Unified-protocol voxel-level pulmonary embolism annotations for three public CT angiography datasets
Reliable clot-volume quantification and subsequent risk assessment in pulmonary embolism depend on precise segmentation of emboli on computed tomography pulmonary angiography. Deep learning models for this task must be trained on accurate voxel-level labels. The three public datasets that provide such labels were annotated under different protocols, and some of their studies contain unlabeled emboli or labels that are discontinuous across slices. This Data Descriptor presents voxel-level pulmonary embolism annotations for 149 of the 166 studies in these datasets. A primary rater drew all annotations under a single protocol. A thoracic radiologist with more than 20 years of experience reviewed and revised them. Three raters at three different centers independently annotated a subset of 15 studies. The subset was selected by source dataset and embolus location. Technical validation quantifies volumetric agreement with the source annotations, changes in within-mask attenuation, and inter-rater agreement on the subset. The dataset is intended to allow segmentation models to be developed and compared under a common reference standard.