An easy-to-use image labeling platform for automatic magnetic resonance image quality assessment

Abstract

In medical imaging, images are usually evaluated by a human observer (HO) depending on the underlying diagnostic question which can be a time-demanding and cost-intensive process. Model observers (MO) which mimic the human visual system can help to support the HO during this reading process or can provide feedback to the MR scanner and/or HO about the derived image quality. For this purpose MOs are trained on HO-derived image labels with respect to a certain diagnostic task. We propose a non-reference image quality assessment system based on a machine-learning approach with a deep neural network and active learning to keep the amount of needed labeled training data small. A labeling platform is developed as a web application with accounted data security and confidentiality to facilitate the HO labeling procedure. The platform is made publicly available.