Correlation of objective image quality metrics with radiologists' diagnostic confidence depends on the clinical task performed.

Abstract

Purpose: Objective image quality metrics (IQMs) are widely used as outcome measures to assess acquisition and reconstruction strategies for diagnostic images. For nonpathological magnetic resonance (MR) images, these IQMs correlate to varying degrees with expert radiologists' confidence scores of overall perceived diagnostic image quality. However, it is unclear whether IQMs also correlate with task-specific diagnostic image quality or expert radiologists' confidence in performing a specific diagnostic task, which calls into question their use as surrogates for radiologist opinion.

Approach: 0.5 T MR images from 16 stroke patients and two healthy volunteers were retrospectively undersampled ( $R=1$ to $7\times$ ) and reconstructed via compressed sensing. Three neuroradiologists reported the presence/absence of acute ischemic stroke (AIS) and assigned a Fazekas score describing the extent of chronic ischemic lesion burden. Neuroradiologists ranked their confidence in performing each task using a 1 to 5 Likert scale. Confidence scores were correlated with noise quality measure, the visual information fidelity criterion, the feature similarity index, root mean square error, and structural similarity (SSIM) via nonlinear regression modeling.

Results: Although acceleration alters image quality, neuroradiologists remain able to report pathology. All of the IQMs tested correlated to some degree with diagnostic confidence for assessing chronic ischemic lesion burden, but none correlated with diagnostic confidence in diagnosing the presence/absence of AIS due to consistent radiologist performance regardless of image degradation.

Conclusions: Accelerated images were helpful for understanding the ability of IQMs to assess task-specific diagnostic image quality in the context of chronic ischemic lesion burden, although not in the case of AIS diagnosis. These findings suggest that commonly used IQMs, such as the SSIM index, do not necessarily indicate an image's utility when performing certain diagnostic tasks.