International benchmarking competitions have become fundamental for the comparative performance assessment of image analysis methods. However, little attention has been given to investigating what can be learnt from these competitions. Do they really generate scientific progress? What are common and successful participation strategies? What makes a solution superior to a competing method? To address this gap in the literature, we performed a multi-center study with all 80 competitions that were conducted in the scope of IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021. Statistical analyses performed based on comprehensive descriptions of the submitted algorithms linked to their rank as well as the underlying participation strategies revealed common characteristics of winning solutions. These typically include the use of multi-task learning (63%) and/or multi-stage pipelines (61%), and a focus on augmentation (100%), image preprocessing (97%), data curation (79%), and postprocessing (66%). The "typical" lead of a winning team is a computer scientist with a doctoral degree, five years of experience in biomedical image analysis, and four years of experience in deep learning. Two core general development strategies stood out for highly-ranked teams: the reflection of the metrics in the method design and the focus on analyzing and handling failure cases. According to the organizers, 43% of the winning algorithms exceeded the state of the art but only 11% completely solved the respective domain problem. The insights of our study could help researchers (1) improve algorithm development strategies when approaching new problems, and (2) focus on open research questions revealed by this work.

Quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) is a useful magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique which provides spatial distribution of magnetic susceptibility values of tissues. QSMs can be obtained by deconvolving the dipole kernel from phase images, but the spectral nulls in the dipole kernel make the inversion ill-posed. In recent times, deep learning approaches have shown a comparable QSM reconstruction performance as the classic approaches, despite the fast reconstruction time. Most of the existing deep learning methods are, however, based on supervised learning, so matched pairs of input phase images and the ground-truth maps are needed. Moreover, it was reported that the supervised learning often leads to underestimated QSM values. To address this, here we propose a novel unsupervised QSM deep learning method using physics-informed cycleGAN, which is derived from optimal transport perspective. In contrast to the conventional cycleGAN, our novel cycleGAN has only one generator and one discriminator thanks to the known dipole kernel. Experimental results confirm that the proposed method provides more accurate QSM maps compared to the existing deep learning approaches, and provide competitive performance to the best classical approaches despite the ultra-fast reconstruction.