The goal of the Automated Cardiac Diagnosis Challenge (ACDC) challenge is to:

• compare the performance of automatic methods on the segmentation of the left ventricular endocardium and epicardium as the right ventricular endocardium for both end diastolic and end systolic phase instances;
• compare the performance of automatic methods for the classification of the examinations in five classes (normal case, heart failure with infarction, dilated cardiomyopathy, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, abnormal right ventricle).

The overall ACDC dataset was created from real clinical exams acquired at the University Hospital of Dijon. Acquired data were fully anonymized and handled within the regulations set by the local ethical committee of the Hospital of Dijon (France). Our dataset covers several well-defined pathologies with enough cases to (1) properly train machine learning methods and (2) clearly assess the variations of the main physiological parameters obtained from cine-MRI (in particular diastolic volume and ejection fraction). The dataset is composed of 150 exams (all from different patients) divided into 5 evenly distributed subgroups (4 pathological plus 1 healthy subject groups) as described below. Furthermore, each patient comes with the following additional information : weight, height, as well as the diastolic and systolic phase instants.

The database is made available to participants through two datasets from the dedicated online evaluation website after a personal registration: i) a training dataset of 100 patients along with the corresponding manual references based on the analysis of one clinical expert; ii) a testing dataset composed of 50 new patients, without manual annotations but with the patient information given above. The raw input images are provided through the Nifti format.