Skip to content
Open Imaging Index
MRI Brain

VALDO 2021

Where is VALDO? VAscular Lesions DetectiOn and segmentation challenge at MICCAI 2021

Training data of the MICCAI 2021 VALDO challenge: brain MRI from the SABRE, Rotterdam Scan Study and ALFA cohorts with manual labels of enlarged perivascular spaces (40 cases), cerebral microbleeds on T2* (72) and lacunes (40).

Go to dataset Edit Report

Overview

VALDO 2021 ("Where is VALDO?") was a MICCAI 2021 challenge run by University College London and Erasmus MC on the automated detection and segmentation of three small markers of cerebral small vessel disease on brain MRI: enlarged perivascular spaces (Task 1), cerebral microbleeds (Task 2) and lacunes (Task 3). The training data is public on Zenodo; the validation and test cases stayed with the organisers.

Composition

Cases come from three population cohorts: SABRE (London, UK), the Rotterdam Scan Study (RSS, Netherlands) and ALFA (Barcelona, Spain, cognitively normal relatives of people with Alzheimer's disease). Tasks 1 and 3 use SABRE and RSS with 40 training and 66 test cases each. Task 2 adds ALFA and has 72 training and 147 test cases. Each task also had 5 RSS validation cases. According to the challenge design document, the RSS training subjects are the same in all tasks and the training subjects of Tasks 1 and 3 are identical, so the 152 training cases are not 152 different people. No age, sex or clinical information is shipped with the images.

Acquisition

SABRE was scanned on a Philips 3T system, RSS on a dedicated GE 1.5T scanner and ALFA on a GE Discovery 3T. Tasks 1 and 3 provide T1w, T2w and FLAIR registered to T1w space. Task 2 provides T2*-weighted gradient echo with T1w and T2w registered to T2* space; slice thickness of the T2* ranges from 0.8 mm (RSS) to 3 mm (SABRE, ALFA). All images were defaced and RSS scans were bias-field corrected. Files are NIfTI.

Annotations

Task 1 labels are mixed: SABRE slabs segmented by two raters, six RSS cases segmented in selected slices and regions, and 28 RSS cases with counts only, plus region masks and per-region count tables. Task 2 has full-brain microbleed segmentations for every case, following BOMBS or the Rotterdam protocol. Task 3 has full-brain lacune segmentations from two raters for every case.

Known limitations

  • Training sets are small and the test labels are not public.
  • Task 1 training labels are weak (counts or partial segmentations), and the two cohorts used different PVS criteria.
  • The Zenodo license field says CC BY-NC 4.0 while the record text and paper say CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
  • Overlap between the Task 1 and Task 3 test sets is not reported, so no total subject count is given.

Cohort

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

Contrast / sequence

subjects, values can overlap

  • T2*-weighted 224

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

Only the training set is on Zenodo, as one archive per task. The validation and test cases were never released.

Access page

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

Non-commercial use only, with credit. Anything you share that is built on the data must use the same license.

The Zenodo record text, the challenge paper and the challenge design document name CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. The license field in the Zenodo metadata shows CC BY-NC 4.0. Users are asked to acknowledge the listed funders, cite the cohort papers, and for Task 2 data add "for the ALFA Study" as corporate author with the listed contributors.

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

What you can do

  • No
  • Conditional
  • Yes
  • Yes

What you can share

  • Conditional
  • 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

Sudre CH, Van Wijnen K, Dubost F, et al. Where is VALDO? VAscular Lesions Detection and segmentatiOn challenge at MICCAI 2021. Medical Image Analysis 91, 103029 (2024). doi:10.1016/j.media.2023.103029

All numbers

Every number on this page, as stored in stats.csv, with its source.

MeasureBreakdownValueSource
Subjectscontrast=T2starw
Task 2 (microbleeds): 72 training + 147 test + 5 validation cases, summed; the paper states there was no overlap between the three sets
224sudre2022
Table 2 and Section 2.4.2
Subjectscontrast=T2starw;split=train
Task 2 training set (on Zenodo)
72sudre2022
Table 2
Subjectscontrast=T2starw;split=test
Task 2 test set (not released)
147sudre2022
Table 2
Subjectscontrast=T2starw;split=validation
Task 2 validation cases, all from RSS (not released)
5sudre2022
Section 2.4.2
Subjectscontrast=T2starw;country=GB
SABRE: 11 training + 20 test
31sudre2022
Table 2
Subjectscontrast=T2starw;country=NL
RSS: 34 training + 68 test + 5 validation
107sudre2022
Table 2 and Section 2.4.2
Subjectscontrast=T2starw;country=ES
ALFA: 27 training + 59 test
86sudre2022
Table 2
Subjectscontrast=T2starw;country=GB;split=train
SABRE
11sudre2022
Table 2
Subjectscontrast=T2starw;country=NL;split=train
RSS
34sudre2022
Table 2
Subjectscontrast=T2starw;country=ES;split=train
ALFA
27sudre2022
Table 2
Subjectscontrast=T2starw;country=GB;split=test
SABRE
20sudre2022
Table 2
Subjectscontrast=T2starw;country=NL;split=test
RSS
68sudre2022
Table 2
Subjectscontrast=T2starw;country=ES;split=test
ALFA
59sudre2022
Table 2
Subjectscontrast=T2starw;vendor=philips
SABRE cases (Philips 3T)
31sudre2022
Table 2 and Section 2.4.1
Subjectscontrast=T2starw;vendor=ge
RSS (GE 1.5T) 107 + ALFA (GE Discovery 3T) 86
193sudre2022
Table 2 and Section 2.4.1
Subjectscontrast=T2starw;field_strength=3
SABRE 31 + ALFA 86
117sudre2022
Table 2 and Section 2.4.1
Subjectscontrast=T2starw;field_strength=1.5
RSS 107
107sudre2022
Table 2 and Section 2.4.1
Subjectscontrast=FLAIR;split=train
Task 1 (perivascular spaces) and Task 3 (lacunes) each have 40 training cases (SABRE 6, RSS 34); the challenge design document says both tasks use the same training subjects
40sudre2022
Table 2
Subjectscontrast=FLAIR;country=GB;split=train
SABRE training cases of Tasks 1 and 3
6sudre2022
Table 2
Subjectscontrast=FLAIR;country=NL;split=train
RSS training cases of Tasks 1 and 3
34sudre2022
Table 2

Sources

The keys used in the table above.