Generalization Evaluation of Machine Learning Numerical Observers for Image Quality Assessment

In this paper, we present two new numerical observers (NO) based on machine learning for image quality assessment. The proposed NOs aim to predict human observer performance in a cardiac perfusion-defect detection task for single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) images. Human observer (HumO) studies are now considered to be the gold standard for task-based evaluation of medical images. However such studies are impractical for use in early stages of development for imaging devices and algorithms, because they require extensive involvement of trained human observers who must evaluate a large number of images. To address this problem, numerical observers (also called model observers) have been developed as a surrogate for human observers. The channelized Hotelling observer (CHO), with or without internal noise model, is currently the most widely used NO of this kind. In our previous work we argued that development of a NO model to predict human observers' performance can be viewed as a machine learning (or system identification) problem. This consideration led us to develop a channelized support vector machine (CSVM) observer, a kernel-based regression model that greatly outperformed the popular and widely used CHO. This was especially evident when the numerical observers were evaluated in terms of generalization performance. To evaluate generalization we used a typical situation for the practical use of a numerical observer: after optimizing the NO (which for a CHO might consist of adjusting the internal noise model) based upon a broad set of reconstructed images, we tested it on a broad (but different) set of images obtained by a different reconstruction method. In this manuscript we aim to evaluate two new regression models that achieve accuracy higher than the CHO and comparable to our earlier CSVM method, while dramatically reducing model complexity and computation time. The new models are defined in a Bayesian machine-learning framework: a channelized relevance vector machine (CRVM) and a multi-kernel CRVM (MKCRVM).