Cited by 1,384Medical Image Segmentation TechniquesAdvanced Neural Network ApplicationsDomain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning

The Medical Segmentation Decathlon

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Antonelli, Michela, Reinke, Annika, Bakas, Spyridon, Farahani, Keyvan, Kopp-Schneider, Annette, Landman, Bennett A., Litjens, Geert, Menze, Bjoern +50 more·2022·Nature Communications

Abstract

International challenges have become the de facto standard for comparative assessment of image analysis algorithms. Although segmentation is the most widely investigated medical image processing task, the various challenges have been organized to focus only on specific clinical tasks. We organized the Medical Segmentation Decathlon (MSD)—a biomedical image analysis challenge, in which algorithms compete in a multitude of both tasks and modalities to investigate the hypothesis that a method capable of performing well on multiple tasks will generalize well to a previously unseen task and potentially outperform a custom-designed solution. MSD results confirmed this hypothesis, moreover, MSD winner continued generalizing well to a wide range of other clinical problems for the next two years. Three main conclusions can be drawn from this study: (1) state-of-the-art image segmentation algorithms generalize well when retrained on unseen tasks; (2) consistent algorithmic performance across multiple tasks is a strong surrogate of algorithmic generalizability; (3) the training of accurate AI segmentation models is now commoditized to scientists that are not versed in AI model training.

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  • MSD-Colon contains 126 abdominal CT volumes with colon tumor annotations, and KiTS21 contains 300 CT volumes with kidney tumor annotations.

    “MSD-Colon contains 126 abdominal CT volumes with colon tumor annotations, and KiTS21 contains 300 CT volumes with kidney tumor annotations.”

    From Correction-aware interactive 3D tumor segmentation with sparse and revisable prompts (2026) · cites this paper as [2]

    Table 2 (Methods, The Decathlon mission; page unavailable) lists the Colon task as 190 CT volumes targeting colon cancer primaries, split into 126 training and 64 test volumes. Thus 126 is not the total stated in the claim. The paper’s dataset summary does not address KiTS21 or its claimed 300 kidney-tumor CT volumes. (LLM, conf=0.90)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

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Authors
Antonelli, M., Reinke, A., Bakas, S., Farahani, K., Kopp-Schneider, A., Landman, B. A., Litjens, G., Menze, B., Ronneberger, O., Summers, R. M., van Ginneken, B., Bilello, M., Bilic, P., Christ, P. F., Do, R. K. G., Gollub, M. J., Heckers, S. H., Huisman, H., Jarnagin, W. R., McHugo, M. K., Napel, S., Pernicka, J. S. G., Rhode, K., Tobon-Gomez, C., Vorontsov, E., Meakin, J. A., Ourselin, S., Wiesenfarth, M., Arbeláez, P., Bae, B., Chen, S., Daza, L., Feng, J., He, B., Isensee, F., Ji, Y., Jia, F., Kim, I., Maier-Hein, K., Merhof, D., Pai, A., Park, B., Perslev, M., Rezaiifar, R., Rippel, O., Sarasua, I., Shen, W., Son, J., Wachinger, C., Wang, L., Wang, Y., Xia, Y., Xu, D., Xu, Z., Zheng, Y., Simpson, A. L., Maier-Hein, L., & Cardoso, M. J.
Affiliations
  • King's College London (GB)
  • German Cancer Research Center (DE)
  • University of Pennsylvania (US)
  • National Institutes of Health (US)
  • Vanderbilt University (US)
  • Radboud University Medical Center (NL)
  • University of Zurich (CH)
  • Google DeepMind (United Kingdom) (GB)
  • Technical University of Munich (DE)
  • Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (US)
  • Vanderbilt University Medical Center (US)
  • Stanford Medicine (US)
  • Polytechnique Montréal (CA)
  • Universidad de Los Andes (CO)
  • Tencent (China) (CN)
  • Tsinghua University (CN)
  • Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN)
  • Xiamen University (CN)
  • Kakao Brain (South Korea) (KR)
  • University Hospital Heidelberg (DE)
  • Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Medicine (DE)
  • University of Copenhagen (DK)
  • RWTH Aachen University (DE)
  • Shanghai Jiao Tong University (CN)
  • LMU Klinikum (DE)
  • East China Normal University (CN)
  • Johns Hopkins University (US)
  • Nvidia (United States) (US)
  • Queen's University (CA)
Corresponding author
Antonelli, Michela
Venue
Nature Communications
Published
2022-07-15
Volume
13
Issue
1
Pages
4128-4128
ISSN
2041-1723 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W3172681723
Cited by
1,384
References
5
Citations by year
2026: 299 · 2025: 403 · 2024: 344 · 2023: 230 · 2022: 86 · 2021: 16 · 2020: 1 · 2019: 2
FWCI
87.03
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Nature Communications (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • Research at the University of Copenhagen (University of Copenhagen) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • Zurich Open Repository and Archive (University of Zurich) (acceptedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
  • IRIS eCampus Telematic University (Università degli Studi eCampus) (submittedVersion)
  • Research Portal (King's College London) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • mediaTUM (Technical University of Munich) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
  • Fraunhofer-Publica (Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft) (submittedVersion)
  • PolyPublie (École Polytechnique de Montréal) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • Radboud Repository (Radboud University) (submittedVersion)
  • Zurich Open Repository and Archive (University of Zurich) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • Radboud Repository (Radboud University) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
  • Zurich Open Repository and Archive (University of Zurich)
  • Greater South Information System
Funders
  • Wellcome Trust (WT213038, WT203148)
  • UK Research and Innovation
  • National Institute for Health and Care Research
  • Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek
  • KWF Kankerbestrijding
  • Siemens Healthineers
  • National Institutes of Health (1s10od023495-01, NINDS:R01NS042645, NCI:U24CA189523)
  • Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
  • National Cancer Institute (U24CA189523, U01CA242871, P30CA008748)
  • National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (R01NS042645, NINDS:R01NS042645)
  • NIH Clinical Center
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Medical Image Segmentation Techniques
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Neural Network Applications
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning
Keywords
Medical Segmentation Decathlon, medical image segmentation, benchmarking, cross-task generalization, unseen tasks, multimodal medical imaging, AI training
MeSH terms
Algorithms, Image Processing, Computer-Assisted

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