# Automatic Organ and Pan-cancer Segmentation in Abdomen CT: the FLARE 2023 Challenge

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.12534 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12534/

## Key facts

- Cited by 23 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [UNETR: Transformers for 3D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10504/) (2021)
- [The Medical Segmentation Decathlon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05735/) (2021)
- [MetaFormer Is Actually What You Need for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11418/) (2021)
- [Identifying the Best Machine Learning Algorithms for Brain Tumor Segmentation, Progression Assessment, and Overall Survival Prediction in the BRATS Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.02629/) (2018)
- [The Liver Tumor Segmentation Benchmark (LiTS)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04056/) (2019)
- [AMOS: A Large-Scale Abdominal Multi-Organ Benchmark for Versatile Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08023/) (2022)
- [Embracing Imperfect Datasets: A Review of Deep Learning Solutions for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10454/) (2019)
- [CLIP-Driven Universal Model for Organ Segmentation and Tumor Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00785/) (2023)
- [Metrics reloaded: Recommendations for image analysis validation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01653/) (2022)
- [The state of the art in kidney and kidney tumor segmentation in contrast-enhanced CT imaging: Results of the KiTS19 Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01054/) (2019)
- [STU-Net: Scalable and Transferable Medical Image Segmentation Models Empowered by Large-Scale Supervised Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06716/) (2023)
- [Towards Generalizable Tumor Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19470/) (2024)
- [AbdomenAtlas: A Large-Scale, Detailed-Annotated, & Multi-Center Dataset for Efficient Transfer Learning and Open Algorithmic Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16697/) (2024)
- [Methods and open-source toolkit for analyzing and visualizing challenge results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05121/) (2019)
- [BIAS: Transparent reporting of biomedical image analysis challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04071/) (2019)
- [Label-Free Liver Tumor Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14869/) (2023)
- [Unleashing the Strengths of Unlabeled Data in Pan-cancer Abdominal Organ Quantification: the FLARE22 Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05862/) (2023)
- [Continual Learning for Abdominal Multi-Organ and Tumor Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00988/) (2023)
- [Universal and Extensible Language-Vision Models for Organ Segmentation and Tumor Detection from Abdominal Computed Tomography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18356/) (2024)
- [Learning from partially labeled data for multi-organ and tumor segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06894/) (2022)
- [PHTrans: Parallelly Aggregating Global and Local Representations for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04568/) (2022)
- [CancerUniT: Towards a Single Unified Model for Effective Detection, Segmentation, and Diagnosis of Eight Major Cancers Using a Large Collection of CT Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12291/) (2023)
- [Liver Tumor Screening and Diagnosis in CT with Pixel-Lesion-Patient Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08268/) (2023)
- [Two-Stage Hybrid Supervision Framework for Fast, Low-resource, and Accurate Organ and Pan-cancer Segmentation in Abdomen CT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05405/) (2023)
- [Boosting Medical Image-based Cancer Detection via Text-guided Supervision from Reports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14230/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [nnInteractive: Redefining 3D Promptable Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08373/) (2025)
- [Large-Scale 3D Medical Image Pre-training with Geometric Context Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09890/) (2024)
- [Touchstone Benchmark: Are We on the Right Way for Evaluating AI Algorithms for Medical Segmentation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03670/) (2024)
- [Primus: Enforcing Attention Usage for 3D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01835/) (2025)
- [PanTS: The Pancreatic Tumor Segmentation Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01291/) (2025)
- [LesionLocator: Zero-Shot Universal Tumor Segmentation and Tracking in 3D Whole-Body Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20985/) (2025)
- [Learning Segmentation from Radiology Reports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05582/) (2025)
- [MSWAL: 3D Multi-class Segmentation of Whole Abdominal Lesions Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13560/) (2025)
- [Expectation-Maximization as the Engine of Scalable Medical Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03410/) (2025)
- [Autoregressive Sequence Modeling for 3D Medical Image Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08691/) (2024)
- [Universal CT Representations from Anatomy to Disease Phenotype through Agglomerative Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21906/) (2026)
- [DRL-STNet: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Cross-modality Medical Image Segmentation via Disentangled Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18340/) (2024)
- [Auditing Significance, Metric Choice, and Demographic Fairness in Medical AI Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19091/) (2025)
- [Project Imaging-X: A Survey of 1000+ Open-Access Medical Imaging Datasets for Foundation Model Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27460/) (2026)
- [State of Abdominal CT Datasets: A Critical Review of Bias, Clinical Relevance, and Real-world Applicability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13626/) (2025)
- [Lite ENSAM: a lightweight cancer segmentation model for 3D Computed Tomography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01600/) (2025)
- [MeDUET: Disentangled Unified Pretraining for 3D Medical Image Synthesis and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17901/) (2026)
- [BenchX: Benchmarking AI Models for Cancer Detection and Localization with Demographic and Protocol Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24883/) (2026)
- [From Volumes to Slices: Computationally Efficient Contrastive Learning for Sequential Abdominal CT Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14593/) (2026)
- [MEDLAYXPLAIN: Benchmarking the Expert-Lay Gap in Medical Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.21194/) (2026)
- [SLIP: Segmentation with Low-latency Interactive Prompting for 3D Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22332/) (2026)
- [Merlin Plus: A Large-Scale, Multi-Cancer, Image-Mask-Report Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36436/) (2026)
- [Where to Look Matters: Rethinking Sub-Volume Sampling in 3D Medical Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13915/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Organ and cancer segmentation in abdomen Computed Tomography (CT) scans is the prerequisite for precise cancer diagnosis and treatment. Most existing benchmarks and algorithms are tailored to specific cancer types, limiting their ability to provide comprehensive cancer analysis. This work presents the first international competition on abdominal organ and pan-cancer segmentation by providing a large-scale and diverse dataset, including 4650 CT scans with various cancer types from over 40 medical centers. The winning team established a new state-of-the-art with a deep learning-based cascaded framework, achieving average Dice Similarity Coefficient scores of 92.3% for organs and 64.9% for lesions on the hidden multi-national testing set. The dataset and code of top teams are publicly available, offering a benchmark platform to drive further innovations https://codalab.lisn.upsaclay.fr/competitions/12239.