# RIQE: a NIQE-style reference model for Computed Tomography

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00384 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00384/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 1 of its 14 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Objective quality assessment of medical images and videos: Review and challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07396/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The Natural Image Quality Evaluator (NIQE) scores an image by its statistical distance from a model fitted on pristine images, and its distributed model is fitted on photographs. We release the Radiology Image Quality Evaluator (RIQE), a NIQE-style model fitted on 3,792 full-dose slices from 158 patients of the public LDCT-and-Projection-data collection, with a declared intensity mapping, a manifest of every slice and a script that reproduces the fit. On 40 held-out patients, RIQE ranks reduced-dose reconstructions, simulated by projection-domain noise insertion, worse than the full-dose reconstruction of the same slice in 240 of 240 chest and 230 of 240 abdominal pairs, and ranks images with 20% more noise worse than their source in 97.5-100% of cases. Its preferences among filtered images, however, do not follow lesion signal. With a 4 mm, +10 HU lesion inserted in noisy abdominal slices, RIQE prefers bilateral filtering to the unfiltered image in every image up to a 32 HU residual, at which 29% of the lesion's matched-filter signal remains and its detectability index falls from 0.51 to 0.33; it never prefers Gaussian smoothing, which at the same 32 HU residual leaves 70% of the signal and a detectability index of 0.48. Fitted on photographs with the parameters published for NIQE, the same code ranks every simulated reduced-dose abdominal image better than its full-dose counterpart. RIQE is suited to ranking a degraded image against its source; under the conditions tested it should not be the sole criterion for selecting, comparing or tuning denoisers.