3D-QCNet - A pipeline for automated artifact detection in diffusion MRI images.

Artifacts are a common occurrence in Diffusion MRI (dMRI) scans. Identifying and removing them is essential to ensure the accuracy and viability of any post-processing carried out on these scans. This makes quality control (QC) a crucial first step prior to any analysis of dMRI data. Several QC methods for artifact detection exist, however they suffer from problems like requiring manual intervention and the inability to generalize across different artifacts and datasets. In this paper, we propose an automated deep learning (DL) pipeline that utilizes a 3D-Densenet architecture to train a model on diffusion volumes for automatic artifact detection. Our method is validated on 9000 volumes sourced from 7 large clinical datasets spanning different acquisition protocols (with different gradient directions, high and low b-values, single-shell and multi-shell acquisitions) from multiple scanners. Additionally, they represent diverse subject demographics including age, sex and the presence or absence of pathologies. Our QC method is found to accurately generalize across this heterogenous data by correctly detecting 92% artifacts on average across our test set. This consistent performance over diverse datasets underlines the generalizability of our method, which currently is a significant barrier hindering the widespread adoption of automated QC techniques. Thus, 3D-QCNet can be integrated into diffusion pipelines to effectively automate the arduous and time-intensive process of artifact detection.

Understanding Biases and Disparities in Radiology AI Datasets: A Review.

Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to show great potential in disease detection and diagnosis on medical imaging with increasingly high accuracy. An important component of AI model creation is dataset development for training, validation, and testing. Diverse and high-quality datasets are critical to ensure robust and unbiased AI models that maintain validity, especially in traditionally underserved populations globally. Yet publicly available datasets demonstrate problems with quality and inclusivity. In this literature review, the authors evaluate publicly available medical imaging datasets for demographic, geographic, genetic, and disease representation or lack thereof and call for an increase emphasis on dataset development to maximize the impact of AI models.