CarOtid vessel wall SegMentation and atherosclerOsis diagnosiS challenge (COSMOS 2022)

Welcome to join the MICCAI COSMOS Challenge in person or online:

Welcome to join the SMRA grand challenge session in person or online:

August 24, 8:00 am-9:00 am (Los Angeles time),  AI Grand Challenge
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83794872586?pwd=a2JUTjh1N0ljTGRZcmk0dW1GMmV2U

Meeting ID: 837 9487 2586
Passcode: 255242

Agenda:

Updates:

(NEW!) COSMOS 2022 Challenge Invitation to Present at SMRA and MICCAI  

2022/07/27：The COSMOS 2022 deadline (2022.7.31 23:59 EST) is approaching! Please do not hesitate to submit your Final Evaluation results!

Notably, please do submit your results of the test dataset (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IoXycGFX8o1nCLb8F_xsJZcZp-XzWqON/view?usp=sharing or https://zenodo.org/record/6843257#.YtIsYdJBxH4) in the "Final Evaluation" (NOT the "Validation"), OR YOUR RESULTS WOULD NOT BE CORRECTLY EVALUATED AND RANKED.
Once you submit your results correctly, you can see your score and ranking immediately in "Leaderboards".

Top 10 teams in the Final Evaluation will be invited to present their work at the SMRA 2022 (Aug 23-26) and MICCAI 2022 (Sep 18). There is still a big chance for you to win a place.

• Please leave your email in the submission comment for further communication.
• You can submit your results multiple times, but maximal twice per day.

If you have any questions, please contact us (vws.challenge.2022@gmail.com).

2022/07/16: Final evaluation phase of COSMOS 2022 is open now! Please note, the submission deadline has been extended to 2022.7.31 23:59 EST.

(NEW!) Testing Dataset has been uploaded!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IoXycGFX8o1nCLb8F_xsJZcZp-XzWqON/view?usp=sharing

or https://zenodo.org/record/6843257#.YtIsYdJBxH4

(Please note that the image size of case 60 is (432, 512, 512). When inserting contours into the QVS files, please take into account the effect of image size. )

2022/07/15: Final evaluation phase is coming!

• To avoid delay in responding to the participants' testing set requests, we decided to release the testing set directly (2022.7.16 00:00 EST).
• We will release annotations after the challenge to all teams that successfully submit the final results, please leave your email in the submission comment during the final evaluation phase.
• Data can be used for scientific purposes and research papers with submitting the final results and citing our challenge.

In addition, the deadline is currently set to EST (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-4).

2022/07/11: The evaluation docker for validation has been updated to fix the bug validation-submission-error. 

In addition, note that the writing order of the boundary points should follow the edge order of polygons, instead of simply sorting the points by X and Y coordinates, e.g. [[0, 0], [1,0], [1,1], [0,1]] instead of [[0, 0], [1,0], [0,1], [1,1]].

2022/07/11: We also uploaded the evaluation code: evaluate_carotid_challenge_v2.ipynb (Please change "if target_wall_cont is None:" to "if target_wall_cont is None or target_lumen_cont is None:" in the evaluation code).

2022/07/09: Early submission for validation is open! Please refer to Validation Submission!

2022/07/07: The validation dataset was uploaded to https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HXrhJpN8j7PLA5Y0d0x1dv_yJ-hTuNbX/view?usp=sharing or https://zenodo.org/record/6804793#.YsZFoS1By9Z. And the submission guidelines were updated!

Background

Atherosclerosis is a leading cause of death worldwide, which occurs with luminal narrowing and plaque formation in multiple vascular beds, including carotid arteries. Early detection and proper treatment of carotid atherosclerosis can prevent the progression of cardiovascular disease. Magnetic resonance (MR) black-blood vessel wall imaging (BB-VWI) has been effective at visualizing normal and diseased arteries and characterizing atherosclerotic lesions, which was used in many previous clinical studies, with careful and comprehensive manual segmentation of the vessel wall. However, manual segmentation is labor-intensive and requires a high degree of training in vessel wall review. On the other hand, automatic segmentation is also challenging for complex atherosclerotic lesions and in complex arterial geometries.

Vessel wall imaging (VWI) with MRI of the carotid artery has been recognized to be able to identify atherosclerotic lesions which pose an increased risk of causing clinical events. However, traditional axial acquisition MRI sequences require a long scan. To ensure patient compliance and diagnostic image quality, a fast 3D carotid black blood MRI (volume isotropic turbo spin echo acquisition, VISTA) has been developed, which allows large coverage of carotid arteries with submillimeter isotropic resolution in the coronal acquisition, and is able to depict atherosclerotic lesion burden, severity, and luminal stenosis. The sequence has potential clinical application in identifying patients with advanced lesions but its application is limited due to the complexity of 3D image review, a large number of images available, and the lack of trained radiologists with extensive experience in the evaluation of carotid vessel wall thickness.

Challenge

In this challenge, the task is to segment the vessel wall from 3D-VISTA images and diagnose the atherosclerotic lesions with high accuracy and robustness. And then the clinical usable measurements such as wall thickness (difference between the lumen and outer wall contours), lumen area or stenosis percent can be derived from the vessel wall segmentation. In addition, the identification of the lumen and outer wall boundary of the vessel wall is also critical for the diagnosis of lesions. In summary, this challenge focuses on carotid vessel wall segmentation and atherosclerotic lesion diagnosis.