Lumos: Software for Multi-level Multi-reader Comparison of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Late Gadolinium Enhancement Scar Quantification

Cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) offers state-of-the-art myocardial tissue differentiation. The CMR technique late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) currently provides the noninvasive gold standard for the detection of myocardial fibrosis. Typically, thresholding methods are used for fibrotic scar tissue quantification. A major challenge for standardized CMR assessment is large variations in the estimated scar for different methods. The aim was to improve quality assurance for LGE scar quantification, a multi-reader comparison tool “Lumos” was developed to support quality control for scar quantification methods. The thresholding methods and an exact rasterization approach were implemented, as well as a graphical user interface (GUI) with statistical and case-specific tabs. Twenty LGE cases were considered with half of them including artifacts and clinical results for eight scar quantification methods computed. Lumos was successfully implemented as a multi-level multi-reader comparison software, and differences between methods can be seen in the statistical results. Histograms visualize confounding effects of different methods. Connecting the statistical level with the case level allows for backtracking statistical differences to sources of differences in the threshold calculation. Being able to visualize the underlying groundwork for the different methods in the myocardial histogram gives the opportunity to identify causes for different thresholds. Lumos showed the differences in the clinical results between cases with artifacts and cases without artifacts. A video demonstration of Lumos is offered as supplementary material 1. Lumos allows for a multi-reader comparison for LGE scar quantification that offers insights into the origin of reader differences.