This paper presents a large publicly available multi-center lumbar spine
magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) dataset with reference segmentations of
vertebrae, intervertebral discs (IVDs), and spinal canal. The dataset includes
447 sagittal T1 and T2 MRI series from 218 patients with a history of low back
pain. It was collected from four different hospitals and was divided into a
training (179 patients) and validation (39 patients) set. An iterative data
annotation approach was used by training a segmentation algorithm on a small
part of the dataset, enabling semi-automatic segmentation of the remaining
images. The algorithm provided an initial segmentation, which was subsequently
reviewed, manually corrected, and added to the training data. We provide
reference performance values for this baseline algorithm and nnU-Net, which
performed comparably. We set up a continuous segmentation challenge to allow
for a fair comparison of different segmentation algorithms. This study may
encourage wider collaboration in the field of spine segmentation, and improve
the diagnostic value of lumbar spine MRI