Automated Motion Artifact Check for MRI (AutoMAC-MRI): An Interpretable Framework for Motion Artifact Detection and Severity Assessment

Motion artifacts degrade MRI image quality and increase patient recalls. Existing automated quality assessment methods are largely limited to binary decisions and provide little interpretability. We introduce AutoMAC-MRI, an explainable framework for grading motion artifacts across heterogeneous MR contrasts and orientations. The approach uses supervised contrastive learning to learn a discriminative representation of motion severity. Within this feature space, we compute grade-specific affinity scores that quantify an image's proximity to each motion grade, thereby making grade assignments transparent and interpretable. We evaluate AutoMAC-MRI on more than 5000 expert-annotated brain MRI slices spanning multiple contrasts and views. Experiments assessing affinity scores against expert labels show that the scores align well with expert judgment, supporting their use as an interpretable measure of motion severity. By coupling accurate grade detection with per-grade affinity scoring, AutoMAC-MRI enables inline MRI quality control, with the potential to reduce unnecessary rescans and improve workflow efficiency.