Unleashing the Strengths of Unlabeled Data in Pan-cancer Abdominal Organ Quantification: the FLARE22 Challenge

Quantitative organ assessment is an essential step in automated abdominal disease diagnosis and treatment planning. Artificial intelligence (AI) has shown great potential to automatize this process. However, most existing AI algorithms rely on many expert annotations and lack a comprehensive evaluation of accuracy and efficiency in real-world multinational settings. To overcome these limitations, we organized the FLARE 2022 Challenge, the largest abdominal organ analysis challenge to date, to benchmark fast, low-resource, accurate, annotation-efficient, and generalized AI algorithms. We constructed an intercontinental and multinational dataset from more than 50 medical groups, including Computed Tomography (CT) scans with different races, diseases, phases, and manufacturers. We independently validated that a set of AI algorithms achieved a median Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 90.0% by using 50 labeled scans and 2000 unlabeled scans, which can significantly reduce annotation requirements. They also enabled automatic extraction of key organ biology features, which was labor-intensive with traditional manual measurements. This opens the potential to use unlabeled data to boost performance and alleviate annotation shortages for modern AI models. Abdominal organs are high cancer incidence areas, such as liver cancer, kidney cancer, pancreas cancer, and gastric cancer [1]. Computed Tomography (CT) scanning has been a major imaging technology for the diagnosis and treatment of abdominal cancer because it can yield important prognostic information with fast imaging speed for cancer patients, which has been recommended by many clinical treatment guidelines. In order to quantify abdominal organs, radiologists and clinicians need to manually delineate organ boundaries in each slice of the 3D CT scans [2], [3]. However, manual segmentation is time-consuming and inherently subjective with inter-and intra-expert variability.