In medical imaging, signal detection is one of the most important tasks. It is especially important
to study detection tasks with signal location uncertainty. One way to evaluate system performance
on such tasks is to compute the area under the localization-receiver operating characteristic (LROC)
curve. In an LROC study, detecting a signal includes two steps. The first step is to compute a test
statistic to determine whether the signal is present or absent. If the signal is present, the second step
is to identify the location of the signal. We use the test statistic which maximizes the area under the
LROC curve (ALROC). We attempt to capture the distribution of this ideal LROC test statistic with
signal-absent data using the extreme value distribution. Some simulated test statistics are shown along
with extreme value distributions to illustrate how well our approximation captures the characteristics
of the ideal LROC test statistic. We further derive an approximation to the ideal ALROC using the
extreme value distribution and compare it to the direct simulation of the ALROC. Using a different
approach by defining a parameterized probability density function of the data, we are able to derive
another approximation to the ideal ALROC for weak signals from a power series expansion in signal
amplitude.
In medical imaging, signal detection is one of the most important tasks. A common way to evaluate the performance of an imaging system for a signal-detection task is to calculate the detectability of
the ideal observer. Since the detectability of an ideal observer is not always easy to calculate, it is useful to have approximations for it. These approximations can also be used to check the bias of
numerical computations of the ideal-observer detectability. For signal detection tasks, we usually have two probability densities for the data vector, the signal-absent density and the signal-present density. In this work, we use a single probability density with a variable scalar or vector parameter to represent the corresponding densities under the two hypotheses. The ideal-observer detectability is derived from the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of the ideal observer for the given detection
task. We have found that we can develop expansions for the square of this detectability as a function of the signal parameter, and that the lowest order expansions involve the Fisher information matrix for
the problem of estimating the signal parameter. There are four basic methods we have considered for deriving such expansions. We compute these approximations to ideal-observer detectability for several cases. We compare these to the exact detectability values for these same cases, derived from results in previous work, to examine the usefulness of these approaches. The idea of using one parameterized
probability density function is introduced in order to relate detection performance to estimation performance. Even without an analytical expression for ideal-observer detectability we are able to
compute analytical forms for its derivatives in terms of the Fisher information matrix and similarly defined statistical moments. The results suggest that there is a connection between the performance
of a system on signal-detection tasks and signal-estimation tasks.
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