Objective Task-Based Evaluation of Quantitative Medical Imaging Methods: Emerging Frameworks and Future Directions

Quantitative imaging (QI) holds significant potential across diverse clinical applications. For clinical translation of QI, rigorous evaluation on clinically relevant tasks is essential. This article outlines 4 emerging evaluation frameworks, including virtual imaging trials, evaluation with clinical data in the absence of ground truth, evaluation for joint detection and quantification tasks, and evaluation of QI methods that output multidimensional outputs. These frameworks are presented in the context of recent advancements in PET, such as long axial field of view PET and the development of artificial intelligence algorithms for PET. We conclude by discussing future research directions for evaluating QI methods.