The IBSR is a World Wide Web resou …
The IBSR is a World Wide Web resource providing access to magnetic resonance brain image data and segmentation results contributed and utilized by researchers from all over the world. Its purpose is to encourage the development and evaluation of segmentation methods by providing raw test and image data, human expert segmentation results, and methods for comparing segmentation results.

The field of medical image processing is growing rapidly. Many novel approaches to the segmentation, classification and shape analysis are being developed and reported. This poses a problem in the identification and selection of an optimal methodology once a specific analysis task has been identified. It has become virtually impossible for even a well equipped image processing laboratory to implement all of the methods that are published.

An alternative to local implementation of each method is the establishment of a local repository for image data and the results of any analysis. In this way, new analysis algorithms can be tested on common images, and the results directly compared between various methods and the human expert interpretation of the images. General data description: This repository is meant to contain standard test image data sets which will permit a standardized mechanism for evaluation of the sensitivity of a given analysis method to signal to noise ratio, contrast to noise ratio, shape complexity, degree of partial volume effect, etc.