MRSpineSeg Challenge

1、 Competition name:

The 2nd China Society of Image and Graphics (CSIG) Image and Graphics Technology Challenge: MRSpineSeg Challenge: Automated Multi-class Segmentation of Spinal Structures on Volumetric MR Images.

2、 Purpose：

Degenerative spine diseases (e.g., lumbar disc herniation, spinal stenosis, etc.) have become important diseases affecting the health and quality of life of the elderly and working people. These degenerative spinal diseases often cause changes in the structural morphology and mechanical systems of the spine, resulting in pain, such as lumbar disc herniation, reduced disc height, and nerve compression. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as a non-invasive examination method, it has good soft tissue imaging and no radiation. It is a reliable screening method for degenerative spine diseases. In clinical practice, the treatment of degenerative spinal disorders depends largely on physicians’ experience and lacks accurate quantitative analysis tools. 3D automatic segmentation (MR) images of multiclass spinal structures by MRI are a prerequisite for 3D reconstruction of spinal structures. It can provide quantitative analysis tools for building biomechanical models of the spine, simulating stresses in spinal structures, and assessing the prognosis of different treatment options for degenerative spinal diseases.

This competition aims to gather global developers to explore efficient and accurate 3D automatic segmentation of spinal structure in MR images by using artificial intelligence technology. The spinal structure to be segmented includes 10 vertebrae and 9 intervertebral discs.

3、 Organizer:

 Qianjin,Feng, School of Biomedical Engineering, Southern Medical University, Guangdong Key Laboratory of medical image processing, China.

4、 Requirements for competition participants：

It is open to the whole society. Personnel from colleges and universities, scientific research institutions and enterprises can sign up for the competition. The maximum number of each team is four. Each person can only participate in one team. After team registration, the team information cannot be changed.
Note: all personnel who have access to the competition data are prohibited from participating in the competition. Those who have not access to the competition data of Southern Medical University can also participate in the competition. Southern Medical University has the right of final interpretation.

5、 Timeline:

Registration (March 30, 2021 – May 22, 2021)

6、Citation:

[1] Shumao Pang, Chunlan Pang, Lei Zhao, Yangfan Chen, Zhihai Su, Yujia Zhou, Meiyan Huang, Wei Yang, Hai Lu, Qianjin Feng*. SpineParseNet: Spine Parsing for Volumetric MR Image by a Two-Stage Segmentation Framework with Semantic Image Representation [J]. IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 2021, 40(1): 262-273.

[2] Shumao Pang, Chunlan Pang, Zhihai Su, Liyan Lin, Lei Zhao, Yangfan Chen, Yujia Zhou, Hai Lu, Qianjin Feng*. DGMSNet: Spine Segmentation for MR Image by a Detection-Guided Mixed-supervised Segmentation Network [J]. Medical Image Analysis, 2022, 102261.

Introducing paper: SpineParseNet: Spine Parsing for Volumetric MR Image by a Two-Stage Segmentation Framework with Semantic Image Representation