Evaluation of CNN as anthropomorphic model observer

Model observers (MO) are widely used in medical imaging to act as surrogates of human observers in task- based image quality evaluation, frequently towards optimization of reconstruction algorithms. In this paper, we explore the use of convolutional neural networks (CNN) to be used as MO. We will compare CNN MO to alternative MO currently being proposed and used such as the relevance vector machine based MO and channelized Hotelling observer (CHO). As the success of the CNN, and other deep learning approaches, is rooted in large data sets availability, which is rarely the case in medical imaging systems task- performance evaluation, we will evaluate CNN performance on both large and small training data sets.