Welcome to the Extreme Cardiac MRI Analysis Challenge under Respiratory Motion (CMRxMotion). This a medical image analysis challenge officially registered in MICCAI 2022 and is part of the 13th Statistical Atlases and Computational Modelling of the Heart (STACOM) workshop.
Papers
The CMRxMotion challenge accepted 14 papers, all presented during STACOM 2022; the full recap is available in the challenge summary.
Motivation
The CMR imaging quality is susceptible to respiratory motion artefacts. The aim of this challenge is to assess the effects of respiratory motion on CMR imaging quality and examine the robustness of segmentation models in face of respiratory motion artifacts.
Background
Cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging is the current gold-standard modality for the evaluation of cardiac structure and function. Machine learning-based approaches have achieved remarkable performance in previous CMR challenges (e.g., ACDC, M&Ms). However, the model performance is challenged by inconsistent imaging environments (e.g., vendors and protocols), population shifts (normal v.s. pathological cases) and unexpected human behaviours (e.g., body movements) in clinical practice. It is useful to investigate potential failure modes by exposing a trained machine learning model to extreme cases in a ‘stress test’.
To date, existing challenges focus on the vendor variability and anatomical structure variations while the implications of human behaviors are less explored. For CMR image analysis, respiration motion is one of the major problems. Patients may not be able to follow the breath-hold instructions well, which is common in heart failure cases or children. The poor breath-hold behaviors result in degraded image quality and inaccurate analysis. Therefore, we launch the extreme cardiac MRI analysis challenge under respiratory motion (CMRxMotion Challenge), to establish a public benchmark dataset to assess the effects of respiratory motion on CMR imaging quality and examine the robustness of automated segmentation models.
CMR acquisition design
We attacked the standard operating procedure (SOP) by re-designing the participant’s behaviours during acquisition. For 40 healthy volunteers, we perform clinical CMR scans using the same MRI scanner (Siemens 3T MRI scanner MAGNETOM Vida). Volunteers are trained to act in 4 manners, respectively: a) adhere to the breath-hold instructions; b) halve the breath-hold period; c) breathe freely; and d) breathe intensively.
Therefore, for a single volunteer, we obtain a set of paired CMR images under 4 levels of respiratory motion. Radiologists first assess the image quality and recognise the images with bad quality. For those images with diagnostic quality, radiologists further segment the left ventricle, left ventricle myocardium and right ventricle.
Challenge tasks
We design two tasks:
- Task 1 image quality assessment: challenge participants are expected to develop an image quality assessment model for CMR.
- Task 2 robust segmentation: participants are expected to develop segmentation models that are robust to respiratory motion artifacts.
Top 3 winners of each task receive monetary awards：1st place $500, 2nd place $200, 3rd place $100.
Timeline
The schedule for the challenge is outlined below. All deadlines are in London time (UTC/GMT +0:00).
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 15-Apr | Website opens for registration |
| 31-May | Release training cases (image, quality label, and segmentation) |
| 01-Jul | Release validation cases (image) |
| 06-Jul | Validation data evaluating system opens (leaderboard and submission) |
| 15-Jul | Deadline for STACOM placeholder paper submission |
| 15-Aug | Registration deadline; submission system opens for test set |
| 05-Sep | Docker submission deadline |
| 18-Sep | Release final results at STACOM workshop |
Workshop Schedule
| Session | Team | Attendance | Start Time | End Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Opening remarks | CMRxMotion Organizers | Online | 13:30 | 13:45 |
| Task 1 & 2 Oral | 056 OpenGTN | In person | 13:45 | 14:00 |
| Task 2 Oral | 043 Tewodros | In person | 14:00 | 14:10 |
| Task 1 Oral | 045 UON_IMA | Pre-recorded Video | 14:10 | 14:16 |
| Task 1 Oral | 049 Philips_CTS | Pre-recorded Video | 14:16 | 14:22 |
| Task 2 Oral | 041 UA-SVCC | Pre-recorded Video | 14:22 | 14:28 |
| Task 2 Oral | 044 CMR.Love.LHND | Pre-recorded Video | 14:28 | 14:34 |
| Task 2 Oral | 064 Med-Air | Pre-recorded Video | 14:34 | 14:40 |
| Awards | CMRxMotion Organizers | In person | 14:40 | 15:00 |
Contact
To contact us by email, send to CMRxMotion@163.com or shuowang@fudan.edu.cn.