https://autoimplant.grand-challenge.org/

Motivation

Cranioplasty is the surgical process where a skull defect, caused by a brain tumor surgery or trauma, is repaired using a cranial implant, which must fit precisely against the borders of the skull defect as replacement to the removed cranial bone. The design of the cranial implant is a challenging task and involves several steps: (1) obtaining the 3D imaging data of the skull with the defect from CT or MRI, (2) converting the 3D imaging data into a 3D mesh model and, (3) creating an implant as 3D mesh model for 3D printing. The last step usually requires expensive commercial software, which clinical institutions often have limited access to.  A video shows an example of interactive cranial implant design using  Geomagic Sculpt.  Researchers have been working with common CAD software as an alternative to the commercial software for the design of cranial implants whereas these approaches still involve intensive human interaction, which is time-consuming and requires expertise in the specific medical domain (see also a video for an example of cranial implant design performed using MeVisLab). Therefore, a fast and automatic design of cranial implants is highly desired, which would also enable  in-operation room (in-OR) manufacturing of the implants for the patient.

How to participate

The AutoImplant challenge, which is a half day MICCAI event,  will be officially presented at  MICCAI 2020 virtual conference on 08 October 2020 AM.  The challenge website is currently based on the grand-challenge platform. Users can request participation on this website to get access to the training and test dataset.  Please note that we will only approve requests from users with a complete profile (i.e., real name, valid email address and valid affiliation).  The presentation of the submitted methods and  results will be organized as part of the MICCAI virtual conference.  

Timeline (tentative)

• release of the training set:  June 03 2020 (completed!)
• release of the test set:  Aug. 01 2020
• submission period:  September 01 2020 –September 10, 2020
• presentation of  the (selected) methods/results:  on 08 October 2020 AM, MICCAI virtual conference

Publications

Participants can publish their methods independently, also as preprint, with an appropriate reference to the AutoImplant challenge. Depending on the outcome (e.g., number and quality of the submissions), we plan to coordinate a LNCS challenge proceeding, where the participants are invited to document and submit their solutions. The submitted papers will go through a peer-review process to be accepted. Additionally, for each of these submissions, two authors will be invited to contribute to an extended summary paper to be submitted to a top-tier journal.