Extended PCJO for the Detection-Localization of Hypersignals and Hyposignals in CT Images

Abstract

The anthropomorphic model observer (MO) plays an important role in the assessment and optimization of medical imaging systems. The MO is a task-based approach; while the abnormality can appear as a hypersignal or a hyposignal for different imaging modalities, sequences, or organs, no MO has been proposed for the hyposignals detection-localization task in the literature. To improve the clinical relevance of the existing MOs, we propose an anthropomorphic MO that can also deal with hyposignals in this paper. In a previous study, we reported a perceptually relevant channelized joint observer (PCJO) for detecting and localizing multiple signals with unknown amplitude, orientation, size, and location. Here, we extend it mathematically to hyposignals task. A free-response study (close to the real-diagnostic procedure) for both hypersignals and hyposignals in cerebral and abdominal CT images was conducted with four radiologists. The equally weighted alternative free-response operating characteristic was used as the figure of merit. Statistical analyses show that the extended PCJO approaches the experts’ performances with no significant difference in the studied tasks. The results demonstrate that the extended PCJO is an alternative to replace radiologists for the evaluation and comparison of different medical image processing algorithms. The PCJO has been originally proposed on magnetic resonance imaging but tested on computerized tomography (CT) here; the coherent results show that the PCJO can be generalized to another modality-CT. We also provide in this paper, the reference values of all the parameters in the PCJO to facilitate its future application on magnetic resonance (MR) or CT images.