RibSeg Dataset and Strong Point Cloud Baselines for Rib Segmentation from CT Scans

Manual rib inspections in computed tomography (CT) scans are clinically critical but labor-intensive, as 24 ribs are typically elongated and oblique in 3D volumes. Automatic rib segmentation methods can speed up the process through rib measurement and visualization. However, prior arts mostly use in-house labeled datasets that are publicly unavailable and work on dense 3D volumes that are computationally inefficient. To address these issues, we develop a labeled rib segmentation benchmark, named RibSeg, including 490 CT scans (11,719 individual ribs) from a public dataset. For ground truth generation, we used existing morphology-based algorithms and manually refined its results. Then, considering the sparsity of ribs in 3D volumes, we thresholded and sampled sparse voxels from the input and designed a point cloud-based baseline method for rib segmentation. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art segmentation performance (Dice\(\approx95\%\)) with significant efficiency (\(10\sim40\times\) faster than prior arts). The RibSeg dataset, code, and model in PyTorch are available at https://github.com/M3DV/RibSeg. <strong>Note:</strong> This repository provides rib segmentation ("RibFrac31-rib-seg.nii.gz") and centerline ("RibFrac31-rib-cl.nii.gz") <em>annotations</em> for 490 cases in RibFrac dataset. Please download the corresponding CT <em>images </em>("RibFrac31-image.nii.gz") at https://ribfrac.grand-challenge.org/ (1-click registration is needed via <em>"Join"</em>).