A Generalised Deep Meta-Learning Model for Automated Quality Control of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Images

Background and Objectives: Cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging is a powerful modality in functional and anatomical assessment for various cardiovascular diseases. Sufficient image quality is essential to achieve proper diagnosis and treatment. A large number of medical images, the variety of imaging artefacts, and the workload of imaging centres are among the things that reveal the necessity of automatic image quality assessment (IQA). However, automated IQA requires access to bulk annotated datasets for training deep learning (DL) models. Labelling medical images is a tedious, costly and time-consuming process, which creates a fundamental challenge in proposing DL-based methods for medical applications. This study aims to present a new method for CMR IQA when there is limited access to annotated datasets. Methods: The proposed generalised deep meta-learning model can evaluate the quality by learning tasks in the prior stage and then fine-tuning the resulting model on a small labelled dataset of the desired tasks. This model was evaluated on the data of over 6,000 subjects from the UK Biobank for five defined tasks, including detecting respiratory motion, cardiac motion, Aliasing and Gibbs ringing artefacts and images without artefacts. Results: The results of extensive experiments show the superiority of the proposed model. Besides, comparing the model's accuracy with the domain adaptation model indicates a significant difference by using only 64 annotated images related to the desired tasks. Conclusion: The proposed model can identify unknown artefacts in images with acceptable accuracy, which makes it suitable for medical applications and quality assessment of large cohorts.Comment: 16 pages, 1 figure, 2 table

Automatic Multi-Class Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Image Quality Assessment using Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Spatial and Frequency Domains

Population imaging studies rely upon good quality medical imagery before downstream image quantification. This study provides an automated approach to assess image quality from cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging at scale. We identify four common CMR imaging artefacts, including respiratory motion, cardiac motion, Gibbs ringing, and aliasing. The model can deal with images acquired in different views, including two, three, and four-chamber long-axis and short-axis cine CMR images. Two deep learning-based models in spatial and frequency domains are proposed. Besides recognising these artefacts, the proposed models are suitable to the common challenges of not having access to data labels. An unsupervised domain adaptation method and a Fourier-based convolutional neural network are proposed to overcome these challenges. We show that the proposed models reliably allow for CMR image quality assessment. The accuracies obtained for the spatial model in supervised and weakly supervised learning are 99.41+0.24 and 96.37+0.66 for the UK Biobank dataset, respectively. Using unsupervised domain adaptation can somewhat overcome the challenge of not having access to the data labels. The maximum achieved domain gap coverage in unsupervised domain adaptation is 16.86%. Domain adaptation can significantly improve a 5-class classification task and deal with considerable domain shift without data labels. Increasing the speed of training and testing can be achieved with the proposed model in the frequency domain. The frequency-domain model can achieve the same accuracy yet 1.548 times faster than the spatial model. This model can also be used directly on k-space data, and there is no need for image reconstruction.Comment: 21 pages, 9 figures, 7 table

A Framework for Automated Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Image Quality Scoring based on EuroCMR Registry Criteria

Cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging is a radiation-free modality widely used for functional and structural evaluation of the cardiovascular system. Achieving an accurate diagnosis requires having good-quality images. Subjective CMR image quality assessment is a tedious, time-consuming and costly process. This paper presents an automated scoring framework for CMR image quality assessment that uses deep learning models to evaluate left ventricular coverage and CMR imaging artefacts. The quality scoring in the proposed framework is an attempt to automate some of the subjective quality control criteria of the EuroCMR registry for the short-axis cine steady-state free precession (SSFP) CMR images. The scores given by a radiologist and a cardiologist with experience in CMR imaging for the images of 50 subjects from the UK Biobank were used to validate the proposed framework. The Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) and the Spearman rank-order correlation coefficient (SRCC) calculated for the experts' quality scores versus ones obtained from the proposed framework are 0.908 and 0.806 on average. The results show that the quality scoring by the proposed framework is highly correlated with the experts' opinions. The proposed framework can be used for post-imaging quality assessment of short-axis cine SSFP CMR images and quality control of large population studies such as the UK Biobank.</p

Fully Automated Assessment of Cardiac Coverage in Cine Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Images using an Explainable Deep Visual Salient Region Detection Model

Cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging has become a modality with superior power for the diagnosis and prognosis of cardiovascular diseases. One of the essential basic quality controls of CMR images is to investigate the complete cardiac coverage, which is necessary for the volumetric and functional assessment. This study examines the full cardiac coverage using a 3D convolutional model and then reduces the number of false predictions using an innovative salient region detection model. Salient regions are extracted from the short-axis cine CMR stacks using a three-step proposed algorithm. Combining the 3D CNN baseline model with the proposed salient region detection model provides a cascade detector that can reduce the number of false negatives of the baseline model. The results obtained on the images of over 6,200 participants of the UK Biobank population cohort study show the superiority of the proposed model over the previous state-of-the-art studies. The dataset is the largest regarding the number of participants to control the cardiac coverage. The accuracy of the baseline model in identifying the presence/absence of basal/apical slices is 96.25\% and 94.51\%, respectively, which increases to 96.88\% and 95.72\% after improving using the proposed salient region detection model. Using the salient region detection model by forcing the baseline model to focus on the most informative areas of the images can help the model correct misclassified samples' predictions. The proposed fully automated model's performance indicates that this model can be used in image quality control in population cohort datasets and also real-time post-imaging quality assessments