The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

胎儿镜检查激光​​光凝是一种广泛采用的方法，用于治疗双胞胎输血综合征（TTTS）。该过程涉及光凝病理吻合术以调节双胞胎之间的血液交换。由于观点有限，胎儿镜的可操作性差，可见性差和照明的可变性，因此该程序尤其具有挑战性。这些挑战可能导致手术时间增加和消融不完全。计算机辅助干预措施（CAI）可以通过识别场景中的关键结构并通过视频马赛克来扩展胎儿镜观景领域，从而为外科医生提供决策支持和背景意识。由于缺乏设计，开发和测试CAI算法的高质量数据，该领域的研究受到了阻碍。通过作为MICCAI2021内窥镜视觉挑战组织的胎儿镜胎盘胎盘分割和注册（FETREG2021）挑战，我们发布了第一个Largescale Multencentre TTTS数据集，用于开发广义和可靠的语义分割和视频摩擦质量algorithms。对于这一挑战，我们发布了一个2060张图像的数据集，该数据集是从18个体内TTTS胎儿镜检查程序和18个简短视频剪辑的船只，工具，胎儿和背景类别的像素通道。七个团队参与了这一挑战，他们的模型性能在一个看不见的测试数据集中评估了658个从6个胎儿镜程序和6个短剪辑的图像的图像。这项挑战为创建通用解决方案提供了用于胎儿镜面场景的理解和摩西式解决方案的机会。在本文中，我们介绍了FETREG2021挑战的发现，以及报告TTTS胎儿镜检查中CAI的详细文献综述。通过这一挑战，它的分析和多中心胎儿镜数据的发布，我们为该领域的未来研究提供了基准。