Structure-adaptive sparse denoising for diffusion-tensor MRI.

Diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging (DT-MRI) is becoming a prospective imaging technique in clinical applications because of its potential for in vivo and non-invasive characterization of tissue organization. However, the acquisition of diffusion-weighted images (DWIs) is often corrupted by noise and artifacts, and the intensity of diffusion-weighted signals is weaker than that of classical magnetic resonance signals. In this paper, we propose a new denoising method for DT-MRI, called structure-adaptive sparse denoising (SASD), which exploits self-similarity in DWIs. We define a similarity measure based on the local mean and on a modified structure-similarity index to find sets of similar patches that are arranged into three-dimensional arrays, and we propose a simple and efficient structure-adaptive window pursuit method to achieve sparse representation of these arrays. The noise component of the resulting structure-adaptive arrays is attenuated by Wiener shrinkage in a transform domain defined by two-dimensional principal component decomposition and Haar transformation. Experiments on both synthetic and real cardiac DT-MRI data show that the proposed SASD algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods for denoising images with structural redundancy. Moreover, SASD achieves a good trade-off between image contrast and image smoothness, and our experiments on synthetic data demonstrate that it produces more accurate tensor fields from which biologically relevant metrics can then be computed.