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CT MRI BrainColonHeartHippocampal formationLiverLungPancreasProstateSpleen

Medical Segmentation Decathlon

Medical Segmentation Decathlon (MSD)

CT and MRI volumes for ten different segmentation tasks, from brain tumours and heart to liver, prostate, lung, pancreas and colon, built to test whether one method can solve all of them without per-task tuning. 2,633 volumes in NIfTI under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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Overview

The Medical Segmentation Decathlon is a benchmark of ten 3D segmentation tasks, first run as a challenge at MICCAI 2018 to test whether one method can solve very different problems without manual tuning per task. It remains a common test bed for general-purpose segmentation methods.

Composition

Task Target Modality Volumes (train + test)
01 Brain tumour Oedema, enhancing and non-enhancing tumour MRI: T1w, T1w post-contrast, T2w, FLAIR 484 + 266
02 Heart Left atrium MRI 20 + 10
03 Liver Liver and tumour Contrast CT 131 + 70
04 Hippocampus Hippocampus head and body T1w MRI 263 + 131
05 Prostate Central gland and peripheral zone MRI: T2w, ADC 32 + 16
06 Lung Lung tumour CT 64 + 32
07 Pancreas Pancreas and mass Portal venous CT 282 + 139
08 Hepatic vessel Vessels and tumour Portal venous CT 303 + 140
09 Spleen Spleen Portal venous CT 41 + 20
10 Colon Colon cancer primaries Portal venous CT 126 + 64

Each task is a TAR file with a JSON descriptor, labelled training images and unlabelled test images, all converted to NIfTI in a common RAS orientation.

Acquisition

Sources include BraTS 2016/2017, the Left Atrial Segmentation Challenge (King's College London), LiTS, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Radboud University Medical Center, Stanford lung cancer data on TCIA, and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (pancreas, hepatic vessel, spleen, colon). Protocols vary within and across tasks.

Annotations

Experts drew or corrected labels, manually (e.g. hippocampus, colon) or semi-automatically with manual correction (hepatic vessels, spleen). The hippocampus cohort has 90 healthy adults and 105 with a psychotic disorder.

Known limitations

  • Subject counts and demographics are missing for most tasks; volumes are not patients.
  • The website lists 282 + 139 pancreas volumes but 420 in total, as does the paper.
  • Brain tumour data overlap with BraTS releases.

Cohort

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

Modality

Scans
  • CT 1,411 54%
  • MRI 1,222 46%

Table 1 in Simpson et al. 2019, dataset paper, arXiv 1902.09063

Anatomy

Scans
  • Brain 750 28%
  • Liver 644 24%
  • Pancreas 420 16%
  • Hippocampal formation 394 15%
  • Colon 190 7%
  • Lung 96 4%
  • Spleen 61 2%
  • Prostate 48 2%
  • Heart 30 1%

Table 1 in Simpson et al. 2019, dataset paper, arXiv 1902.09063

Condition

Groups can overlap

  • Psychotic disorder 105
  • Healthy control 90
  • Schizophrenia 56

p. 5 (Task04_Hippocampus) in Simpson et al. 2019, dataset paper, arXiv 1902.09063

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

Download from AWS or Google Drive; one TAR file per task. Test labels are not released.

Access page

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International

Use, share and adapt for any purpose with credit. Anything you share that is built on the data must use the same license.

Original license text Version read: 4.0 Checked 2026-10-07

What you can do

  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes

What you can share

  • Yes
  • Conditional
  • Conditional

What you must do

  • Yes
  • Yes
  • No
  • No
  • Manuscript review No
  • Release code No
  • Return results No
  • Delete after use No

Limits

  • No
  • Location limits No

Citation

Simpson AL, Antonelli M, Bakas S, et al. A large annotated medical image dataset for the development and evaluation of segmentation algorithms. arXiv:1902.09063 (2019). Antonelli M, Reinke A, Bakas S, et al. The Medical Segmentation Decathlon. Nature Communications 13, 4128 (2022).

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.