A Deep-Learning-Based Label-free No-Reference Image Quality Assessment Metric: Application in Sodium MRI Denoising

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Yuan, Shuaiyu, Whitmarsh, Tristan, Kessler, Dimitri A, Arponen, Otso, McLean, Mary A, Baxter, Gabrielle, Riemer, Frank, Kennerley, Aneurin J, Brackenbury, William J, Gilbert, Fiona J, Kaggie, Joshua D
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Yuan, Shuaiyu
Whitmarsh, Tristan
Kessler, Dimitri A
Arponen, Otso
McLean, Mary A
Baxter, Gabrielle
Riemer, Frank
Kennerley, Aneurin J
Brackenbury, William J
Gilbert, Fiona J
Kaggie, Joshua D
author_facet Yuan, Shuaiyu
Whitmarsh, Tristan
Kessler, Dimitri A
Arponen, Otso
McLean, Mary A
Baxter, Gabrielle
Riemer, Frank
Kennerley, Aneurin J
Brackenbury, William J
Gilbert, Fiona J
Kaggie, Joshua D
contents New multinuclear MRI techniques, such as sodium MRI, generally suffer from low image quality due to an inherently low signal. Postprocessing methods, such as image denoising, have been developed for image enhancement. However, the assessment of these enhanced images is challenging especially considering when there is a lack of high resolution and high signal images as reference, such as in sodium MRI. No-reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA) metrics are approaches to solve this problem. Existing learning-based NR-IQA metrics rely on labels derived from subjective human opinions or metrics like Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), which are either time-consuming or lack accurate ground truths, resulting in unreliable assessment. We note that deep learning (DL) models have a unique characteristic in that they are specialized to a characteristic training set, meaning that deviations between the input testing data from the training data will reduce prediction accuracy. Therefore, we propose a novel DL-based NR-IQA metric, the Model Specialization Metric (MSM), which does not depend on ground-truth images or labels. MSM measures the difference between the input image and the model's prediction for evaluating the quality of the input image. Experiments conducted on both simulated distorted proton T1-weighted MR images and denoised sodium MR images demonstrate that MSM exhibits a superior evaluation performance on various simulated noises and distortions. MSM also has a substantial agreement with the expert evaluations, achieving an averaged Cohen's Kappa coefficient of 0.6528, outperforming the existing NR-IQA metrics.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_16481
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Deep-Learning-Based Label-free No-Reference Image Quality Assessment Metric: Application in Sodium MRI Denoising
Yuan, Shuaiyu
Whitmarsh, Tristan
Kessler, Dimitri A
Arponen, Otso
McLean, Mary A
Baxter, Gabrielle
Riemer, Frank
Kennerley, Aneurin J
Brackenbury, William J
Gilbert, Fiona J
Kaggie, Joshua D
Image and Video Processing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
New multinuclear MRI techniques, such as sodium MRI, generally suffer from low image quality due to an inherently low signal. Postprocessing methods, such as image denoising, have been developed for image enhancement. However, the assessment of these enhanced images is challenging especially considering when there is a lack of high resolution and high signal images as reference, such as in sodium MRI. No-reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA) metrics are approaches to solve this problem. Existing learning-based NR-IQA metrics rely on labels derived from subjective human opinions or metrics like Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), which are either time-consuming or lack accurate ground truths, resulting in unreliable assessment. We note that deep learning (DL) models have a unique characteristic in that they are specialized to a characteristic training set, meaning that deviations between the input testing data from the training data will reduce prediction accuracy. Therefore, we propose a novel DL-based NR-IQA metric, the Model Specialization Metric (MSM), which does not depend on ground-truth images or labels. MSM measures the difference between the input image and the model's prediction for evaluating the quality of the input image. Experiments conducted on both simulated distorted proton T1-weighted MR images and denoised sodium MR images demonstrate that MSM exhibits a superior evaluation performance on various simulated noises and distortions. MSM also has a substantial agreement with the expert evaluations, achieving an averaged Cohen's Kappa coefficient of 0.6528, outperforming the existing NR-IQA metrics.
title A Deep-Learning-Based Label-free No-Reference Image Quality Assessment Metric: Application in Sodium MRI Denoising
topic Image and Video Processing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.16481