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TopBrain Segmentation Challenge for Whole Brain Vessel Anatomy

Yang, K.; Shi, P.; Huang, H.; Musio, F.; Baazaoui, H.; Aydin, O. U.; Hilbert, A.; Hamadache, R. E.; Yalcin, C.; Zhang, M.; Falcetta, D.; de la Rosa, E.; Shit, S.; Prabhakar, C.; Wittmann, B.; Rokuss, M. R.; Kirchhoff, Y.; Al-Maskari, R.; Hoeher, L.; Juchler, N.; Casamitjana, A.; Cleary, J.; Schmick, A.; Baumgartner, P.; Deseoe, J.; Vandans, O.; Lee, D.; Oh, K.; LaBella, D.; Mazher, M.; Niederer, S. A.; Qayyum, A.; Liu, Y.; Chen, J.; Kim, W.; Asawalertsak, N.; Kim, M.; Shin, D.; Park, S.-H.; Kikuchi, S.; Zhang, Y.; Liu, J.; Cui, Y.; Qiu, Y.; Verschuur, A.; Zhang, J.; van der Schaaf, I.; Su, R.;

2026-05-30 radiology and imaging
10.64898/2026.05.28.26354312 medRxiv
Show abstract

We present the TopBrain 2025 Challenge, the first benchmark for fine-grained multiclass segmentation of the whole brain vasculature in both computed tomography angiography (CTA) and magnetic resonance angiography (MRA). Building on the TopCoW challenge, TopBrain scales vessel annotation from the Circle of Willis to the entire brain, introducing a dataset of 90 annotated volumes across 48 landmark vessel classes spanning arterial and venous systems, of which 50 training volumes are publicly released. Vessel definitions were consolidated from established neuroanatomical references into a unified annotation scheme, and vessel caliber measurements along the centerline are reported for the first time across the whole brain vascular anatomy. To address the unique challenges of multiclass brain vessel segmentation, we propose an evaluation framework that accounts for detection in segmentation performance, assesses anatomical plausibility, and introduces novel contamination metrics that characterize inter-class prediction errors. Fifteen teams from over 220 registered participants submitted algorithms to the benchmark. The top-performing teams built on nnUNet with principled system design choices, achieving around 80% Dice scores, near-zero invalid neighbor counts, over 60% F1 scores for side-road vessels, and below 18% foreground contamination ratio. Larger vessels are easier to segment, while smaller and more complex vessels remain the true bottleneck. The annotated datasets and podium-finish algorithms are made publicly available on Zenodo.

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