Agreement of Image Quality Metrics with Radiological Evaluation in the Presence of Motion Artifacts

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Main Authors: Marchetto, Elisa, Eichhorn, Hannah, Gallichan, Daniel, Schnabel, Julia A., Ganz, Melanie
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Marchetto, Elisa
Eichhorn, Hannah
Gallichan, Daniel
Schnabel, Julia A.
Ganz, Melanie
author_facet Marchetto, Elisa
Eichhorn, Hannah
Gallichan, Daniel
Schnabel, Julia A.
Ganz, Melanie
contents Purpose: Reliable image quality assessment is crucial for evaluating new motion correction methods for magnetic resonance imaging. In this work, we compare the performance of commonly used reference-based and reference-free image quality metrics on a unique dataset with real motion artifacts. We further analyze the image quality metrics' robustness to typical pre-processing techniques. Methods: We compared five reference-based and five reference-free image quality metrics on data acquired with and without intentional motion (2D and 3D sequences). The metrics were recalculated seven times with varying pre-processing steps. The anonymized images were rated by radiologists and radiographers on a 1-5 Likert scale. Spearman correlation coefficients were computed to assess the relationship between image quality metrics and observer scores. Results: All reference-based image quality metrics showed strong correlation with observer assessments, with minor performance variations across sequences. Among reference-free metrics, Average Edge Strength offers the most promising results, as it consistently displayed stronger correlations across all sequences compared to the other reference-free metrics. Overall, the strongest correlation was achieved with percentile normalization and restricting the metric values to the skull-stripped brain region. In contrast, correlations were weaker when not applying any brain mask and using min-max or no normalization. Conclusion: Reference-based metrics reliably correlate with radiological evaluation across different sequences and datasets. Pre-processing steps, particularly normalization and brain masking, significantly influence the correlation values. Future research should focus on refining pre-processing techniques and exploring machine learning approaches for automated image quality evaluation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_18389
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Agreement of Image Quality Metrics with Radiological Evaluation in the Presence of Motion Artifacts
Marchetto, Elisa
Eichhorn, Hannah
Gallichan, Daniel
Schnabel, Julia A.
Ganz, Melanie
Medical Physics
Purpose: Reliable image quality assessment is crucial for evaluating new motion correction methods for magnetic resonance imaging. In this work, we compare the performance of commonly used reference-based and reference-free image quality metrics on a unique dataset with real motion artifacts. We further analyze the image quality metrics' robustness to typical pre-processing techniques. Methods: We compared five reference-based and five reference-free image quality metrics on data acquired with and without intentional motion (2D and 3D sequences). The metrics were recalculated seven times with varying pre-processing steps. The anonymized images were rated by radiologists and radiographers on a 1-5 Likert scale. Spearman correlation coefficients were computed to assess the relationship between image quality metrics and observer scores. Results: All reference-based image quality metrics showed strong correlation with observer assessments, with minor performance variations across sequences. Among reference-free metrics, Average Edge Strength offers the most promising results, as it consistently displayed stronger correlations across all sequences compared to the other reference-free metrics. Overall, the strongest correlation was achieved with percentile normalization and restricting the metric values to the skull-stripped brain region. In contrast, correlations were weaker when not applying any brain mask and using min-max or no normalization. Conclusion: Reference-based metrics reliably correlate with radiological evaluation across different sequences and datasets. Pre-processing steps, particularly normalization and brain masking, significantly influence the correlation values. Future research should focus on refining pre-processing techniques and exploring machine learning approaches for automated image quality evaluation.
title Agreement of Image Quality Metrics with Radiological Evaluation in the Presence of Motion Artifacts
topic Medical Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.18389