Automatic Detection of Common Signal Quality Issues in MRI Data using Deep Neural Networks

Abstract: Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a commonly used non-invasive imaging technique that provides high resolution images of soft tissue. One problem with MRI is that it is sensitive to signal quality issues. The issues can arise for various reasons, for example by metal located either inside or outside of the body. Another common signal quality issue is caused by the patient being partly placed outside field of view of the MRI scanner.   This thesis aims to investigate the possibility to automatically detect these signal quality issues using deep neural networks. More specifically, two different 3D CNN network types were studied, a classification-based approach and a reconstruction-based approach. The datasets used consist of MRI volumes from UK Biobank which have been processed and manually annotated by operators at AMRA Medical. For the classification method four different network architectures were explored utilising supervised learning with multi-label classification. The classification method was evaluated using accuracy and label-based evaluation metrics, such as macro-precision, macro-recall and macro-F1. The reconstruction method was based on anomaly detection using an autoencoder which was trained to reconstruct volumes without any artefacts. A mean squared prediction error was calculated for the reconstructed volume and compared against a threshold in order to classify a volume with or without artefacts. The idea was that volumes containing artefacts should be more difficult to reconstruct and thus, result in a higher prediction error. The reconstruction method was evaluated using accuracy, precision, recall and F1-score.  The results show that the classification method has overall higher performance than the reconstruction method. The achieved accuracy for the classification method was 98.0% for metal artefacts and 97.5% for outside field of view artefacts. The best architecture for the classification method proved to be DenseNet201. The reconstruction method worked for metal artefacts with an achieved accuracy of 75.7%. Furthermore, it was concluded that reconstruction method did not work for detection of outside field of view artefacts.    The results from the classification method indicate that there is a possibility to automatically detect artefacts with deep neural networks. However, it is needed to further improve the method in order to completely replace a manual quality control step before using the volumes for calculation of biomarkers.