RibSeg Dataset and Strong Point Cloud Baselines for Rib Segmentation from CT Scans

RibSeg Dataset and Strong Point Cloud Baselines for Rib Segmentation from CT Scans

Jiancheng Yang, Shixuan Gu, Donglai Wei, Hanspeter Pfister, and Bingbing Ni.

(MICCAI), 2021.

Manual rib inspections in computed tomography (CT) scans are clinically critical but labor-intensive, as 24 ribs are typically elon- gated and oblique in 3D volumes. Automatic rib segmentation methods can speed up the process through rib measurement and visualization. However, prior arts mostly use in-house labeled datasets that are pub- licly unavailable and work on dense 3D volumes that are computationally inefficient. To address these issues, we develop a labeled rib segmentation benchmark, named RibSeg, including 490 CT scans (11,719 individual ribs) from a public dataset. For ground truth generation, we used exist- ing morphology-based algorithms and manually refined its results. Then, considering the sparsity of ribs in 3D volumes, we thresholded and sam- pled sparse voxels from the input and designed a point cloud-based base- line method for rib segmentation. The proposed method achieves state- of-the-art segmentation performance (Dice ≈ 95%) with significant effi- ciency (10 ∼ 40× faster than prior arts). The RibSeg dataset, code, and model in PyTorch are available at https://github.com/M3DV/RibSeg.