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Medical imaging systems are commonly assessed by use of objective image quality measures. Supervised deep learning methods have been investigated to implement numerical observers for task-based image quality assessment. However, labeling large amounts of experimental data to train deep neural networks is tedious, expensive, and prone to subjective errors. Computer-simulated image data can potentially be employed to circumvent these issues; however, it is often difficult to computationally model complicated anatomical structures, noise sources, and the response of real-world imaging systems. Hence, simulated image data will generally possess physical and statistical differences from the experimental image data they seek to emulate. Within the context of machine learning, these differences between the sets of two images is referred to as domain shift. In this study, we propose and investigate the use …