Artificial Intelligence-Driven Single-Shot PET Image Artifact Detection and Disentanglement: Toward Routine Clinical Image Quality Assurance

Abstract

Purpose Medical imaging artifacts compromise image quality and quantitative analysis and might confound interpretation and misguide clinical decision-making. The present work envisions and demonstrates a new paradigm PET image Quality Assurance NETwork (PET-QA-NET) in which various image artifacts are detected and disentangled from images without prior knowledge of a standard of reference or ground truth for routine PET image quality assurance. Methods The network was trained and evaluated using training/validation/testing data sets consisting of 669/100/100 artifact-free oncological 18F-FDG PET/CT images and subsequently fine-tuned and evaluated on 384 (20% for fine-tuning) scans from 8 different PET centers. The developed DL model was quantitatively assessed using various image quality metrics calculated for 22 volumes of interest defined on each scan. In addition, 200 additional 18F-FDG PET/CT scans (this time with artifacts), generated using both CT-based attenuation and scatter correction (routine PET) and PET-QA-NET, were blindly evaluated by 2 nuclear medicine physicians for the presence of artifacts, diagnostic confidence, image quality, and the number of lesions detected in different body regions. Results Across the volumes of interest of 100 patients, SUV MAE values of 0.13 ± 0.04, 0.24 ± 0.1, and 0.21 ± 0.06 were reached for SUVmean, SUVmax, and SUVpeak, respectively (no statistically significant difference). Qualitative assessment showed a general trend of improved image quality and diagnostic confidence and reduced image artifacts for PET-QA-NET compared with routine CT-based attenuation and scatter correction. Conclusion We developed a highly effective and reliable quality assurance tool that can be embedded routinely to detect and correct for 18F-FDG PET image artifacts in clinical setting with notably improved PET image quality and quantitative capabilities.