About

Welcome to the Extreme Cardiac MRI Analysis Challenge under Respiratory Motion (CMRxMotion). This a medical image analysis challenge officially registered in MICCAI 2022.

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 of 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: 1) the image quality assessment task and 2) the segmentation task.

  • Task 1: challenge participants are expected to develop an image quality assessment model for CMR.
  • Task 2: 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 of the challenge is as follows. All deadlines are London time (UTC/GMT +0:00).

15-Aprwebsite opens for registration
31-Mayrelease training cases (image, quality label and segmentation)
01-Julrelease validation cases (image)
06-Julvalidation data evaluating system opens (Leaderboard and submission system are available.)
15-Juldeadline for STACOM placeholder paper submission
15-Augregistration deadline, submission system opens for test set
05-Sepdocker submission deadline
18-Seprelease final results at STACOM workshop

Workshop Schedule

CMRxMotion Challenge Program
September 18, 2022 @Singapore

TeamAttendenceStart TimeEnd Time
Opening remarksCMRxMotion OrganizersOnline13:3013:45
Task 1&2 Oral056 OpenGTNIn person13:4514:00
Task 2 Oral043 TewodrosIn person14:0014:10
Task 1 Oral045 UON_IMAPre-recorded Video14:1014:16
Task 1 Oral049 Philips_CTSPre-recorded Video14:1614:22
Task 2 Oral041 UA-SVCCPre-recorded Video14:2214:28
Task 2 Oral044 CMR.Love.LHNDPre-recorded Video14:2814:34
Task 2 Oral064 Med-AirPre-recorded Video14:3414:40
AwardsCMRxMotion OrganizersIn person14:4015:00

Contact

To contact us by email, send to CMRxMotion@163.com or CMRxMotion@gmail.com.

Organizers