QICOM: Open-Source Software for Reproducible Image Quality Evaluation, Blinded Assessment, and Radiomic Comparison

Fabio Mattiussi, Switinder Ghotra

QICOM (Quality Image COMparator) is open-source software for quantitative image comparison, paired radiomics, and blinded assessment. It saves processing settings, image identities, measurements, and response mappings so a comparison can be reopened and recalculated. We evaluate reference agreement, responses to controlled perturbations, and recovery of saved analyses. Synthetic experiments cover 37 quantitative descriptors using independentnumerical references and separate upstream integration comparisons. The QICOM/MIRP backend meets the reference tolerances for all 482 numeric IBSI 1 digital-phantom entries and all 1,622 entries across configurations A-E of the public CT reference case; these comprise 1,804 feature/aggregation comparisons and 300 preprocessing diagnostics. Restricting masked SSIM and HFEN to complete kernel support removes the observed dependence on excluded pixels. In a synthetic filtering example, stronger smoothing increases SSIM while worsening MSE and HFEN relative to milder smoothing and changing GLCM contrast more strongly. Reopened radiomics projects reproduce all 43 feature pairs per comparison, and two blinded deliveries return four correctly mapped…