ImageCHD: A 3D Computed Tomography Image Dataset for Classification of Congenital Heart Disease

Abstract

Congenital heart disease (CHD) is the most common type of birth defects, which occurs 1 in every 110 births in the United States. CHD usually comes with severe variations in heart structure and great artery connections that can be classified into many types. Thus highly specialized domain knowledge and time-consuming human process is needed to analyze the associated medical images. On the other hand, due to the complexity of CHD and the lack of dataset, little has been explored on the automatic diagnosis (classification) of CHDs. In this paper, we present ImageCHD, the first medical image dataset for CHD classification. ImageCHD contains 110 3D Computed Tomography (CT) images covering most types of CHD, which is of decent size compared with existing medical imaging datasets. Classification of CHDs requires the identification of large structural changes without any local tissue changes, with limited data. It is an example of a larger class of problems that are quite difficult for current machine-learning based vision methods to solve. To demonstrate this, we further present a baseline framework for automatic classification of CHD, based on a state-of-the-art CHD segmentation method. Experimental results show that the baseline framework can only achieve a classification accuracy of 82.0% under selective prediction scheme with 88.4% coverage, leaving big room for further improvement. We hope that ImageCHD can stimulate further research and lead to innovative and generic solutions that would have an impact in multiple domains. Our dataset is released to the public[1].