Motion artifacts present a significant challenge in structural MRI (sMRI), often compromising clinical diagnostics and large-scale automated analysis. While manual quality control (QC) remains the gold standard, it is increasingly unscalable for massive longitudinal studies. To address this, we propose a hybrid CNN-Attention framework designed for robust, site-invariant MRI quality assessment. Our architecture integrates a hierarchical 2D CNN encoder for local spatial feature extraction with a multi-head cross-attention mechanism to model global dependencies. This synergy enables the model to prioritize motion relevant artifact signatures, such as ringing and blurring, while dynamically filtering out site-specific intensity variations and background noise. The framework was trained end-to-end on the MR-ART dataset using a balanced cohort of 200 subjects. Performance was evaluated across two tiers: Seen Site Evaluation on a held-out MR-ART partition and Unseen Site Evaluation using 200 subjects from 17 heterogeneous sites in the ABIDE archive. On seen sites, the model achieved a scan-level accuracy of 0.9920 and an F1-score of 0.9919. Crucially, it maintained strong generalization across unseen ABIDE sites (Acc = 0.755) without any retraining or fine-tuning, demonstrating high resilience to domain shift. These results indicate that attention-based feature re-weighting successfully captures universal artifact descriptors, bridging the performance gap between diverse imaging environments and scanner manufacturers.
Motion artifacts in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) degrade diagnostic reliability. Existing deep learning methods are typically contrast-specific and fail to generalize across diverse modalities and artifact severities. We propose a unified framework combining parameter-informed contrast disentanglement with severity-aware adaptive correction. ScanCLIP, pretrained on over 30,000 MRI text-image pairs, derives contrast embeddings from acquisition parameters to disentangle contrast style from anatomical content, yielding contrast-free features. A Vision Transformer then estimates motion severity and routes features through a Mixture-of-Experts network, enabling targeted artifact correction. A dual-pathway decoder reconstructs both the clean image and residual artifact map, enforcing image-space consistency. On IXI and HCP benchmarks, our method improves PSNR by 0.75 dB and SSIM by up to 0.0279 over state-of-the-art approaches, with larger gains at higher artifact severities. It further demonstrates robust zero-shot generalization on real-world clinical data acquired with unseen scanning parameters, where existing methods either fail to remove artifacts or introduce additional distortions.
Corrupted, inconsistent, or anomalous data silently threatens the safety and reliability of medical AI. Despite growing regulatory recognition of dataset quality assurance (QA) for high-risk medical AI, scalable automated detection remains underdeveloped. We employ unsupervised anomaly detection (AD) and out-of-distribution (OOD) detection as an automated dataset QA mechanism for multi-center dynamic contrast-enhanced breast MRI. We build a controlled AD benchmark of 17 realistic QA-relevant anomaly types from six public datasets (protocol violations, processing errors, incorrect anatomical regions) and propose a taxonomy of radiological image anomalies based on human visual perception, enabling fine-grained analysis of AD failure modes. The benchmark includes near-, medium-far-, far-OOD samples, as well as in-distribution and external normal data. Four methods are evaluated: a projection-based method extended with a domain-specific feature extractor and a novel positional encoding, a reconstruction-based approach extended to full 3D volumes with an augmented training objective, and two unmodified hybrid OOD detection methods. Medium-far- and far-OOD samples are detected reliably, whereas near-OOD samples and external normal data from unseen institutions expose method-specific differences. The 3D reconstruction-based approach best balances detection performance (AUROC: 0.936) and generalization to unseen institutions. The projection-based method with positional encoding achieves the highest overall detection performance (AUROC: 0.954). Both hybrid methods exhibit critical failure modes, confirming that methods validated for one modality or anatomy may not generalize without domain-specific adaptation. Implants and mastectomies remain an open challenge for all methods. Our results establish a foundation and practical guidance on scalable unsupervised QA in medical AI pipelines.
Chiara Tappermann, Steffen Renisch, Lars Ole Schwen +3
Reliable quality control (QC) of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is essential for reliable diagnostic neuroimaging, yet standard manual assessment is subjective and time-consuming. MRIQC has established standardized automated extraction of image-quality metrics (IQMs), but its reliance on local computational imaging skills and capacity including high-performance computing, limits its adoption in resource-constrained settings (RCS). We present WebMRIQC (webmriqc.mailab.io), an open-source browser-based platform that wraps the validated MRIQC engine behind a zero-installation web interface. WebMRIQC automates the DICOM-to-BIDS conversion of de-identified MRI scans, executes the unmodified containerized MRIQC pipeline on a shared compute node governed by a fair-share job queue, and returns an interactive in-browser dashboard. The dashboard grounds every IQM in published quality thresholds, benchmarks each scan against the normative distribution of high-resource open datasets, and supports cross-site multicentre implementation of optimized scan protocols in RCS.We describe the system architecture and a validation framework establishing measurement equivalence between WebMRIQC and native MRIQC across thirteen IQMs on the BraTS-Africa and BraTS 2021 datasets. Preliminary results indicate strong agreement for contrast-, signal and noise-based metrics, demonstrating that web-based implementation lowers the barrier to standardized MRI QC and provides a foundation for harmonized, regionally adapted quality benchmarks across RCS imaging sites. The code is publicly available here https://github.com/CAMERA-MRI/WebMRIqc.
Philip Nkwam, Ifeoluwa Oladeji, Sekinat Zurakat-Aderibigbe +9