Nonparametric neighborhood statistics for MRI denoising

technical reportThis paper presents a novel method for denoising MR images that relies on an optimal estimation, combining a likelihood model with an adaptive image prior. The method models images as random fields and exploits the properties of independent Rician noise to learn the higher-order statistics of image neighborhoods from corrupted input data. It uses these statistics as priors within a Bayesian denoising framework. This paper presents an information-theoretic method for characterizing neighborhood structure using nonparametric density estimation. The formulation generalizes easily to simultaneous denoising of multimodal MRI, exploiting the relationships between modalities to further enhance performance. The method, relying on the information content of input data for noise estimation and setting important parameters, does not require significant parameter tuning. Qualitative and quantitative results on real, simulated, and multimodal data, including comparisons with other approaches, demonstrate the effectiveness of the method

Higher-order image statistics for unsupervised, information-theoretic, adaptive, image filtering

technical reportThe restoration of images is an important and widely studied problem in computer vision and image processing. Various image filtering strategies have been effective, but invariably make strong assumptions about the properties of the signal and/or degradation. Therefore, these methods typically lack the generality to be easily applied to new applications or diverse image collections. This paper describes a novel unsupervised, informationtheoretic, adaptive filter (UINTA) that improves the predictability of pixel intensities from their neighborhoods by decreasing the joint entropy between them. Thus UINTA automatically discovers the statistical properties of the signal and can thereby restore a wide spectrum of images and applications. This paper describes the formulation required to minimize the joint entropy measure, presents several important practical considerations in estimating image-region statistics, and then presents results on both real and synthetic data

Monte Carlo-based Noise Compensation in Coil Intensity Corrected Endorectal MRI

Background: Prostate cancer is one of the most common forms of cancer found in males making early diagnosis important. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been useful in visualizing and localizing tumor candidates and with the use of endorectal coils (ERC), the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) can be improved. The coils introduce intensity inhomogeneities and the surface coil intensity correction built into MRI scanners is used to reduce these inhomogeneities. However, the correction typically performed at the MRI scanner level leads to noise amplification and noise level variations. Methods: In this study, we introduce a new Monte Carlo-based noise compensation approach for coil intensity corrected endorectal MRI which allows for effective noise compensation and preservation of details within the prostate. The approach accounts for the ERC SNR profile via a spatially-adaptive noise model for correcting non-stationary noise variations. Such a method is useful particularly for improving the image quality of coil intensity corrected endorectal MRI data performed at the MRI scanner level and when the original raw data is not available. Results: SNR and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) analysis in patient experiments demonstrate an average improvement of 11.7 dB and 11.2 dB respectively over uncorrected endorectal MRI, and provides strong performance when compared to existing approaches. Conclusions: A new noise compensation method was developed for the purpose of improving the quality of coil intensity corrected endorectal MRI data performed at the MRI scanner level. We illustrate that promising noise compensation performance can be achieved for the proposed approach, which is particularly important for processing coil intensity corrected endorectal MRI data performed at the MRI scanner level and when the original raw data is not available.Comment: 23 page

Dependent Nonparametric Bayesian Group Dictionary Learning for online reconstruction of Dynamic MR images

In this paper, we introduce a dictionary learning based approach applied to the problem of real-time reconstruction of MR image sequences that are highly undersampled in k-space. Unlike traditional dictionary learning, our method integrates both global and patch-wise (local) sparsity information and incorporates some priori information into the reconstruction process. Moreover, we use a Dependent Hierarchical Beta-process as the prior for the group-based dictionary learning, which adaptively infers the dictionary size and the sparsity of each patch; and also ensures that similar patches are manifested in terms of similar dictionary atoms. An efficient numerical algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is also presented. Through extensive experimental results we show that our proposed method achieves superior reconstruction quality, compared to the other state-of-the- art DL-based methods

A Multi-Resolution and Adaptive 3-D Image Denoising Framework with Applications in Medical Imaging

Due to recent increase in the usage of 3-D magnetic resonance images (MRI) and analysis of functional magnetic resonance images (fMRI), research on 3-D image processing becomes important. Observed 3- D images often contain noise which should be removed in such a way that important image features, e.g., edges, edge structures, and other image details should be preserved, so that subsequent image analyses are reliable. Most image denoising methods in the literature are for 2-D images. However, their direct generalizations to 3- D images can not preserve complicated edge structures well. Because, the edge structures in a 3-D edge surface can be much more complicated than the edge structures in a 2-D edge curve. Moreover, the amount of smoothing should be determined locally, depending on local image features and local signal to noise ratio, which is much more challenging in 3-D images due to large number of voxels. This paper proposes an efficient 3- D image denoising procedure based on local clustering of the voxels. This method provides a framework for determining the size of bandwidth and the amount of smoothing locally by empirical procedures. Numerical studies and a real MRI denoising show that it works well in many medical image denoising problems

Image Denoising by a Local Clustering Framework

Images often contain noise due to imperfections in various image acquisition techniques. Noise should be removed from images so that the details of image objects (e.g., blood vessels, inner foldings, or tumors in the human brain) can be clearly seen, and the subsequent image analyses are reliable. With broad usage of images in many disciplines—for example, medical science—image denoising has become an important research area. In the literature, there are many different types of image denoising techniques, most of which aim to preserve image features, such as edges and edge structures, by estimating them explicitly or implicitly. Techniques based on explicit edge detection usually require certain assumptions on the smoothness of the image intensity surface and the edge curves which are often invalid especially when the image resolution is low. Methods that are based on implicit edge detection often use multiresolution smoothing, weighted local smoothing, and so forth. For such methods, the task of determining the correct image resolution or choosing a reasonable weight function is challenging. If the edge structure of an image is complicated or the image has many details, then these methods would blur such details. This article presents a novel image denoising framework based on local clustering of image intensities and adaptive smoothing. The new denoising method can preserve complicated edge structures well even if the image resolution is low. Theoretical properties and numerical studies show that it works well in various applications

A General System for Automatic Biomedical Image Segmentation Using Intensity Neighborhoods

Image segmentation is important with applications to several problems in biology and medicine. While extensively researched, generally, current segmentation methods perform adequately in the applications for which they were designed, but often require extensive modifications or calibrations before being used in a different application. We describe an approach that, with few modifications, can be used in a variety of image segmentation problems. The approach is based on a supervised learning strategy that utilizes intensity neighborhoods to assign each pixel in a test image its correct class based on training data. We describe methods for modeling rotations and variations in scales as well as a subset selection for training the classifiers. We show that the performance of our approach in tissue segmentation tasks in magnetic resonance and histopathology microscopy images, as well as nuclei segmentation from fluorescence microscopy images, is similar to or better than several algorithms specifically designed for each of these applications

Adaptive weights smoothing with applications to image segmentation

We propose a new method of nonparametric estimation which is based on locally constant smoothing with an adaptive choice of weights for every pair of data-points. Some theoretical properties of the procedure are investigated. Then we demonstrate the performance of the method on some simulated univariate and bivariate examples and compare it with other nonparametric methods. Finally we discuss applications of this procedure to Magnetic Resonance Imaging