Report of vertebra segmentation challenge in 2014 MICCAI workshop on computational spine imaging

Abstract

Segmentation is the fundamental step formost spine image analysis tasks. The vertebra segmentation challenge held at the 2014 Computational Spine Imaging Workshop (CSI2014) objectively evaluated the performance of several algorithms segmenting vertebrae in spine CT scans. Five teams participated in the challenge. Ten training data sets and Five test data sets with reference annotation were provided for training and evaluation. Dice coefficient and absolute surface distances were used as the evaluation metrics. The segmentations on both the whole vertebra and its substructures were evaluated. The performances comparisons were assessed in different aspects. The top performers in the challenge achieved Dice coefficient of 0.93 in the upper thoracic, 0.95 in the lower thoracic and 0.96 in the lumbar spine. The strength and weakness of each method are discussed in this paper.