🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the lack of a unified, machine-verifiable data specification in medical imaging AI, which hinders consistent dataset structure, annotation provenance, quality documentation, and ML-readiness. To bridge this gap, we propose VIDS—an open standard that, for the first time, integrates standardized folder organization, naming conventions, annotation provenance schemas, and quality documentation within a single framework, along with 21 machine-verifiable rules. Built around the NIfTI working format while preserving DICOM metadata, VIDS provides an open-source validator installable via PyPI and supports export to mainstream frameworks such as nnU-Net, MONAI, and COCO. Evaluation reveals that four widely used datasets comply with only 20–39% of VIDS dimensions. We also release LIDC-Hybrid-100, a fully compliant reference dataset comprising 100 CT scans annotated by consensus among four radiologists (mean Dice: 0.7765), which passes all 21 validation checks.
📝 Abstract
Medical imaging AI development is fundamentally dependent on annotated datasets, yet no existing standard provides machine-enforceable validation across dataset structure, annotation provenance, quality documentation, and ML readiness within a single framework. DICOM standardizes image acquisition, storage, and communication at the individual study level. BIDS organizes neuroimaging research datasets with consistent naming conventions. Neither addresses the curation layer, viz., who annotated what, when, with what tool, and to what quality standard.
This paper presents VIDS (Verified Imaging Dataset Standard), an open specification that defines folder layout, file naming, annotation provenance schemas, quality documentation, and 21 machine-enforceable validation rules across two compliance profiles. VIDS uses NIfTI as a canonical working format while preserving full DICOM metadata in sidecars for traceability, and supports export to any downstream ML framework (nnU-Net, MONAI, COCO, flat NIfTI) without loss of provenance.
Twenty-two compliance dimensions are defined and four major public datasets -- LIDC-IDRI, BraTS, CheXpert, and the Medical Segmentation Decathlon -- are benchmarked against these dimensions. Even widely used datasets satisfy only 20--39% of these dimensions, with provenance and quality documentation as the largest systematic gaps. LIDC-Hybrid-100 is released as a 100-subject VIDS-compliant reference CT dataset with consensus segmentation masks from four radiologist annotations (mean pairwise Dice 0.7765), validating 21/21 on the Full compliance profile.
VIDS is fully open source: the specification is CC BY 4.0, all tools are Apache 2.0, the reference validator is available on PyPI (pip install vids-validator), and LIDC-Hybrid-100 is published on Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19582717).