Multi-site Incremental Image Quality Assessment of Structural MRI via Consensus Adversarial Representation Adaptation.

Deep learning based image quality assessment (IQA) is useful for automatic quality control of medical images but requires a large number of training data. Though using multi-site data can significantly increase the training sample size and improve the performance of the IQA model, there are technical and legal issues involved in the sharing of patient data across different sites. When data are not sharable, devising a single IQA model that is applicable to all sites is challenging. To overcome this problem, we introduce a multi-site incremental IQA (MSI-IQA) method for structural MRI, which first trains an IQA model from one site, and then sequentially and incrementally improves the IQA model in other sites using transfer learning and consensus adversarial representation adaptation (CARA) without explicit data sharing between sites.