title: MRI denoising using non-local means.
abstract: Magnetic Resonance (MR) images are affected by random noise which limits the accuracy of any quantitative measurements from the data. In the present work, a recently proposed filter for random noise removal is analyzed and adapted to reduce this noise in MR magnitude images. This parametric filter, named Non-Local Means (NLM), is highly dependent on the setting of its parameters. The aim of this paper is to find the optimal parameter selection for MR magnitude image denoising. For this purpose, experiments have been conducted to find the optimum parameters for different noise levels. Besides, the filter has been adapted to fit with specific characteristics of the noise in MR image magnitude images (i.e. Rician noise). From the results over synthetic and real images we can conclude that this filter can be successfully used for automatic MR denoising.
authors.affiliation: Biomedical Informatics Group (IBIME), ITACA Institute, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Camino de Vera, s/n. 46022 Valencia, Spain.
authors.forename: José V
authors.initials: JV
authors.lastname: Manjón
authors.affiliation: Biomedical Informatics Group (IBIME), ITACA Institute, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Camino de Vera, s/n. 46022 Valencia, Spain.
authors.forename: José
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Carbonell-Caballero
authors.affiliation: Biomedical Informatics Group (IBIME), ITACA Institute, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Camino de Vera, s/n. 46022 Valencia, Spain.
authors.forename: Juan J
authors.initials: JJ
authors.lastname: Lull
authors.affiliation: Biomedical Informatics Group (IBIME), ITACA Institute, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Camino de Vera, s/n. 46022 Valencia, Spain.
authors.forename: Gracián
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: García-Martí
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiology, Dr. Peset Hospital and Quirón Hospital, Valencia, Spain.
authors.forename: Luís
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Martí-Bonmatí
authors.affiliation: Biomedical Informatics Group (IBIME), ITACA Institute, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Camino de Vera, s/n. 46022 Valencia, Spain.
authors.forename: Montserrat
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Robles
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001921:Brain / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000379:methods*; D013131:Spine / Q000033:anatomy & histology