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Open Imaging Index
Pathology slides Lymph node

CAMELYON16

Cancer Metastases in Lymph Nodes Challenge 2016

Whole-slide images of sentinel lymph nodes from breast cancer surgery, labelled for metastases with detailed tumour outlines, created for the first challenge on detecting metastases in digital pathology. About 400 H&E slides from two Dutch hospitals, released under CC0.

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Overview

CAMELYON16 is a collection of digitised lymph node sections from breast cancer surgery, created for the first challenge on detecting cancer metastases in whole-slide images. It was organised by Radboud University Medical Center and is widely used to develop and compare slide-level and pixel-level metastasis detection methods in computational pathology.

Composition

The slides are H&E-stained sections of sentinel lymph nodes. The data note on the combined CAMELYON dataset counts 399 slides for the CAMELYON16 part, while the challenge website speaks of 400:

Center Slides No metastasis Macro-metastasis Micro-metastasis
Radboud UMC, Nijmegen 249 150 48 51
UMC Utrecht 150 90 34 26

Slides containing only isolated tumour cells were not included in this part. The training data were released in two batches of 170 and 100 slides; a further 130 slides formed the challenge test set.

Acquisition

Cases were sampled from sentinel node procedures between 2006 and 2016, stratified so that metastasis-positive slides are over-represented. Radboud slides were scanned with a 3DHistech Pannoramic Flash II 250 and Utrecht slides with a Hamamatsu NanoZoomer-XR. Slides are stored as tiled, JPEG-compressed TIFF files at about 0.23 to 0.25 µm per pixel.

Annotations

A lab technician and a clinical PhD student outlined all metastases, and one of two expert breast pathologists checked every annotation. Consecutive sections stained for cytokeratin (immunohistochemistry) were used when the H&E slide was unclear. Outlines are provided as XML files and binary masks. The data note mentions that 15 slides may contain metastases that were not annotated.

Known limitations

  • Only two hospitals and two scanners, all in the Netherlands.
  • Positive slides are much more frequent than in clinical practice because of stratified sampling.
  • Some slides contain two sections of the same node, of which only one is annotated.
  • Patient demographics are not provided.

Cohort

Aggregate numbers from the sources below. Bars are relative to the largest value.

Condition

Slides

Groups can overlap

  • Lymph node metastasis 159 40%

Table 3 in Litjens et al. 2018, GigaScience (CAMELYON data note)

Split

Slides
  • Training 270 68%

From CAMELYON16 challenge data page

Condition by split

Slides

Reported cross table. A dot marks a cell the source does not give.

Training
Lymph node metastasis110

From CAMELYON16 challenge data page

Scanner vendor

Slides
  • 3DHISTECH 249 62%
  • Hamamatsu 150 38%

Table 3; Data collection section in Litjens et al. 2018, GigaScience (CAMELYON data note)

Scanner vendor by condition

Slides

Reported cross table. A dot marks a cell the source does not give.

Lymph node metastasis
3DHISTECH99
Hamamatsu60

Table 3 in Litjens et al. 2018, GigaScience (CAMELYON data note)

License and access

Our reading of the license, not legal advice. Before you use the data, read the original license and confirm that your use is allowed. We take no responsibility for how you use a dataset. Full disclaimer

Access
Open download

Download without an account

Shared through GigaDB, the AWS Registry of Open Data and Baidu Pan together with CAMELYON17.

Access page

Creative Commons Zero 1.0 Universal

Public domain dedication. Do anything with the data, including commercial use, without asking and without having to give credit.

Original license text Version read: 1.0 Checked 2026-10-07

What you can do

  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes

What you can share

  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes

What you must do

  • No
  • Share alike No
  • No
  • No
  • Manuscript review No
  • Release code No
  • Return results No
  • Delete after use No

Limits

  • No
  • Location limits No

Citation

Litjens G, Bandi P, Ehteshami Bejnordi B, et al. 1399 H&E-stained sentinel lymph node sections of breast cancer patients: the CAMELYON dataset. GigaScience 7, giy065 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1093/gigascience/giy065

Sources

Every number on this page comes from one of these documents. Each chart names the table or page it is taken from. The raw numbers are in stats.csv.