Cao 2026 In-house cSS Test Set

This is a small clinical test set of patients with cortical superficial siderosis (cSS), the curvilinear hemosiderin deposits along the cortical surface that are a marker of cerebral amyloid angiopathy. Cao and colleagues used it to check whether a segmentation network trained only on procedurally generated images with synthetic cSS and microbleed labels works on real scans. The paper calls the set in-house. The authors are from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg and the German Centre for Neurodegenerative Diseases, but the paper does not say where the patients were scanned.

Composition

10 patients with confirmed cSS, 6 of them women, with a median age of 74.5 years (interquartile range 67 to 78). The set serves only as a test set. The paper reports no diagnoses beyond cSS and no information on how patients were selected.

Acquisition

Each patient has a susceptibility-weighted or T2*-weighted MRI. Field strength, scanner, vendor and voxel size of the real scans are not reported, nor how many patients had each sequence.

Annotations

A trained investigator delineated the cSS lesions by hand, and an experienced neuroradiologist validated the delineations. The paper evaluates voxel-level segmentation (AUPRC and AUROC) against these masks.

Known limitations

• Not publicly available, and no data availability statement or access route is published.
• Only 10 patients, one reader with neuroradiologist validation.
• Acquisition details and the holding site are not reported.
• The paper's microbleed evaluation used 13 ALFA scans from the VALDO 2021 challenge, which are covered by the VALDO 2021 entry, not by this one.