Ms-Multi-Spine challenge proceedings

Abstract

International audienceThis proceedings book gathers the methodological papers accompanying pipelines submitted for the ms-multi-spine-challenge (https://portal.fli-iam.irisa.fr/MS-Multi-Spine/), that took place in the context of Miccai 2025 conference. This challenge results from the joint motivation of the OFSEP(https://www.ofsep.org/en) (French registry on multiple sclerosis aiming at gathering, for research purposes, imaging data, clinical data and biological samples from the French population of multiple sclerosis subjects), FLI(https://portal.fli-iam.irisa.fr/) (France Life Imaging, devoted to setup a national distributed e-infrastructure to manage and process medical imaging data) and Empenn research team. These particular efforts were directed towards bringing attention to the spinal cord multiple sclerosis lesion segmentation and to its specific methodological setting. Indeed, in clinical practice, it is highly recommended to acquire at least two sequences among a set of available ones for the detection of spinal cords, without specific guidelines to date. In practice, depending on the center and context, any combination of existing MR sequences can be provided. This challenge therefore represents a concrete and paradigmatic case of missing modalities setting where, depending on the case, some modalities may be missing both at inference or training time. To the best of our knowledge, such clinical datasets are still rarely available in medical imaging. More generally, to date, the medical imaging community concentrated its efforts toward the detection/segmentation of the lesions in brain MRI but spinal cord lesions remain a topic much less studied. In this challenge, we provided a set of 100 segmented cases with different combinations of sequences among sagittal T2w, sagittal PSIR, sagittal STIR and 3d MPRAGE to the participants, that were asked to propose a segmentation method being able to deal with any of the following combinations (sagittal T2w, sagittal PSIR), (sagittal T2w, sagittal STIR), (sagittal T2w, 3d MP2RAGE) and (sagittal T2w, sagittal STIR, 3D MP2RAGE). The performances of the methods were then assessed using a dedicated testing set. The training and testing data sets were manually annotated using a principled process involving 5 experts for each case. All pipelines were submitted in the form of a docker and integrated to the VIP platform (creatis.insa-lyon.fr/vip/) and participants were not involved in the evaluation on the test set data. The dataset can be requested at (https://shanoir.irisa.fr/shanoir-ng/welcome) and we hope it will contribute to unlock new solutions to improve spinal cord lesion segmentation methods