Objectives

VISCERAL will define and execute a targeted benchmark framework to speed up progress towards:

• Automated anatomy identification and pathology identification in 3D (MRI, CT) and 4D (MRI with a time component) radiology images.
• Similar case retrieval for these images and the reports associated with them.

The following objectives will be met in carrying out the VISCERAL project:

• Create an evaluation infrastructure and software to allow the benchmarks to be carried out efficiently and effectively, but that also allows continuous evaluation to take place beyond the benchmarks;
• Innovate through the use of a cloud infrastructure for the evaluation of algorithms on huge amounts of data;
• Run two benchmarks and two workshops at which benchmark results will be discussed;
• Fuse a large number of automated benchmark entries to create a very large silver corpus;
• Create a small but sufficiently large gold corpus by manual annotation of the radiology images (used to evaluate the quality of the evaluation by the silver corpus);
• Release the radiology data and the silver and gold corpora as research collections at the end of the project.

Two benchmarks will be organised during the project:

• Benchmark 1: Identification, localization and segmentation
• The Benchmark tasks will be organ identification and the segmentation of bones, inner organ and relevant substructures.   
• Benchmark Dates: August to November 2013
• Benchmark 2: Retrieval
• The Benchmark task will be the retrieval of similar cases based on both visual information and radiology reports.
• Benchmark Dates: May to August 2014