The state-of-the-art 3D anisotropic intracranial hemorrhage segmentation on non-contrast head CT: The INSTANCE challenge

Automatic intracranial hemorrhage segmentation in 3D non-contrast head CT (NCCT) scans is significant in clinical practice. Existing hemorrhage segmentation methods usually ignores the anisotropic nature of the NCCT, and are evaluated on different in-house datasets with distinct metrics, making it highly challenging to improve segmentation performance and perform objective comparisons among different methods. The INSTANCE 2022 was a grand challenge held in conjunction with the 2022 International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI). It is intended to resolve the above-mentioned problems and promote the development of both intracranial hemorrhage segmentation and anisotropic data processing. The INSTANCE released a training set of 100 cases with ground-truth and a validation set with 30 cases without ground-truth labels that were available to the participants. A held-out testing set with 70 cases is utilized for the final evaluation and ranking. The methods from different participants are ranked based on four metrics, including Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC), Hausdorff Distance (HD), Relative Volume Difference (RVD) and Normalized Surface Dice (NSD). A total of 13 teams submitted distinct solutions to resolve the challenges, making several baseline models, pre-processing strategies and anisotropic data processing techniques available to future researchers. The winner method achieved an average DSC of 0.6925, demonstrating a significant growth over our proposed baseline method. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed INSTANCE challenge releases the first intracranial hemorrhage segmentation benchmark, and is also the first challenge that intended to resolve the anisotropic problem in 3D medical image segmentation, which provides new alternatives in these research fields.

Transformer Network for Significant Stenosis Detection in CCTA of Coronary Arteries

Coronary artery disease (CAD) has posed a leading threat to the lives of cardiovascular disease patients worldwide for a long time. Therefore, automated diagnosis of CAD has indispensable significance in clinical medicine. However, the complexity of coronary artery plaques that cause CAD makes the automatic detection of coronary artery stenosis in Coronary CT angiography (CCTA) a difficult task. In this paper, we propose a Transformer network (TR-Net) for the automatic detection of significant stenosis (i.e. luminal narrowing > 50%) while practically completing the computer-assisted diagnosis of CAD. The proposed TR-Net introduces a novel Transformer, and tightly combines convolutional layers and Transformer encoders, allowing their advantages to be demonstrated in the task. By analyzing semantic information sequences, TR-Net can fully understand the relationship between image information in each position of a multiplanar reformatted (MPR) image, and accurately detect significant stenosis based on both local and global information. We evaluate our TR-Net on a dataset of 76 patients from different patients annotated by experienced radiologists. Experimental results illustrate that our TR-Net has achieved better results in ACC (0.92), Spec (0.96), PPV (0.84), F1 (0.79) and MCC (0.74) indicators compared with the state-of-the-art methods. The source code is publicly available from the link (https://github.com/XinghuaMa/TR-Net).