Wavelet-domain TI Wiener-like filtering for complex MR data denoising

Magnetic resonance (MR) images are affected by random noises, which degrade many image processing and analysis tasks. It has been shown that the noise in magnitude MR images follows a Rician distribution. Unlike additive Gaussian noise, the noise is signal-dependent, and consequently difficult to reduce, especially in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) images. Wirestam et al. in [20] proposed a Wiener-like filtering technique in wavelet-domain to reduce noise before construction of the magnitude MR image. Based on Wirestam's study, we propose a wavelet-domain translation-invariant (TI) Wiener-like filtering algorithm for noise reduction in complex MR data. The proposed denoising algorithm shows the following improvements compared with Wirestam's method: (1) we introduce TI property into the Wiener-like filtering in wavelet-domain to suppress artifacts caused by translations of the signal; (2) we integrate one Stein's Unbiased Risk Estimator (SURE) thresholding with two Wiener-like filters to make the hard-thresholding scale adaptive; and (3) the first Wiener-like filtering is used to filter the original noisy image in which the noise obeys Gaussian distribution and it provides more reasonable results. The proposed algorithm is applied to denoise the real and imaginary parts of complex MR images. To evaluate our proposed algorithm, we conduct extensive denoising experiments using T1-weighted simulated MR images, diffusion-weighted (DW) phantom and in vivo data. We compare our algorithm with other popular denoising methods. The results demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms others in term of both efficiency and robustness.