Image quality metrics (IQMs) such as root mean square error (RMSE) and structural similarity index (SSIM) are commonly used in the evaluation and optimization of accelerated magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) acquisition and reconstruction strategies. However, it is unknown how well these indices relate to a radiologist's perception of diagnostic image quality. In this study, we compare the image quality scores of five radiologists with the RMSE, SSIM, and other potentially useful IQMs: peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) multi-scale SSIM (MSSSIM), information-weighted SSIM (IWSSIM), gradient magnitude similarity deviation (GMSD), feature similarity index (FSIM), high dynamic range visible difference predictor (HDRVDP), noise quality metric (NQM), and visual information fidelity (VIF). The comparison uses a database of MR images of the brain and abdomen that have been retrospectively degraded by noise, blurring, undersampling, motion, and wavelet compression for a total of 414 degraded images. A total of 1017 subjective scores were assigned by five radiologists. IQM performance was measured via the Spearman rank order correlation coefficient (SROCC) and statistically significant differences in the residuals of the IQM scores and radiologists' scores were tested. When considering SROCC calculated from combining scores from all radiologists across all image types, RMSE and SSIM had lower SROCC than six of the other IQMs included in the study (VIF, FSIM, NQM, GMSD, IWSSIM, and HDRVDP). In no case did SSIM have a higher SROCC or significantly smaller residuals than RMSE. These results should be considered when choosing an IQM in future imaging studies.

中文翻译：

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客观图像质量指标与放射线专家对MR图像诊断质量评分的比较。

图像质量度量（IQM），例如均方根误差（RMSE）和结构相似性指数（SSIM），通常用于评估和优化加速磁共振成像（MRI）的获取和重建策略。但是，尚不清楚这些指标与放射科医生对诊断图像质量的感知之间的关系如何。在这项研究中，我们将5位放射科医生的图像质量得分与RMSE，SSIM和其他可能有用的IQM进行了比较：峰值信噪比（PSNR）多尺度SSIM（MSSSIM），信息加权SSIM（IWSSIM），梯度幅度相似度偏差（GMSD），特征相似度指数（FSIM），高动态范围可见差异预测值（HDRVDP），噪声质量度量（NQM）和视觉信息保真度（VIF）。比较使用的是大脑和腹部的MR图像数据库，这些图像已被噪声，模糊，欠采样，运动和小波压缩追溯地退化，总共414幅退化图像。五位放射科医生总共分配了1017个主观评分。通过Spearman等级相关系数（SROCC）来测量IQM的性能，并测试IQM得分和放射科医生得分的残差在统计学上的显着差异。当考虑通过结合所有图像类型的所有放射科医生的分数计算得出的SROCC时，RMSE和SSIM的SROCC低于研究中包括的其他六个IQM（VIF，FSIM，NQM，GMSD，IWSSIM和HDRVDP）。在任何情况下，SSIM的SROCC都不比RMSE高或残差小得多。