Advancing Precision: A Comprehensive Review of MRI Segmentation Datasets from BraTS Challenges (2012–2025)

Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) challenges have significantly advanced research in brain tumor segmentation and related medical imaging tasks. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the BraTS datasets from 2012 to 2024, examining their evolution, challenges, and contributions to MRI-based brain tumor segmentation. Over the years, the datasets have grown in size, complexity, and scope, incorporating refined pre-processing and annotation protocols. By synthesizing insights from over a decade of BraTS challenges, this review elucidates the progression of dataset curation, highlights the impact on state-of-the-art segmentation approaches, and identifies persisting limitations and future directions. Crucially, it provides researchers, clinicians, and industry stakeholders with a single, in-depth resource on the evolution and practical utility of BraTS datasets-demonstrating year-by-year improvements in the field and discussing their potential for enabling robust, clinically relevant segmentation methods that can further advance precision medicine. Additionally, an overview of the upcoming BraTS 2025 Challenge-currently in planning-is presented, highlighting its expanded focus across further clinical needs.