Evaluation procedure

Protocol

As for the pixel-accurate ground truth, it was manually drawn on short axis slices in diastole and systole by two cardiologists with more than 10 years of experience each.

In details, manual tracing of the LV endocardial and epicardial borders was performed by an experienced user. The validation of these contours was done by two independent expert in this domain. The accuracy was particularly highlight, as the right selection of the first slice at the base of the ventricle (that is particularly important for the right ventricle). The first expert (10 years of experience) correct and validate the contours. Then the second expert from another university hospital (20 years of experience) again can make some minor corrections and validate the contours, and if there is a disagreement, a consensus between the experts was done.

The following rules were defined: the left and right ventricle must be covered at most (according to the available data), the papillary muscles are included into the left cavity, there is not interpolation of the muscle at the basal plane of the LV (The contours follow the limit defined by the aortic valve), the infundibulum is not included in the right cavity (a clear separation must be seen). Groundtruth label field images were created where 0, 1, 2 and 3 represent voxels located in the background, in the RV cavity, in the myocardium, and in the LV cavity.

You must refer to this citation for any use of the ACDC database.

  • O. Bernard, A. Lalande, C. Zotti, F. Cervenansky, et al.
    "Deep Learning Techniques for Automatic MRI Cardiac Multi-structures Segmentation and
    Diagnosis: Is the Problem Solved ?" in IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging,
    vol. 37, no. 11, pp. 2514-2525, Nov. 2018

    doi: 10.1109/TMI.2018.2837502