Fusion of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for No-Reference Magnetic Resonance Image Quality Assessment.

Journal: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland)
Published Date:

Abstract

The quality of magnetic resonance images may influence the diagnosis and subsequent treatment. Therefore, in this paper, a novel no-reference (NR) magnetic resonance image quality assessment (MRIQA) method is proposed. In the approach, deep convolutional neural network architectures are fused and jointly trained to better capture the characteristics of MR images. Then, to improve the quality prediction performance, the support vector machine regression (SVR) technique is employed on the features generated by fused networks. In the paper, several promising network architectures are introduced, investigated, and experimentally compared with state-of-the-art NR-IQA methods on two representative MRIQA benchmark datasets. One of the datasets is introduced in this work. As the experimental validation reveals, the proposed fusion of networks outperforms related approaches in terms of correlation with subjective opinions of a large number of experienced radiologists.

Authors

  • Igor Stępień
    Doctoral School of Engineering and Technical Sciences at the Rzeszow University of Technology, al. Powstancow Warszawy 12, 35-959 Rzeszow, Poland.
  • Rafał Obuchowicz
    Department of Diagnostic Imaging, Jagiellonian University Medical College, 19 Kopernika Street, 31-501 Cracow, Poland.
  • Adam Piórkowski
    Department of Biocybernetics and Biomedical Engineering, AGH University of Science and Technology, al. Mickiewicza 30, 30-059 Cracow, Poland.
  • Mariusz Oszust
    Department of Computer and Control Engineering, Rzeszow University of Technology, W. Pola 2, 35-959 Rzeszow, Poland.