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PURPOSE It is important to fully automate the evaluation of gadoxetate disodium-enhanced arterial phase images because the efficient quantification of transient severe motion artifacts can be used in a variety of applications. Our study proposes a fully automatic evaluation method of motion artifacts during the arterial phase of gadoxetate disodium-enhanced MRI. METHODS The proposed method was based on the construction of quality-aware features to represent the motion artifact using MR image statistics and multi-directional filtered coefficients. Using the quality-aware features, the method calculated quantitative quality scores of gadoxetate disodium-enhanced images fully automatically. The performance of our proposed method, as well as two other methods, was acquired by correlating scores against subjective scores from radiologists based on the 5-point scale and binary evaluation. The subjective scores evaluated by two radiologists were severity scores of motion artifacts in the evaluation set on a scale of 1 (no motion artifacts) to 5 (severe motion artifacts). RESULTS Pearson's linear correlation coefficient (PLCC) and spearman's rank ordered correlation coefficient (SROCC) values of our proposed method against the subjective scores were 0.9036 and 0.9057, respectively, while the PLCC values of two other methods were 0.6525 and 0.8243 and the SROCC values were 0.6070 and 0.8348. Also, in terms of binary quantification of transient severe respiratory motion, the proposed method achieved 0.9310 sensitivity, 0.9048 specificity and 0.9200 accuracy, while the other two methods achieved 0.7586, 0.8996 sensitivities, 0.8098, 0.8905 specificities and 0.9200, 0.9048 accuracies CONCLUSIONS: : This study demonstrated the high performance of the proposed automatic quantification method in evaluating transient severe motion artifacts in arterial phase images. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.