Accurate lesion segmentation is critical in stroke rehabilitation research for the quantification of lesion burden and accurate image processing. Current automated lesion segmentation methods for T1-weighted (T1w) MRIs, commonly used in rehabilitation research, lack accuracy and reliability. Manual segmentation remains the gold standard, but it is time-consuming, subjective, and requires significant neuroanatomical expertise. However, many methods developed with ATLAS v1.2 report low accuracy, are not publicly accessible or are improperly validated, limiting their utility to the field. Here we present ATLAS v2.0 (N=1271), a larger dataset of T1w stroke MRIs and manually segmented lesion masks that includes training (public. n=655), test (masks hidden, n=300), and generalizability (completely hidden, n=316) data. Algorithm development using this larger sample should lead to more robust solutions, and the hidden test and generalizability datasets allow for unbiased performance evaluation via segmentation challenges. We anticipate that ATLAS v2.0 will lead to improved algorithms, facilitating large-scale stroke rehabilitation research.

Official Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-022-01401-7