Denoising 3D MR images by the enhanced non-local means filter for Rician noise

The non-local means (NLM) filter removes noise by calculating the weighted average of the pixels in the global area and shows superiority over existing local filter methods that only consider local neighbor pixels. This filter has been successfully extended from 2D images to 3D images and has been applied to denoising 3D magnetic resonance (MR) images. In this article, a novel filter based on the NLM filter is proposed to improve the denoising effect. Considering the characteristics of Rician noise in the MR images, denoising by the NLM filter is first performed on the squared magnitude images. Then, unbiased correcting is carried out to eliminate the biased deviation. When performing the NLM filter, the weight is calculated based on the Gaussian-filtered image to reduce the disturbance of the noise. The performance of this filter is evaluated by carrying out a qualitative and quantitative comparison of this method with three other filters, namely, the original NLM filter, the unbiased NLM (UNLM) filter and the Rician NLM (RNLM) filter. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed filter achieves better denoising performance over the other filters being compared.     

Generalized total variation-based MRI Rician denoising model with spatially adaptive regularization parameters

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is an outstanding medical imaging modality but the quality often suffers from noise pollution during image acquisition and transmission. The purpose of this study is to enhance image quality using feature-preserving denoising method. In current literature, most existing MRI denoising methods did not simultaneously take the global image prior and local image features into account. The denoising method proposed in this paper is implemented based on an assumption of spatially varying Rician noise map. A two-step wavelet-domain estimation method is developed to extract the noise map. Following a Bayesian modeling approach, a generalized total variation-based MRI denoising model is proposed based on global hyper-Laplacian prior and Rician noise assumption. The proposed model has the properties of backward diffusion in local normal directions and forward diffusion in local tangent directions. To further improve the denoising performance, a local variance estimator-based method is introduced to calculate the spatially adaptive regularization parameters related to local image features and spatially varying noise map. The main benefit of the proposed method is that it takes full advantage of the global MR image prior and local image features. Numerous experiments have been conducted on both synthetic and real MR data sets to compare our proposed model with some state-of-the-art denoising methods. The experimental results have demonstrated the superior performance of our proposed model in terms of quantitative and qualitative image quality evaluations.     

A general strategy for anisotropic diffusion in MR image denoising and enhancement

Anisotropic diffusion (AD) has proven to be very effective in the denoising of magnetic resonance (MR) images. The result of AD filtering is highly dependent on several parameters, especially the conductance parameter. However, there is no automatic method to select the optimal parameter values. This paper presents a general strategy for AD filtering of MR images using an automatic parameter selection method. The basic idea is to estimate the parameters through an optimization step on a synthetic image model, which is different from traditional analytical methods. This approach can be easily applied to more sophisticated diffusion models for better denoising results. We conducted a systematic study of parameter selection for the AD filter, including the dynamic parameter decreasing rate, the parameter selection range for different noise levels and the influence of the image contrast on parameter selection. The proposed approach was validated using both simulated and real MR images. The model image generated using our approach was shown to be highly suitable for the purpose of parameter optimization. The results confirm that our method outperforms most state-of-the-art methods in both quantitative measurement and visual evaluation. By testing on real images with different noise levels, we demonstrated that our method is sufficiently general to be applied to a variety of MR images.     

Laplacian based non-local means denoising of MR images with Rician noise

Magnetic Resonance (MR) image is often corrupted with a complex white Gaussian noise (Rician noise) which is signal dependent. Considering the special characteristics of Rician noise, we carry out nonlocal means denoising on squared magnitude images and compensate the introduced bias. In this paper, we propose an algorithm which not only preserves the edges and fine structures but also performs efficient denoising. For this purpose we have used a Laplacian of Gaussian (LoG) filter in conjunction with a nonlocal means filter (NLM). Further, to enhance the edges and to accelerate the filtering process, only a few similar patches have been preselected on the basis of closeness in edge and inverted mean values. Experiments have been conducted on both simulated and clinical data sets. The qualitative and quantitative measures demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method.     

Rician noise reduction in magnetic resonance images using adaptive non-local mean and guided image filtering

This paper proposes a Rician noise reduction method for magnetic resonance (MR) images. The proposed method is based on adaptive non-local mean and guided image filtering techniques. In the first phase, a guidance image is obtained from the noisy image through an adaptive non-local mean filter. Sobel operators are applied to compute the strength of edges which is further used to control the spread of the kernel in non-local mean filtering. In the second phase, the noisy and the guidance images are provided to the guided image filter as input to restore the noise-free image. The improved performance of the proposed method is investigated using the simulated and real data sets of MR images. Its performance is also compared with the previously proposed state-of-the art methods. Comparative analysis demonstrates the superiority of the proposed scheme over the existing approaches.     

Nonlocal maximum likelihood estimation method for denoising multiple-coil magnetic resonance images

Effective denoising is vital for proper analysis and accurate quantitative measurements from magnetic resonance (MR) images. Even though many methods were proposed to denoise MR images, only few deal with the estimation of true signal from MR images acquired with phased-array coils. If the magnitude data from phased array coils are reconstructed as the root sum of squares, in the absence of noise correlations and subsampling, the data is assumed to follow a non central-χ distribution. However, when the k-space is subsampled to increase the acquisition speed (as in GRAPPA like methods), noise becomes spatially varying. In this note, we propose a method to denoise multiple-coil acquired MR images. Both the non central-χ distribution and the spatially varying nature of the noise is taken into account in the proposed method. Experiments were conducted on both simulated and real data sets to validate and to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.     

采用非局部主成分分析的极大似然估计图像去噪

本文提出一种采用非局部主成分分析的极大似然估计去噪方法.首先采用非局部主成分分析算法来计算像素邻域间的灰度值和纹理结构相似性,然后通过极大似然估计方法估计最优复原图像.本方法使用非局部主成分分析克服现有局部性去噪方法模糊边界等缺陷,引入极大似然估计方法来改进现有非局部均值的简单加权均值去噪处理,从而提高对图像细节信息的复原能力.最后分别使用本文方法、非局部均值和局部极大似然估计三种去噪方法,在不同噪音大小和不同几何纹理复杂度的图像中进行定性和定量的去噪实验.结果表明,本文方法可在保持图像细节和纹理信息的情况下有效去噪,较之现有方法效果更好.     

去除乘性噪音的主成分分析算法

雷达成像系统的进一步应用依赖于对图像中噪音的有效抑制.在目前现有消除噪音方法的基础上,基于图像的局部相似性,结合主成分分析法,提出一种新的有效去除乘性噪音的滤波算法.乘性噪音经对数变换后可转化为加性噪音处理.分析了对数域中噪音的类型.首先在图像的对数域,通过非局部方法选取局部相似块作为训练样本,利用主成分分析法提取出信号的主要特征.然后基于统计理论中最小均方误差估计法给出了一种适用于图像信息的阈值原则.最后分析了变换过程引起的偏差,由对数域的偏估计得到滤波图像.数值实验验证了新算法的有效性.对比于目前提出的变分方法,新算法处理后的图像有更高的信噪比和更好的视觉效果,且具有一定的实用性.     

用于MR图像非局域均值去噪的边缘增强策略

非局域均值(NLM)滤波有很好的去噪效果并已成功地应用于磁共振图像的去噪中,但与所有去噪方法相同,总是会在一定程度上模糊图像细节. 该文提出将从原始图像中提取出来的高频信息与NLM去噪图像相融合,来还原在去噪过程中丢失的细节. 首先利用一种基于拉普拉斯金字塔的多分辨率方法,从原始图像中提取出包含丰富的边缘信息的高频组分. 然后利用作者提出的一种新的基于SUSAN算子的边缘检测算子产生一幅连续的边缘图,并利用该边缘图将高频组分与NLM方法去噪的图像相融合. 该方法在图像的平滑区域取得了良好的去噪效果,同时可以保留甚至增强图像的细节. 同时,该方法对图像的增强不会导致增强图像中常见的伪影.     

Superiority of 3D wavelet-packet denoising in MR microscopy

Three dimensional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) datasets are becoming increasingly important in clinical and research applications because of their inherent signal to noise (SNR) advantages, high resolution and isotropic voxels. Despite SNR advantages, some 3D acquisitions may be SNR-limited, particularly in MR microscopy. Historically, both classic filtering and wavelet-based denoising techniques have been performed on a slice-by-slice basis. In principle, adaptive techniques such as best- basis wavelet-packet denoising might offer inherent advantages when performed in 3D, instead of 2D, by tracking through plane "structure" and suppressing noise "pseudostructure." This hypothesis was tested in 10 volumetric MR microscopy datasets from several different MR microscopy atlas projects. 3D wavelet-packet denoised images consistently yielded lower minimum mean-square error and subjectively perceived noise power than corresponding 2D denoised images using otherwise identical algorithms and parameters. MR microscopy researchers preferred the denoised images to the unprocessed images for their atlas projects.