Nuclear Segmentation

The colorectal nuclear segmentation and phenotypes (CoNSeP) dataset consists of 41 H&E stained image tiles, each of size 1,000×1,000 pixels at 40× objective magnification. The images were extracted from 16 colorectal adenocarcinoma (CRA) WSIs, each belonging to an individual patient, and scanned with an Omnyx VL120 scanner within the department of pathology at University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire, UK. Source: HoVer-Net: Simultaneous Segmentation and Classification of Nuclei in Multi-Tissue Histology Images Image Source: Graham et al

This dataset contains a large number of segmented nuclei images. The images were acquired under a variety of conditions and vary in the cell type, magnification, and imaging modality (brightfield vs. fluorescence). The dataset is designed to challenge an algorithm's ability to generalize across these variations. Each image is represented by an associated ImageId. Files belonging to an image are contained in a folder with this ImageId. Within this folder are two subfolders: images contains the image file. masks contains the segmented masks of each nucleus. This folder is only included in the training set. Each mask contains one nucleus. Masks are not allowed to overlap (no pixel belongs to two masks). The second stage dataset will contain images from unseen experimental conditions. To deter hand labeling, it will also contain images that are ignored in scoring. The metric used to score this competition requires that your submissions are in run-length encoded format. Please see the evaluation page for details. As with any human-annotated dataset, you may find various forms of errors in the data. You may manually correct errors you find in the training set. The dataset will not be updated/re-released unless it is determined that there are a large number of systematic errors. The masks of the stage 1 test set will be released with the release of the stage 2 test set.

The CELL benchmark is made of fluorescence microscopy images of cell. Source: Multi-Domain Adversarial Learning Image Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.09239v1.pdf

Different types of cells play a vital role in the initiation, development, invasion, metastasis and therapeutic response of tumors of various organs. For example, (1) most carcinomas originate from epithelial cells, (2) spatial arrangement of tumor infiltrating Lymphocytes (TILs) is associated with clinical outcome in several cancers, including the ones of breast, prostate, and lung (Fridman et. al., Nature Reviews Cancer, 2012), and (3) tumor associated macrophages (TAMs) influence diverse processes such as angiogenesis, neoplastic cell mitogenesis, antigen presentation, matrix degradation, and cytotoxicity in various tumors (Ruffel and Coussens, Cancer Cell, 2015). Thus, accurate identification and segmentation of nuclei of multiple cell-types is important for AI enabled characterization of tumor and its microenvironment. In this challenge, participants will be provided with H&E stained tissue images of four organs with annotations of multiple cell-types including epithelial cells, lymphocytes, macrophages, and neutrophils. Participants will use the annotated dataset to develop computer vision algorithms to recognize these cell-types from the tissue images of unseen patients released in the testing set of the challenge. Additionally, all cell-types will not have equal number of annotated instances in the training dataset which will encourage participants to develop algorithms for learning from imbalanced classes in a few shot learning paradigm. H&E staining of human tissue sections is a routine and most common protocol used by pathologists to enhance the contrast of tissue sections for tumor assessment (grading, staging, etc.) at multiple microscopic resolutions. Hence, we will provide the annotated dataset of H&E stained digitized tissue images of several patients acquired at multiple hospitals using one of the most common 40x scanner magnification. The annotations will be done with the help of expert pathologists.