ECPC-IDS: A benchmark endometrial cancer PET/CT image dataset for evaluation of semantic segmentation and detection of hypermetabolic regions.

Background: Endometrial cancer is one of the most common tumors in the female reproductive system and is the third most common gynecological malignancy that causes death after ovarian and cervical cancer. Early diagnosis can significantly improve the 5-year survival rate of patients. With the development of artificial intelligence, computer-assisted diagnosis plays an increasingly important role in improving the accuracy and objectivity of diagnosis and reducing the workload of doctors. However, the absence of publicly available image datasets restricts the application of computer-assisted diagnostic techniques.

Methods: In this paper, a publicly available Endometrial Cancer PET/CT Image Dataset for Evaluation of Semantic Segmentation and Detection of Hypermetabolic Regions (ECPC-IDS) are published. Specifically, the segmentation section includes PET and CT images, with 7159 images in multiple formats totally. In order to prove the effectiveness of segmentation on ECPC-IDS, six deep learning semantic segmentation methods are selected to test the image segmentation task. The object detection section also includes PET and CT images, with 3579 images and XML files with annotation information totally. Eight deep learning methods are selected for experiments on the detection task.

Results: This study is conduct using deep learning-based semantic segmentation and object detection methods to demonstrate the distinguishability on ECPC-IDS. From a separate perspective, the minimum and maximum values of Dice on PET images are 0.546 and 0.743, respectively. The minimum and maximum values of Dice on CT images are 0.012 and 0.510, respectively. The target detection section's maximum mAP values on PET and CT images are 0.993 and 0.986, respectively.

Conclusion: As far as we know, this is the first publicly available dataset of endometrial cancer with a large number of multi-modality images. ECPC-IDS can assist researchers in exploring new algorithms to enhance computer-assisted diagnosis, benefiting both clinical doctors and patients. ECPC-IDS is also freely published for non-commercial at: https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/ECPC-IDS/23808258.