Toward Vision Language Model-based Assessment of Clinical Quality and Usability of LGE-MR Images for Cardiac Ablation Planning
LGE cardiac MRI is widely used for left atrial fibrosis assessment and ablation planning in atrial fibrillation patients as knowledge of fibrotic tissue regions identified from LGE-MRI is critical for catheter ablation. Often, poor quality images used during ablation planning can cause mis-localization of ablation targets, directly impacting procedure safety and outcome. The decision of whether a scan meets the minimum quality threshold for ablation planning is currently made informally by the reviewing radiologist and is not captured by any automated system, yet it is arguably the most safety-critical output of the image quality assessment (IQA) process. However, variations in image quality caused by noise, motion artifacts, and poor boundary definition significantly compromise the reliability of downstream segmentation and clinical decision-making tasks. Manual quality assessment by expert radiologists is subjective and difficult to scale, while existing automated methods produce scalar scores without interpretable clinical reasoning. In this work, we propose a two-stage vision language model (VLM) framework for clinically grounded image quality assessment of left atrial LGE-MRI. In the first stage, a fine-tuned VLM generates structured radiology-style quality reports predicting five radiologist-defined criteria: Noise, Motion Artifact, LA Boundary Accuracy, PV Region Accuracy, and Under-segmentation Severity. In the second stage, a GPT-based reasoning module maps the predicted quality and reports to a structured quality scores and binary clinical usability decision for ablation planning. We curate a dataset of 60 annotated image slice-text pairs from 20 patients and benchmark four state-of-the-art VLM architectures. InternVL2 achieves the highest criterion-level accuracy (Avg ACC=0.65, PLCC=0.79), while DeepSeek achieves perfect clinical usability agreement (Acc=1.00, kappa=1.00).