AUTHOR=Pizarro Ricardo A. , Cheng Xi , Barnett Alan , Lemaitre Herve , Verchinski Beth A. , Goldman Aaron L. , Xiao Ena , Luo Qian , Berman Karen F. , Callicott Joseph H. , Weinberger Daniel R. , Mattay Venkata S. 

TITLE=Automated Quality Assessment of Structural Magnetic Resonance Brain Images Based on a Supervised Machine Learning Algorithm

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Neuroinformatics

VOLUME=10

YEAR=2016

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroinformatics/articles/10.3389/fninf.2016.00052

DOI=10.3389/fninf.2016.00052

ISSN=1662-5196

ABSTRACT=<p>High-resolution three-dimensional magnetic resonance imaging (3D-MRI) is being increasingly used to delineate morphological changes underlying neuropsychiatric disorders. Unfortunately, artifacts frequently compromise the utility of 3D-MRI yielding irreproducible results, from both type I and type II errors. It is therefore critical to screen 3D-MRIs for artifacts before use. Currently, quality assessment involves slice-wise visual inspection of 3D-MRI volumes, a procedure that is both subjective and time consuming. Automating the quality rating of 3D-MRI could improve the efficiency and reproducibility of the procedure. The present study is one of the first efforts to apply a support vector machine (SVM) algorithm in the quality assessment of structural brain images, using global and region of interest (ROI) automated image quality features developed in-house. SVM is a supervised machine-learning algorithm that can predict the category of test datasets based on the knowledge acquired from a learning dataset. The performance (accuracy) of the automated SVM approach was assessed, by comparing the SVM-predicted quality labels to investigator-determined quality labels. The accuracy for classifying 1457 3D-MRI volumes from our database using the SVM approach is around 80%. These results are promising and illustrate the possibility of using SVM as an automated quality assessment tool for 3D-MRI.</p>