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Analysis of objective quality metrics in computed tomography images affected by metal artifacts

  • Yakdiel Rodriguez-Gallo , Ruben Orozco-Morales ORCID logo and Marlen Perez-Diaz ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: December 28, 2021

Abstract

Image quality (IQ) assessment plays an important role in the medical world. New methods to evaluate image quality have been developed, but their application in the context of computer tomography is yet limited. In this paper the performance of fifteen well-known full reference (FR) IQ metrics is compared with human judgment using images affected by metal artifacts and processed with metal artifact reduction methods from a phantom. Five region of interest with different sizes were selected. IQ was evaluated by seven experienced radiologists completely blinded to the information. To measure the correlation between FR-IQ, and the score assigned by radiologists non-parametric Spearman rank-order correlation coefficient and Kendall’s Rank-order Correlation coefficient were used; so as root mean square error and the mean absolute error to measure the prediction accuracy. Cohen’s kappa was employed with the purpose of assessing inter-observer agreement. The metrics GMSD, IWMSE, IWPSNR, WSNR and OSS-PSNR were the best ranked. Inter-observer agreement was between 0.596 and 0.954, with p<0.001 in all study. The objective scores predicted by these methods correlate consistently with the subjective evaluations. The application of this metrics will make possible a better evaluation of metal artifact reduction algorithms in future works.


Corresponding author: Marlen Perez-Diaz, Departamento de Control Automático, Universidad Central ‘Marta Abreu’ de las Villas, Carretera a Camajuaní km 5½, Santa Clara 54830, Villa Clara, Cuba, E-mail:

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Dr. Luc Beaulieu of Laval University, Québec, Canada, for his help and provide the phantom data set.

  1. Research funding: No funding was received for this paper.

  2. Author contributions: The authors of this manuscript declare no relationships with any company, whose products or services may be related to the subject matter of the article. All authors have actively contributed to this article through data collection, development of experiments, analysis of results and writing the article.

  3. Conflicts of interest: The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

  4. Informed consent: This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

  5. Ethical approval: This article does not contain patient data.

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Received: 2020-09-15
Accepted: 2021-11-26
Published Online: 2021-12-28
Published in Print: 2022-02-23

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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