BACKGROUND
Kidney tumors are notorious for their conspicuous appearance in computed tomography (CT) imaging, and this has enabled important work by radiologists and surgeons to study the relationship between tumor size, shape, and appearance and its prospects for treatment. It’s laborious work, however, and it relies on assessments that are often subjective and imprecise. Automatic segmentation of renal tumors and surrounding anatomy is a promising tool for addressing these limitations: Segmentation-based assessments are objective and necessarily well-defined, and automation eliminates all effort save for the click of a button. Expanding on the 2019 Kidney Tumor Segmentation Challenge, KiTS21 aims to accelerate the development of reliable tools to address this need, while also serving as a high-quality benchmark for competing approaches to segmentation methods generally.

KiTS21 is a competition in which teams are invited to download a training set of 300 segmented CT scans and develop an approach for automating this segmentation task. Teams are asked to submit a short paper describing their approach via OpenReview by August 23, 2021. Once a team’s paper has been reviewed and accepted, that team will be invited to submit a Docker container with their model for evaluation on the private test set by September 13, 2021, after which their submission will be placed on the leaderboard.

Accepted papers will be published as satellite event proceedings in conjunction with MICCAI 2021.

PROGRAM CHAIRS
- Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos, PhD, University of Minnesota
- Christopher Weight, MD, Cleveland Clinic

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
- Nicholas Heller, University of Minnesota
- Fabian Isensee, German Cancer Research Center
- Dasha Trofimova, German Cancer Research Center
- Nicholas Austin, University of Massachusetts Lowell
- Rafat Soleiman, University of Minnesota
- Alison Leslie, University of Minnesota
- Emily Abramczyk, Cleveland Clinic
- Nik Damberg, University of Minnesota
- Resha Tejpaul, University of Minnesota
- Kellan Moore, Whitman College
- Devante Delbrune, University of Minnesota
- Brett Norling, University of Minnesota

CONTACT INFORMATION
If you have any questions, please contact Nicholas Heller at helle246@umn.edu