Title
Evaluation of a machine learning based model observer for x-ray CT.
Abstract
In the medical imaging domain, image quality assessment is usually carried out by human observers (HuO) performing a clinical task in reader studies. To overcome time-consuming reader studies numerical model observers (MO) were introduced and are now widely used in the CT research community to predict the performance of HuOs. In the recent years, machine learning based MOs showed promising results for SPECT. Therefore, we built a neural network, a so called softmax regression model based on machine learning, as MO for x-ray CT. Performance was evaluated by comparing to one of the most prevalent MOs, the channelized Hotelling observer (CHO). CT image data labeled with confidence ratings assessed in a reader study for a detection-task of signals of different sizes, different noise levels and different reconstruction algorithms were used to train and test the MOs. Data was acquired with a clinical CT scanner. For each of four different x-ray radiation exposures, there were 208 repeated scans of a Catphan phantom. The neural network based MO (NN-MO) as well as the CHO showed good agreement with the performance in the reader study.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1117/12.2293582
Proceedings of SPIE
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Neural Network,Model Observer,CHO,Machine Learning,Image Quality
Conference
10577
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0277-786X
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Felix K. Kopp100.34
Marco Catalano200.34
Daniela Pfeiffer300.68
Ernst J. Rummeny4199.07
Peter B. Noël500.34