CMRxRecon2024: A Multi-Modality, Multi-View K-Space Dataset Boosting Universal Machine Learning for Accelerated Cardiac MRI

Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has emerged as a clinically gold-standard technique for diagnosing cardiac diseases, thanks to its ability to provide diverse information with multiple modalities and anatomical views. Accelerated cardiac MRI is highly expected to achieve time-efficient and patient-friendly imaging, and then advanced image reconstruction approaches are required to recover high-quality, clinically interpretable images from undersampled measurements. However, the lack of publicly available cardiac MRI k-space dataset in terms of both quantity and diversity has severely hindered substantial technological progress, particularly for data-driven artificial intelligence. Here, we provide a standardized, diverse, and high-quality CMRxRecon2024 dataset to facilitate the technical development, fair evaluation, and clinical transfer of cardiac MRI reconstruction approaches, towards promoting the universal frameworks that enable fast and robust reconstructions across different cardiac MRI protocols in clinical practice. To the best of our knowledge, the CMRxRecon2024 dataset is the largest and most diverse publicly available cardiac k-space dataset. It is acquired from 330 healthy volunteers, covering commonly used modalities, anatomical views, and acquisition trajectories in clinical cardiac MRI workflows. Besides, an open platform with tutorials, benchmarks, and data processing tools is provided to facilitate data usage, advanced method development, and fair performance evaluation.

An Empirical Study on the Fairness of Foundation Models for Multi-Organ Image Segmentation

The segmentation foundation model, e.g., Segment Anything Model (SAM), has attracted increasing interest in the medical image community. Early pioneering studies primarily concentrated on assessing and improving SAM's performance from the perspectives of overall accuracy and efficiency, yet little attention was given to the fairness considerations. This oversight raises questions about the potential for performance biases that could mirror those found in task-specific deep learning models like nnU-Net. In this paper, we explored the fairness dilemma concerning large segmentation foundation models. We prospectively curate a benchmark dataset of 3D MRI and CT scans of the organs including liver, kidney, spleen, lung and aorta from a total of 1056 healthy subjects with expert segmentations. Crucially, we document demographic details such as gender, age, and body mass index (BMI) for each subject to facilitate a nuanced fairness analysis. We test state-of-the-art foundation models for medical image segmentation, including the original SAM, medical SAM and SAT models, to evaluate segmentation efficacy across different demographic groups and identify disparities. Our comprehensive analysis, which accounts for various confounding factors, reveals significant fairness concerns within these foundational models. Moreover, our findings highlight not only disparities in overall segmentation metrics, such as the Dice Similarity Coefficient but also significant variations in the spatial distribution of segmentation errors, offering empirical evidence of the nuanced challenges in ensuring fairness in medical image segmentation.