Blind Image Quality Assessment for MRI with A Deep Three-dimensional content-adaptive Hyper-Network

Abstract: Image Quality Assessment (IQA) is of great value in the workflow of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)-based analysis. Blind IQA (BIQA) methods are especially required since high-quality reference MRI images are usually not available. Recently, many efforts have been devoted to developing deep learning-based BIQA approaches. However, the performance of these methods is limited due to the utilization of simple content-non-adaptive network parameters and the waste of the important 3D spatial information of the medical images. To address these issues, we design a 3D content-adaptive hyper-network for MRI BIQA. The overall 3D configuration enables the exploration of comprehensive 3D spatial information from MRI images, while the developed content-adaptive hyper-network contributes to the self-adaptive capacity of network parameters and thus, facilitates better BIQA performance. The effectiveness of the proposed method is extensively evaluated on the open dataset, MRIQC. Promising performance is achieved compared with the corresponding baseline and 4 state-of-the-art BIQA methods. We make our code available at \url{https://git.openi.org.cn/SIAT_Wangshanshan/HyS-Net}.