A latent space for unsupervised MR image quality control via artifact assessment
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；National Institute on Aging, National Institutes of Health（美国国立卫生研究院国家衰老研究所）；Johns Hopkins School of Medicine（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学医学院）
Lianrui Zuo, Yuan Xue, Blake E. Dewey, Yihao Liu, Jerry L. Prince, Aaron Carass
备注：
Accepted at the International Society for Optics and Photonics - Medical Imaging (SPIE-MI) 2023
Image quality control (IQC) can be used in automated magnetic resonance (MR) image analysis to exclude erroneous results caused by poorly acquired or artifact-laden images. Existing IQC methods for MR imaging generally require human effort to craft meaningful features or label large datasets for supervised training. The involvement of human labor can be burdensome and biased, as labeling MR images based on their quality is a subjective task. In this paper, we propose an automatic IQC method that evaluates the extent of artifacts in MR images without supervision. In particular, we design an artifact encoding network that learns representations of artifacts based on contrastive learning. We then use a normalizing flow to estimate the density of learned representations for unsupervised classification. Our experiments on large-scale multi-cohort MR datasets show that the proposed method accurately detects images with high levels of artifacts, which can inform downstream analysis tasks about potentially flawed data.
The quality assessment (QA) of restored low light images is an important tool for benchmarking and improving low light restoration (LLR) algorithms. While several LLR algorithms exist, the subjective perception of the restored images has been much less studied. Challenges in capturing aligned low light and well-lit image pairs and collecting a large number of human opinion scores of quality for training, warrant the design of unsupervised (or opinion unaware) no-reference (NR) QA methods. This work studies the subjective perception of low light restored images and their unsupervised NR QA. Our…
Unsupervised Low-dose CT Reconstruction with One-way Conditional Normalizing Flows
School of Mathematical Sciences, Capital Normal University（首都师范大学数学学院）；Centre for Mathematical Imaging Techniques, University of Liverpool（利物浦大学数学成像技术中心）；Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Strathclyde（斯特拉思克莱德大学数学与统计学系）
CoRe-DA: Contrastive Regression for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Surgical Skill Assessment
UCL Hawkes Institute, University College London（伦敦大学学院霍克斯研究所）；Dept of Computer Science, University College London（伦敦大学学院计算机科学系）；The Griffin Institute（格里芬研究所）
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；ObEN, inc.（ObEN公司）
Image translation between two domains is a class of problems aiming to learn mapping from an input image in the source domain to an output image in the target domain. It has been applied to numerous domains, such as data augmentation, domain adaptation, and unsupervised training. When paired training data is not accessible, image translation becomes an ill-posed problem. We constrain the problem with the assumption that the translated image needs to be perceptually similar to the original image and also appears to be drawn from the new domain, and propose a simple yet effective image translati…
University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）；University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）
Current deep neural network based approaches to computed tomography (CT) metal artifact reduction (MAR) are supervised methods which rely heavily on synthesized data for training. However, as synthesized data may not perfectly simulate the underlying physical mechanisms of CT imaging, the supervised methods often generalize poorly to clinical applications. To address this problem, we propose, to the best of our knowledge, the first unsupervised learning approach to MAR. Specifically, we introduce a novel artifact disentanglement network that enables different forms of generations and regulariz…
University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）；King's College London（伦敦国王学院）
Motion is one of the main sources for artifacts in magnetic resonance (MR) images. It can have significant consequences on the diagnostic quality of the resultant scans. Previously, supervised adversarial approaches have been suggested for the correction of MR motion artifacts. However, these approaches suffer from the limitation of required paired co-registered datasets for training which are often hard or impossible to acquire. Building upon our previous work, we introduce a new adversarial framework with a new generator architecture and loss function for the unsupervised correction of sever…
University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）；University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
Current deep neural network based approaches to computed tomography (CT) metal artifact reduction (MAR) are supervised methods that rely on synthesized metal artifacts for training. However, as synthesized data may not accurately simulate the underlying physical mechanisms of CT imaging, the supervised methods often generalize poorly to clinical applications. To address this problem, we propose, to the best of our knowledge, the first unsupervised learning approach to MAR. Specifically, we introduce a novel artifact disentanglement network that disentangles the metal artifacts from CT images i…
What Are We Really Measuring? Rethinking Dataset Bias in Web-Scale Natural Image Collections via Unsupervised Semantic Clustering
School of Electrical Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST)（伊朗科学技术大学电气工程学院）；Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST)（冲绳科学技术大学院大学）
Unsupervised dMRI Artifact Detection via Angular Resolution Enhancement and Cycle Consistency Learning
School of Computer Science, University of Sydney（悉尼大学计算机科学学院）；Brain and Mind Centre, University of Sydney（悉尼大学脑与心智中心）；Central Clinical School, University of Sydney（悉尼大学临床中心）；School of Biomedical Engineering, University of Sydney（悉尼大学生物医学工程学院）
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）
Optical diffraction tomography (ODT) produces three dimensional distribution of refractive index (RI) by measuring scattering fields at various angles. Although the distribution of RI index is highly informative, due to the missing cone problem stemming from the limited-angle acquisition of holograms, reconstructions have very poor resolution along axial direction compared to the horizontal imaging plane. To solve this issue, here we present a novel unsupervised deep learning framework, which learns the probability distribution of missing projection views through optimal transport driven cycle…
Kyoto University（京都大学）；e-Growth Co., Ltd.（e-Growth 有限公司）；Nara Medical University（奈良县立医科大学）；Rakuwakai Otowa Hospital（洛和会音羽医院）
The reduction of metal artifacts in computed tomography (CT) images, specifically for strong artifacts generated from multiple metal objects, is a challenging issue in medical imaging research. Although there have been some studies on supervised metal artifact reduction through the learning of synthesized artifacts, it is difficult for simulated artifacts to cover the complexity of the real physical phenomena that may be observed in X-ray propagation. In this paper, we introduce metal artifact reduction methods based on an unsupervised volume-to-volume translation learned from clinical CT imag…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）；Seoul National University College of Medicine（首尔大学医学院）
Diffusion-weighted MRI is nowadays performed routinely due to its prognostic ability, yet the quality of the scans are often unsatisfactory which can subsequently hamper the clinical utility. To overcome the limitations, here we propose a fully unsupervised quality enhancement scheme, which boosts the resolution and removes the motion artifact simultaneously. This process is done by first training the network using optimal transport driven cycleGAN with stochastic degradation block which learns to remove aliasing artifacts and enhance the resolution, then using the trained network in the test …
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国高等科学技术院（KAIST））；Chungnam National University Hospital（忠南大学医院）；Chungnam National University College of Medicine（忠南大学医学院）
Recently, deep learning approaches for MR motion artifact correction have been extensively studied. Although these approaches have shown high performance and reduced computational complexity compared to classical methods, most of them require supervised training using paired artifact-free and artifact-corrupted images, which may prohibit its use in many important clinical applications. For example, transient severe motion (TSM) due to acute transient dyspnea in Gd-EOB-DTPA-enhanced MR is difficult to control and model for paired data generation. To address this issue, here we propose a novel u…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术院）
Ultrasound imaging (US) often suffers from distinct image artifacts from various sources. Classic approaches for solving these problems are usually model-based iterative approaches that have been developed specifically for each type of artifact, which are often computationally intensive. Recently, deep learning approaches have been proposed as computationally efficient and high performance alternatives. Unfortunately, in the current deep learning approaches, a dedicated neural network should be trained with matched training data for each specific artifact type. This poses a fundamental limitat…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）
Ultrasound (US) imaging is a fast and non-invasive imaging modality which is widely used for real-time clinical imaging applications without concerning about radiation hazard. Unfortunately, it often suffers from poor visual quality from various origins, such as speckle noises, blurring, multi-line acquisition (MLA), limited RF channels, small number of view angles for the case of plane wave imaging, etc. Classical methods to deal with these problems include image-domain signal processing approaches using various adaptive filtering and model-based approaches. Recently, deep learning approaches…
The k-space data generated from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is only a finite sampling of underlying signals. Therefore, MRI images often suffer from low spatial resolution and Gibbs ringing artifacts. Previous studies tackled these two problems separately, where super resolution methods tend to enhance Gibbs artifacts, whereas Gibbs ringing removal methods tend to blur the images. It is also a challenge that high resolution ground truth is hard to obtain in clinical MRI. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised learning framework for both MRI super resolution and Gibbs artifacts removal …
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）
Metal artifact reduction (MAR) is one of the most important research topics in computed tomography (CT). With the advance of deep learning technology for image reconstruction,various deep learning methods have been also suggested for metal artifact removal, among which supervised learning methods are most popular. However, matched non-metal and metal image pairs are difficult to obtain in real CT acquisition. Recently, a promising unsupervised learning for MAR was proposed using feature disentanglement, but the resulting network architecture is complication and difficult to handle large size c…
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；The University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Jiaxing Research Institute, Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学嘉兴研究院）
Medical image quality assessment (MIQA) is a vital prerequisite in various medical image analysis applications. Most existing MIQA algorithms are fully supervised that request a large amount of annotated data. However, annotating medical images is time-consuming and labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised anomaly-aware framework with test-time clustering for optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) image quality assessment in a setting wherein only a set of high-quality samples are accessible in the training phase. Specifically, a feature-embedding-based low-quality r…
California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) suffers from several artifacts, the most common of which are motion artifacts. These artifacts often yield images that are of non-diagnostic quality. To detect such artifacts, images are prospectively evaluated by experts for their diagnostic quality, which necessitates patient-revisits and rescans whenever non-diagnostic quality scans are encountered. This motivates the need to develop an automated framework capable of accessing medical image quality and detecting diagnostic and non-diagnostic images. In this paper, we explore several convolutional neural netw…
Explicit Abnormality Extraction for Unsupervised Motion Artifact Reduction in Magnetic Resonance Imaging
School of Electrical Engineering and Automation, Wuhan University（武汉大学电气与自动化学院）；University Hospital Heidelberg（海德堡大学医院）；Vitalent Consulting（维塔伦特咨询公司）；College of Science and Engineering, James Cook University（詹姆斯库克大学科学与工程学院）；Uppsala University（乌普萨拉大学）；School of Computer Science, University of Sydney（悉尼大学计算机学院）
In clinical practice MR images are often first seen by radiologists long after the scan. If image quality is inadequate either patients have to return for an additional scan, or a suboptimal interpretation is rendered. An automatic image quality assessment (IQA) would enable real-time remediation. Existing IQA works for MRI give only a general quality score, agnostic to the cause of and solution to low-quality scans. Furthermore, radiologists' image quality requirements vary with the scan type and diagnostic task. Therefore, the same score may have different implications for different scans. W…
Z 2 Sky Technologies Inc.（Z 2 天空科技公司）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Suzhou Institute for Advance Research, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学苏州研究院）；Key Lab of Intelligent Information Processing of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Institute of Computing Technology, CAS（中国科学院计算技术研究所中国科学院智能信息处理重点实验室）
Recently, both supervised and unsupervised deep learning methods have been widely applied on the CT metal artifact reduction (MAR) task. Supervised methods such as Dual Domain Network (Du-DoNet) work well on simulation data; however, their performance on clinical data is limited due to domain gap. Unsupervised methods are more generalized, but do not eliminate artifacts completely through the sole processing on the image domain. To combine the advantages of both MAR methods, we propose an unpaired dual-domain network (U-DuDoNet) trained using unpaired data. Unlike the artifact disentanglement …
Beyond Pixels: Medical Image Quality Assessment with Implicit Neural Representations
Computer Engineering Department, Istanbul Technical University（伊斯坦布尔技术大学计算机工程系）；Department of Applied Mathematics, Technical Medical Centre, University of Twente（代尔夫特理工大学应用数学系）
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；CAS Key Laboratory of Technology in Geo-Spatial Information Processing and Application System（中国科学院地理空间信息处理与应用系统技术重点实验室）
Existing learning-based methods for blind image quality assessment (BIQA) are heavily dependent on large amounts of annotated training data, and usually suffer from a severe performance degradation when encountering the domain/distribution shift problem. Thanks to the development of unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), some works attempt to transfer the knowledge from a label-sufficient source domain to a label-free target domain under domain shift with UDA. However, it requires the coexistence of source and target data, which might be impractical for source data due to the privacy or storage…
Unsupervised Polychromatic Neural Representation for CT Metal Artifact Reduction
ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
The bone age, reflecting the degree of development of the bones, can be used to predict the adult height and detect endocrine diseases of children. Both examinations of radiologists and variability of operators have a significant impact on bone age assessment. To decrease human intervention , machine learning algorithms are used to assess the bone age automatically. However, conventional supervised deep-learning methods need pre-labeled data. In this paper, based on the convolutional auto-encoder with constraints (CCAE), an unsupervised deep-learning model proposed in the classification of the…
JPEG AIC2026: A large-scale dataset for fine-grained assessment of image coding
University of Konstanz（康斯坦茨大学）；Cloudinary（Cloudinary公司）；IST-IT（IST-IT机构）；Fraunhofer IIS（弗劳恩霍夫应用固体物理研究所）；Huawei（华为公司）；Takushoku University（拓殖大学）；IT-UBI（IT-UBI机构）；EPFL（洛桑联邦理工学院）
To support the application scenarios where high-resolution (HR) images are urgently needed, various single image super-resolution (SISR) algorithms are developed. However, SISR is an ill-posed inverse problem, which may bring artifacts like texture shift, blur, etc. to the reconstructed images, thus it is necessary to evaluate the quality of super-resolution images (SRIs). Note that most existing image quality assessment (IQA) methods were developed for synthetically distorted images, which may not work for SRIs since their distortions are more diverse and complicated. Therefore, in this paper…
Plekhanov Russian University of Economics（普列汉诺夫俄罗斯经济大学）
We present a number of new piecewise-polynomial kernels for image interpolation. The kernels are constructed by optimizing a measure of interpolation quality based on the magnitude of anisotropic artifacts. The kernel design process is performed symbolically using Mathematica computer algebra system. Experimental evaluation involving 14 image quality assessment methods demonstrates that our results compare favorably with the existing linear interpolators.
In this paper, we analyze the statistics of error signals to assess the perceived quality of images. Specifically, we focus on the magnitude spectrum of error images obtained from the difference of reference and distorted images. Analyzing spectral statistics over grayscale images partially models interference in spatial harmonic distortion exhibited by the visual system but it overlooks color information, selective and hierarchical nature of visual system. To overcome these shortcomings, we introduce an image quality assessment algorithm based on the Spectral Understanding of Multi-scale and …
MIT（麻省理工学院）；Boston Children’s Hospital（波士顿儿童医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）
Fetal brain MRI is useful for diagnosing brain abnormalities but is challenged by fetal motion. The current protocol for T2-weighted fetal brain MRI is not robust to motion so image volumes are degraded by inter- and intra- slice motion artifacts. Besides, manual annotation for fetal MR image quality assessment are usually time-consuming. Therefore, in this work, a semi-supervised deep learning method that detects slices with artifacts during the brain volume scan is proposed. Our method is based on the mean teacher model, where we not only enforce consistency between student and teacher model…
Parallel imaging is a widely-used technique to accelerate magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). However, current methods still perform poorly in reconstructing artifact-free MRI images from highly undersampled k-space data. Recently, implicit neural representation (INR) has emerged as a new deep learning paradigm for learning the internal continuity of an object. In this study, we adopted INR to parallel MRI reconstruction. The MRI image was modeled as a continuous function of spatial coordinates. This function was parameterized by a neural network and learned directly from the measured k-space it…
UPDA: Unsupervised Progressive Domain Adaptation for No-Reference Point Cloud Quality Assessment
School of Automation, Nanjing University of Science and Technology（自动化学院，南京理工大学）；National Key Laboratory of Information Systems Engineering（信息系统工程国家重点实验室）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology（计算机科学与工程学院，南京理工大学）
Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；Washington University in St. Louis（圣路易斯华盛顿大学）；Mayo Clinic（梅奥诊所）
Real-world non-mydriatic retinal fundus photography is prone to artifacts, imperfections and low-quality when certain ocular or systemic co-morbidities exist. Artifacts may result in inaccuracy or ambiguity in clinical diagnoses. In this paper, we proposed a simple but effective end-to-end framework for enhancing poor-quality retinal fundus images. Leveraging the optimal transport theory, we proposed an unpaired image-to-image translation scheme for transporting low-quality images to their high-quality counterparts. We theoretically proved that a Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) model wit…
Quality assessment of diffusion MRI (dMRI) data is essential prior to any analysis, so that appropriate pre-processing can be used to improve data quality and ensure that the presence of MRI artifacts do not affect the results of subsequent image analysis. Manual quality assessment of the data is subjective, possibly error-prone, and infeasible, especially considering the growing number of consortium-like studies, underlining the need for automation of the process. In this paper, we have developed a deep-learning-based automated quality control (QC) tool, QC-Automator, for dMRI data, that can …
Aselsan Inc.（阿瑟尔桑公司）；Middle East Technical University（中东技术大学）；NOROM Neuroscience and Neurotechnology Excellency Center（NOROM神经科学与神经技术卓越中心）
Image-to-image translation (IIT) has made much progress recently with the development of adversarial learning. In most of the recent work, an adversarial loss is utilized to match the distributions of the translated and target image sets. However, this may create artifacts if two domains have different marginal distributions, for example, in uniform areas. In this work, we propose an unsupervised IIT method that preserves the uniform regions after the translation. The gradient adjustment loss, which is the L2 norm between the Sobel response of the target image and the adjusted Sobel response o…
