Sandy Engelhardt

Why is the winner the best?

By Matthias Eisenmann, Annika Reinke, Vivienn Weru, Minu D. Tizabi, Fabian Isensee, Tim J. Adler, Sharib Ali, Vincent Andrearczyk, Marc Aubreville, Ujjwal Baid, Spyridon Bakas, Niranjan Balu, Sophia Bano, Jorge Bernal, Sebastian Bodenstedt, Alessandro Casella, Veronika Cheplygina, Marie Daum, Marleen de Bruijne, Adrien Depeursinge, Reuben Dorent, Jan Egger, David G. Ellis, Sandy Engelhardt, Melanie Ganz, Noha Ghatwary, Gabriel Girard, Patrick Godau, Anubha Gupta, Lasse Hansen, Kanako Harada, Mattias P. Heinrich, Nicholas Heller, Alessa Hering, Arnaud Huaulmé, Pierre Jannin, Ali Emre Kavur, Oldřich Kodym, Michal Kozubek, Jianning Li, Hongwei Li, Jun Ma, Carlos Martı́n-Isla, Bjoern Menze, Alison Noble, Valentin Oreiller, Nicolas Padoy, Sarthak Pati, Kelly Payette, Tim Rädsch, Jonathan Rafael-Patiño, Vivek Singh Bawa, Stefanie Speidel, Carole H. Sudre, Kimberlin van Wijnen, Martin Wagner, Donglai Wei, Amine Yamlahi, Moi Hoon Yap, Chun Yuan, Maximilian Zenk, Aneeq Zia, David Zimmerer, Dogu Baran Aydogan, Binod Bhattarai, Louise Bloch, Raphael Brüngel, Jihoon Cho, Chanyeol Choi, Qi Dou, Ivan Ezhov, Christoph M. Friedrich, Clifton D. Fuller, Rebati Raman Gaire, Adrian Galdran, Álvaro Garcı́a Faura, Maria Grammatikopoulou, SeulGi Hong, Mostafa Jahanifar, Ikbeom Jang, Abdolrahim Kadkhodamohammadi, Inha Kang, Florian Kofler, Satoshi Kondo, Hugo Kuijf, Mingxing Li, Minh Luu, Tomaž Martinčič, Pedro Morais, Mohamed A. Naser, Bruno Oliveira, David Owen, Subeen Pang, Jinah Park, Sung-Hong Park, Szymon Plotka, Élodie Puybareau, Nasir Rajpoot, Kanghyun Ryu, Numan Saeed, Adam Shephard, Pengcheng Shi, Dejan Štepec, Ronast Subedi, Guillaume Tochon, Helena R. Torres, Helene Urien, João L. Vilaça, Kareem A. Wahid, Haojie Wang, Jiacheng Wang, Liansheng Wang, Xiyue Wang, Benedikt Wiestler, Marek Wodzinski, Fangfang Xia, Juanying Xie, Zhiwei Xiong, Sen Yang, Yanwu Yang, Zixuan Zhao, Klaus Maier-Hein, Paul F. Jäger, Annette Kopp-Schneider, Lena Maier-Hein

2023-02-27

In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (CVPR)

Abstract

International benchmarking competitions have become fundamental for the comparative performance assessment of image analysis methods. However, little attention has been given to investigating what can be learnt from these competitions. Do they really generate scientific progress? What are common and successful participation strategies? What makes a solution superior to a competing method? To address this gap in the literature, we performed a multi-center study with all 80 competitions that were conducted in the scope of IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021. Statistical analyses performed based on comprehensive descriptions of the submitted algorithms linked to their rank as well as the underlying participation strategies revealed common characteristics of winning solutions. These typically include the use of multi-task learning (63%) and/or multi-stage pipelines (61%), and a focus on augmentation (100%), image preprocessing (97%), data curation (79%), and postprocessing (66%). The “typical” lead of a winning team is a computer scientist with a doctoral degree, five years of experience in biomedical image analysis, and four years of experience in deep learning. Two core general development strategies stood out for highly-ranked teams: the reflection of the metrics in the method design and the focus on analyzing and handling failure cases. According to the organizers, 43% of the winning algorithms exceeded the state of the art but only 11% completely solved the respective domain problem. The insights of our study could help researchers (1) improve algorithm development strategies when approaching new problems, and (2) focus on open research questions revealed by this work.

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A global benchmark of algorithms for segmenting the left atrium from late gadolinium-enhanced cardiac magnetic resonance imaging

Abstract

Segmentation of medical images, particularly late gadolinium-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (LGE-MRI) used for visualizing diseased atrial structures, is a crucial first step for ablation treatment of atrial fibrillation. However, direct segmentation of LGE-MRIs is challenging due to the varying intensities caused by contrast agents. Since most clinical studies have relied on manual, labor-intensive approaches, automatic methods are of high interest, particularly optimized machine learning approaches. To address this, we organized the 2018 Left Atrium Segmentation Challenge using 154 3D LGE-MRIs, currently the world’s largest atrial LGE-MRI dataset, and associated labels of the left atrium segmented by three medical experts, ultimately attracting the participation of 27 international teams. In this paper, extensive analysis of the submitted algorithms using technical and biological metrics was performed by undergoing subgroup analysis and conducting hyper-parameter analysis, offering an overall picture of the major design choices of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and practical considerations for achieving state-of-the-art left atrium segmentation. Results show that the top method achieved a Dice score of 93.2% and a mean surface to surface distance of 0.7 mm, significantly outperforming prior state-of-the-art. Particularly, our analysis demonstrated that double sequentially used CNNs, in which a first CNN is used for automatic region-of-interest localization and a subsequent CNN is used for refined regional segmentation, achieved superior results than traditional methods and machine learning approaches containing single CNNs. This large-scale benchmarking study makes a significant step towards much-improved segmentation methods for atrial LGE-MRIs, and will serve as an important benchmark for evaluating and comparing the future works in the field. Furthermore, the findings from this study can potentially be extended to other imaging datasets and modalities, having an impact on the wider medical imaging community.

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