The Circle of Willis (CoW) is an important network of arteries connecting major circulations of the brain. Its vascular architecture is believed to affect the risk, severity, and clinical outcome of serious neuro-vascular diseases. However, characterizing the highly variable CoW anatomy is still a manual and time-consuming expert task. The CoW is usually imaged by two angiographic imaging modalities, magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) and computed tomography angiography (CTA), but there exist limited public datasets with annotations on CoW anatomy, especially for CTA. Therefore we organized the TopCoW Challenge in 2023 with the release of an annotated CoW dataset. The TopCoW dataset was the first public dataset with voxel-level annotations for thirteen possible CoW vessel components, enabled by virtual-reality (VR) technology. It was also the first large dataset with paired MRA and CTA from the same patients. TopCoW challenge formalized the CoW characterization problem as a multiclass anatomical segmentation task with an emphasis on topological metrics. We invited submissions worldwide for the CoW segmentation task, which attracted over 140 registered participants from four continents. The top performing teams managed to segment many CoW components to Dice scores around 90%, but with lower scores for communicating arteries and rare variants. There were also topological mistakes for predictions with high Dice scores. Additional topological analysis revealed further areas for improvement in detecting certain CoW components and matching CoW variant topology accurately. TopCoW represented a first attempt at benchmarking the CoW anatomical segmentation task for MRA and CTA, both morphologically and topologically.

Learning about diagnostic features and related clinical information from dental radiographs is important for dental research. However, the lack of expert-annotated data and convenient search tools poses challenges. Our primary objective is to design a search tool that uses a user's query for oral-related research. The proposed framework, Contrastive LAnguage Image REtrieval Search for dental research, Dental CLAIRES, utilizes periapical radiographs and associated clinical details such as periodontal diagnosis, demographic information to retrieve the best-matched images based on the text query. We applied a contrastive representation learning method to find images described by the user's text by maximizing the similarity score of positive pairs (true pairs) and minimizing the score of negative pairs (random pairs). Our model achieved a hit@3 ratio of 96% and a Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) of 0.82. We also designed a graphical user interface that allows researchers to verify the model's performance with interactions.

These findings are documented based on interpretations from imaging examinations (e.g., fundus examination), complications or outcomes associated with surgeries (e.g., cataract surgery), and experiences or symptoms shared by patients. Such findings are oftentimes described along with their exact eye locations as well as other contextual information such as their timing and status. Thus, ophthalmology notes comprise of spatial relations between eye findings and their corresponding locations, and these findings are further described using different spatial characteristics such as laterality and size. Although there has been recent advancements in using natural language processing (NLP) methods in the ophthalmology domain, they are mainly targeted for specific ocular conditions. Some work leveraged electronic health record text data to identify conditions such as glaucoma [1], herpes zoster ophthalmicus [2], and exfoliation syndrome [3], while another set of work extracted quantitative measures particularly related to visual acuity [4, 5] and microbial keratitis [6]. In this work, we aim to extract more comprehensive information related to all eye findings, covering both spatial and contextual, from the ophthalmology notes. Besides automated screening and diagnosis of various ocular conditions, identifying such detailed information can aid in applications such as automated monitoring of eye findings or diseases and cohort retrieval for retrospective epidemiological studies. For this, we propose to extend our existing radiology spatial representation schema-Rad-SpatialNet [7] to the ophthalmology domain. We refer to this as the Eye-SpatialNet schema in this paper.