LNQ 2023 challenge: Benchmark of weakly-supervised techniques for mediastinal lymph node quantification
<|reference_start|>LNQ 2023 challenge: Benchmark of weakly-supervised techniques for mediastinal lymph node quantification: Accurate assessment of lymph node size in 3D CT scans is crucial for cancer staging, therapeutic management, and monitoring treatment response. Existing state-of-the-art segmentation frameworks in medical imaging often rely on fully annotated datasets. However, for lymph node segmentation, these datasets are typically small due to the extensive time and expertise required to annotate the numerous lymph nodes in 3D CT scans. Weakly-supervised learning, which leverages incomplete or noisy annotations, has recently gained interest in the medical imaging community as a potential solution. Despite the variety of weakly-supervised techniques proposed, most have been validated only on private datasets or small publicly available datasets. To address this limitation, the Mediastinal Lymph Node Quantification (LNQ) challenge was organized in conjunction with the 26th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI 2023). This challenge aimed to advance weakly-supervised segmentation methods by providing a new, partially annotated dataset and a robust evaluation framework. A total of 16 teams from 5 countries submitted predictions to the validation leaderboard, and 6 teams from 3 countries participated in the evaluation phase. The results highlighted both the potential and the current limitations of weakly-supervised approaches. On one hand, weakly-supervised approaches obtained relatively good performance with a median Dice score of $61.0\%$. On the other hand, top-ranked teams, with a median Dice score exceeding $70\%$, boosted their performance by leveraging smaller but fully annotated datasets to combine weak supervision and full supervision. This highlights both the promise of weakly-supervised methods and the ongoing need for high-quality, fully annotated data to achieve higher segmentation performance.<|reference_end|>
@article{dorent2024lnq,
    title={LNQ 2023 challenge: Benchmark of weakly-supervised techniques for
  mediastinal lymph node quantification},
    author={Reuben Dorent, Roya Khajavi, Tagwa Idris, Erik Ziegler, Bhanusupriya
  Somarouthu, Heather Jacene, Ann LaCasce, Jonathan Deissler, Jan Ehrhardt,
  Sofija Engelson, Stefan M. Fischer, Yun Gu, Heinz Handels, Satoshi Kasai,
  Satoshi Kondo, Klaus Maier-Hein, Julia A. Schnabel, Guotai Wang, Litingyu
  Wang, Tassilo Wald, Guang-Zhong Yang, Hanxiao Zhang, Minghui Zhang, Steve
  Pieper, Gordon Harris, Ron Kikinis, Tina Kapur},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.10069},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2408.10069},
    primaryClass={cs.CV}
}