This collection consists of Computed Tomography (CT) images of the mediastinum and abdomen in which lymph node positions are marked by radiologists at the National Institutes of Health, Clinical Center. Radiologists at the Imaging Biomarkers and Computer-Aided Diagnosis Laboratory labeled a total of 388 mediastinal lymph nodes in CT images of 90 patients and a total of 595 abdominal lymph nodes in 86 patients.
The collection is aimed at the medical image computing community for developing and assessing computer-aided detection methods. Automated detection of lymph nodes can be an important clinical diagnostic tool but is very challenging due to the low contrast of surrounding structures in CT and to their varying sizes, poses, shapes and sparsely distributed locations. This data set is made available to make direct comparison to other detection methods in order to advance the state of the art.
