A pulmonary (thrombo)-embolism (PE) refers to the situation when a portion of a blood clot becomes lodged in a pulmonary artery. PE is diagnosed with computed tomography pulmonary angiography (CTPA). Delay of treatment or lack of treatment results in increased morbidity and mortality. In comparison to an expert panel, the average radiologist has a sensitivity between 77-94\%. Computer aided detection (CAD) algorithms have been shown to increase radiologists’ sensitivity. However, CAD has not been adopted into clinical practice due to the large amount of false positive detections that those systems produce.

We propose this challenge to foster research in the field of CAD for PE and to provide an objective benchmark with which to compare the already existing algorithms. We hope that this effort can also enable new CAD algorithms with lower false positive rate than state-of-the-art and make CAD for PE a reality.