum located in the anterosuperior portion of the atrial septum. PFO is one of the main factors causing cryptogenic stroke which is the fifth leading cause of death in the United States. For PFO diagnosis, contrast transthoracic echocardiography (cTTE) is preferred as being a more robust method compared with others. However, the current PFO diagnosis through cTTE is extremely slow as it is proceeded manually by sonographers on echocardiography videos. Currently there is no publicly available dataset for this important topic in the community. In this paper, we present EchoCP, as the first echocardiography dataset in cTTE targeting PFO diagnosis. EchoCP consists of 30 patients with both rest and Valsalva maneuver videos which covers various PFO grades. We further establish an automated baseline method for PFO diagnosis based on the state-of-the-art cardiac chamber segmentation technique, which achieves 0.89 average mean Dice score, but only 0.70/0.67 mean accuracies for PFO diagnosis, leaving large room for improvement. We hope that the challenging EchoCP dataset can stimulate further research and lead to innovative and generic solutions that would have an impact in multiple domains. Our dataset is released.