Datasets:
license: cc-by-3.0
task_categories:
- image-segmentation
tags:
- medical
- pet
- ct
- mri
- sarcoma
- oncology
- extremity
- tumor-segmentation
- rtstruct
- dicom
- tcia
- multimodal
pretty_name: Soft-tissue Sarcoma (joint FDG-PET/CT and MRI)
size_categories:
- n<1K
configs:
- config_name: default
data_files:
- split: preview
path: data/preview-*
dataset_info:
features:
- name: image
dtype: image
- name: mask
dtype: image
- name: overlay
dtype: image
- name: patient_id
dtype: string
- name: role
dtype: string
- name: frame
dtype: string
- name: sequence
dtype: string
- name: modality
dtype: string
- name: is_gold_tier
dtype: bool
- name: is_propagated
dtype: bool
- name: is_derived_crop
dtype: bool
- name: orientation
dtype: string
- name: n_slices
dtype: int32
- name: slice_index
dtype: int32
- name: mass_slice_frac
dtype: float32
- name: mass_px
dtype: int32
- name: edema_px
dtype: int32
- name: has_gtv_mass
dtype: bool
- name: has_gtv_edema
dtype: bool
- name: uses_alias_roi_names
dtype: bool
- name: roi_names
dtype: string
- name: image_series_uid
dtype: string
- name: rtstruct_uid
dtype: string
- name: lung_mets
dtype: int32
- name: grade
dtype: string
- name: site
dtype: string
- name: histology
dtype: string
- name: mskcc_type
dtype: string
- name: mri_to_pet_days
dtype: int32
splits:
- name: preview
num_bytes: 29167123
num_examples: 306
download_size: 29149250
dataset_size: 29167123
Soft-tissue-Sarcoma (STS)
A TCIA collection of 51 patients with histologically proven soft-tissue sarcoma of the extremities, each imaged with joint pre-treatment FDG-PET/CT and MRI and contoured by an expert radiation oncologist. Collected at McGill University Health Centre (Montreal) and published with Vallières et al., Phys Med Biol 2015.
The original study built a radiomics model predicting lung metastases from joint PET/MRI texture features; 19 of the 51 patients developed lung metastases.
Dataset Details
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Modalities | FDG-PET, CT, MRI (T1 + T2FS-or-STIR) + DICOM RTSTRUCT contours |
| Body part | EXTREMITY (all 612 series) — 28/51 thigh, remainder other limb/girdle sites |
| Task | 3D tumour segmentation (single foreground structure) |
| Patients | 51 — STS_001 … STS_051, contiguous, no gaps |
| Studies | 102 — exactly 2 per patient (one MRI session, one PET/CT session) |
| Series | 612 = 51 CT + 51 PT + 204 MR + 306 RTSTRUCT (exactly 12 per patient) |
| Images | 38,283 DICOM |
| Size | 9.19 GiB (TCIA quotes 9.87 GB) |
| Scanners | PET/CT: GE Discovery ST. MRI: GE / Philips / Siemens / Varian (multi-vendor) |
| License | CC BY 3.0 Unported — commercial use permitted |
| DOI | 10.7937/K9/TCIA.2015.7GO2GSKS |
| Registration | None — fully public |
There is no official train/val/test split and no named subsets. Splitting is
left to the consumer. Natural strata that do exist: lung metastases 19 / 32,
T2FS 26 / STIR 25, GTV_Edema present 32 / absent 19.
Per-patient structure — 6 image series + 6 RTSTRUCT
Every one of the 51 patients has exactly the same 12 series, in two frames of reference:
| Frame | Image series | Paired RTSTRUCT | n |
|---|---|---|---|
| Native MRI | MR T1 | RTstruct_T1 |
51 |
| Native MRI | MR T2FS or STIR | RTstruct_T2FS / RTstruct_STIR |
26 / 25 |
| PET/CT | CT | RTstruct_CT |
51 |
| PET/CT | PT (FDG-PET) | RTstruct_PET |
51 |
| PET/CT (crop) | Aligned_T1toPET_BOX |
RTstruct_AlignedT1toPET |
51 |
| PET/CT (crop) | Aligned_{T2FS,STIR}toPET_BOX |
RTstruct_Aligned{T2FS,STIR}toPET |
26 / 25 |
T2FS and STIR are mutually exclusive and partition all 51 patients. The paper treats STIR as a fallback under the "T2FS" umbrella: "When T2-weighted fat-saturated scans were not available, STIR scans were used (n = 25)."
Ground truth — one hand-drawn tier, five propagated
There is a single annotator (an expert radiation oncologist), so there is no inter-rater ambiguity. What varies is drawn versus derived:
- Gold / primary:
RTstruct_T2FS(26) andRTstruct_STIR(25) — contours were manually drawn slice-by-slice on the T2FS/STIR scans. This is the tier the paper's features were extracted from. - Propagated: the other four tiers (
RTstruct_T1,RTstruct_CT,RTstruct_PET,RTstruct_Aligned*toPET) are MIM Software rigid-registration propagations of those contours onto the other grids.
⚠️ ROIGenerationAlgorithm = MANUAL on all 306 objects, including the
propagated ones — the DICOM tag does not distinguish drawn from derived. Use
the tier table above, not the tag.
⚠️ The PET/CT-frame masks cross a large time gap. The MRI and PET/CT sessions are a median 21 days apart (mean 20.5; range 0–63 days; only 3 same-day; 32/51 more than 14 days; 10/51 more than 30 days; the PET/CT session never precedes the MRI). The PET/CT-frame contours are rigid propagations across that much repositioning, so they are geometrically approximate. Neubauer et al. (MICCAI 2020) found it necessary to have a nuclear medicine physician re-delineate on PET rather than trust them.
Two ROIs, and they are nested
| ROI | Patients | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
GTV_Mass |
51 (all) | tumour mass, excluding peritumoural edema — the paper's reference target |
GTV_Edema |
32 | tumour including peritumoural edema — secondary, used in the paper only to probe segmentation-uncertainty |
⚠️ GTV_Edema is a nested superset of GTV_Mass, not a disjoint class. Across
all 32 patients the in-plane area ratio is ≥ 1.031 (median 1.29, max 8.74), and
the edema slice set is a superset of the mass slice set for 31/32 — the sole
exception, STS_021, has exactly one mass slice with no edema contour.
Build these as two independent binary targets, never as a {0,1,2} label map.
A label map assigns "edema" only to the rim annulus GTV_Edema \ GTV_Mass, which
is not a structure anyone annotated and scores meaninglessly.
Loader gotchas — verified against all 612 series and all 306 RTSTRUCT objects
These are easy to get silently wrong. series_to_patient.json and pairs.json
(shipped at repo root) pre-resolve all of them.
SeriesDescriptionis typo-ridden. RTSTRUCT carriesRTStruct_CT,RTStruct_PET,RTstruct_AlignedT!toPET(bang instead of a 1),RTstruct_Aligned_T1toPET/_STIRtoPET(stray underscore), plus stray_BOXsuffixes; the MR side hasAlligned_T1toPET_BOX(double L). After case-insensitive normalisation the counts land exactly on 51/51/51/26/25/51/26/25 = 306.Native-MR T1-vs-T2FS/STIR is NOT readable from the description. The 102 native MR series carry free-text clinical protocol names —
AX STIR,Axial FSE/T2 Fatsat,KNEE *AXT2SP,eT1W_TSE_ax SENSE W PICT-PLUS,2. AXIAL T1 BOTH LEGS - RESEARCH… Resolve the sequence by following the normalised RTSTRUCT back throughReferencedFrameOfReferenceSequenceto the series it references.pairs.jsonhas already done this.The other 102 MR series are MIM-derived crops, distinguishable only by
ManufacturercontainingMIM Software(e.g.SIEMENS / MIM Software). TheAligned_*_BOXvolumes are tumour-centred crops, not full FOV (e.g. 153×123×60), though self-consistent — 0% out-of-bounds contour vertices.ROI order is not stable. 12 of the 192 two-ROI objects list
GTV_Edemafirst. Map byROIName, never byROINumberor sequence index.STS_046renames its ROIs. On its PET/CT-frame RTSTRUCTs the names areGTV_Research(= mass) andGTV_Res+edema(= edema). Hard-matching the literal string"GTV_Mass"yields a silently empty mask for that patient. Match with an alias set.Never group contours by z — the gold scans are not all axial. Of the 51 annotated T2FS/STIR scans, 45 are axial, 4 coronal and 2 sagittal (for the 32 edema patients specifically: 27 / 4 / 1), and contours are slightly oblique. Use
ReferencedSOPInstanceUID— it is present on every contour, and every referenced SOP exists in its series.Foreground is sparse on the PET/CT grid, but not on the gold tier.
GTV_Masscovers a median of only 13.6% of CT slices (min 5.6%, max 36.3%; 14/51 patients under 10%), so adebug_n_samples: 1smoke test against the PET/CT frame will look degenerate through no fault of the loader. The gold T2FS/STIR tier is not sparse — median 50.0% slice coverage (min 20.0%, max 90.0%, none under 15%), so single-sample debug runs on the default target behave normally.Frames of reference. T1 and T2FS/STIR share one
FrameOfReferenceUID(same MRI session), so T1↔T2FS propagation is geometrically trivial; the PET/CT frame is separate.Dates are shifted for de-identification (intervals preserved), so
StudyDatevalues are not real. 84 of the 612 series carryDateReleased = 2020-05-21— a partial resubmission over the 2015 release.
Cross-dataset overlap
- ⚠️ SAROS shares 6 patients:
STS_001,STS_007,STS_008,STS_026,STS_040,STS_044→ SAROScase_815,case_636,case_678,case_714,case_703,case_753. The cross-reference lives in TCIA's Segmentation-Info CSV undertcia_case_id. SAROS labels body regions, not tumour, so the risk is CT-image contamination rather than tumour-label leakage. - ⚠️ MSTT-199 uses all 51 of these patients as its external test set (reported Dice 0.79 U-Net / 0.80 LiteMedSAM). Do not train on STS and evaluate on MSTT-199.
- No overlap with MSD (no sarcoma task), the BraTS family, MedSAM's training
corpus, SA-Med2D-20M, autoPET, HECKTOR (same PI and lab, different patients and
disease), QIN-SARCOMA (OHSU, DCE-MRI only, no segmentations), or TCGA-SARC
(disjoint cohort — TCGA-SARC has no McGill/Montreal site, and its TCIA arm is
5
TCGA-QQ-*patients). - ⚠️
INFOclinical_STS.xlsxhas no cross-reference ID column. ItsMSKCC typecolumn is a histological classification scheme (Liposarcoma / Leiomyosarcoma / MFH / Other) — not a link to MSKCC or TCGA.
Provenance
Official, author-deposited TCIA collection. All 51 patients from the paper are present — no count mismatch. Third-party re-hosts exist and all of them misstate the license or the content; prefer this mirror or TCIA directly:
| Re-host | Problem |
|---|---|
Kaggle 4quant/soft-tissue-sarcoma |
HDF5 at 5 mm isotropic, PET/CT only — no MRI; ~4% of the original |
reasat/sts-reg |
NIfTI, T1→T2 registered; claims CC0 (understates CC BY 3.0) |
husnainrasool/tcia-sarcoma-ds |
verbatim re-upload but claims MIT (wrong license class) |
| hyper.ai listing | labels it Non-Commercial — incorrect; CC BY 3.0 permits commercial use |
Faithful-naming disclosures for this mirror:
- 25 of the 51 "T2FS" scans are actually STIR — the paper's own umbrella term, not a mirroring error.
- Half the MR series (102/204) are derived MIM registered crops, not raw acquisitions. This is a raw + derived mix, exactly as TCIA publishes it.
- Body part is tagged
EXTREMITYthroughout, but roughly 10/51 primary sites are girdle/trunk (buttock, pelvis, groin, parascapular) rather than true limb.
Structure
images/<PatientID>/<SeriesInstanceUID>/*.dcm # CT, PT, MR — 306 series
segmentations/<PatientID>/<SeriesInstanceUID>/*.dcm # RTSTRUCT — 306 objects
clinical/INFOclinical_STS.xlsx # demographics + outcome vector
clinical/Soft-tissue-Sarcoma-nbia-digest.xlsx # official NBIA series digest
series_to_patient.json # all 612 series, normalised `role`
pairs.json # RTSTRUCT -> image series + ROI names
LICENSE.txt
series_to_patient.json keys each SeriesInstanceUID to PatientID,
StudyInstanceUID, Modality, SeriesDescription, a normalised role
(ct, pet, mr_t1, mr_t2fs, mr_stir, aligned_t1_to_pet,
aligned_t2fs_to_pet, aligned_stir_to_pet), Manufacturer, ImageCount,
FileSize, license/DOI and the relative path.
pairs.json keys each RTSTRUCT SeriesInstanceUID to the
image_series_uid it is drawn on (resolved from
ReferencedFrameOfReferenceSequence, not from the typo-ridden description),
frame_of_reference_uid, the literal roi_names, roi_names_with_contours,
n_referenced_sop, and the boolean flags has_gtv_mass, has_gtv_edema and
uses_alias_roi_names. Pairing therefore needs no TCIA round-trip and no
description parsing.
Benchmark reference point
Neubauer et al., Soft Tissue Sarcoma Co-Segmentation in Combined MRI and PET/CT Data (MICCAI MMMI 2020, arXiv:2008.12544): 39/51 patients after cropping to the leg region, 5-fold CV — best T2 Dice 77.2 ± 16.5%, PET Dice 74.6 ± 19.0%, T2-only baseline 65.6 ± 24.0%. They resampled in-plane to 0.75 mm and kept the native T2 slice distance to avoid interpolation artifacts.
Source & Citation
- TCIA collection: https://www.cancerimagingarchive.net/collection/soft-tissue-sarcoma/
- DOI:
10.7937/K9/TCIA.2015.7GO2GSKS
@article{vallieres2015sts,
author = {Valli{\`e}res, Martin and Freeman, Carolyn R. and
Skamene, Sonia R. and El Naqa, Issam},
title = {A radiomics model from joint {FDG-PET} and {MRI} texture features
for the prediction of lung metastases in soft-tissue sarcomas of
the extremities},
journal = {Physics in Medicine and Biology},
volume = {60},
number = {14},
pages = {5471--5496},
year = {2015},
doi = {10.1088/0031-9155/60/14/5471}
}
@misc{vallieres2015stsdata,
author = {Valli{\`e}res, M. and Freeman, C. R. and Skamene, S. R. and
El Naqa, I.},
title = {A radiomics model from joint {FDG-PET} and {MRI} texture features
for the prediction of lung metastases in soft-tissue sarcomas of
the extremities [Data set]},
year = {2015},
publisher = {The Cancer Imaging Archive},
doi = {10.7937/K9/TCIA.2015.7GO2GSKS}
}
@article{clark2013tcia,
author = {Clark, Kenneth and Vendt, Bruce and Smith, Kirk and others},
title = {The Cancer Imaging Archive ({TCIA}): Maintaining and Operating a
Public Information Repository},
journal = {Journal of Digital Imaging},
volume = {26},
number = {6},
pages = {1045--1057},
year = {2013},
doi = {10.1007/s10278-013-9622-7}
}