Department of Radiology | Image Quality and Image Perception


image quality and image perception

Assessment of Image Quality Without a Gold Standard

A long-standing problem in the clinical evaluation of medical imaging systems is how to know the true state of disease. If you are comparing two or more modalities, which do you take as the “gold standard”? For example, if the system is intended to measure the cardiac ejection fraction, how can you plot a regression line of the measured values against the truth if that truth is not known. Surprisingly, we have shown that it is possible to plot this line – regression without the x-axis – provided multiple patients are studied on multiple modalities.

For a brief summary of this method, click here

For more details and mathematical derivations, see the papers listed below, and for software for implementing the method, see the Image Quality Website maintained by the Center for Gamma-ray Imaging.

J. W. Hoppin, M. A. Kupinski, G. A. Kastis, E. Clarkson, and H. H. Barrett, Objective comparison of quantitative imaging modalities without the use of a gold standard, IEEE Trans. Med. Imag., 21, 5:441-449, 2002.
[PDF(276 KB)]
M. A. Kupinski, J. W. Hoppin, E. Clarkson, and H. H. Barrett, “Estimation in medical imaging without a gold standard”, Acad. Radiol., 9:290-297, 2002.
[PDF(400 KB)]
J. W. Hoppin, D. W. Wilson, T. E. Peterson, M. A. Kupinski, G. A. Kastis, E. Clarkson, L R. Furenlid, and
H. H. Barrett, “Evaluating estimation techniques in medical imaging without a gold standard: experimental validation”, Proc. SPIE, 5034, 230-237, 2003.
M. A. Kupinski, J. W. Hoppin, J. Krasnow, S. Dahlberg, J. A. Leppo, M. A. King, E. Clarkson, and H. H. Barrett, Comparing cardiac ejection fraction estimation algorithms without a gold standard, Acad. Radiol., 31:329-337, 2006.
[PDF(198 KB)]