MR Image Denoising and Super-Resolution Using Regularized Reverse Diffusion

IEEE Trans Med Imaging. 2023 Apr;42(4):922-934. doi: 10.1109/TMI.2022.3220681. Epub 2023 Apr 3.

Abstract

Patient scans from MRI often suffer from noise, which hampers the diagnostic capability of such images. As a method to mitigate such artifacts, denoising is largely studied both within the medical imaging community and beyond the community as a general subject. However, recent deep neural network-based approaches mostly rely on the minimum mean squared error (MMSE) estimates, which tend to produce a blurred output. Moreover, such models suffer when deployed in real-world situations: out-of-distribution data, and complex noise distributions that deviate from the usual parametric noise models. In this work, we propose a new denoising method based on score-based reverse diffusion sampling, which overcomes all the aforementioned drawbacks. Our network, trained only with coronal knee scans, excels even on out-of-distribution in vivo liver MRI data, contaminated with a complex mixture of noise. Even more, we propose a method to enhance the resolution of the denoised image with the same network. With extensive experiments, we show that our method establishes state-of-the-art performance while having desirable properties which prior MMSE denoisers did not have: flexibly choosing the extent of denoising, and quantifying uncertainty.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Artifacts
  • Humans
  • Magnetic Resonance Imaging*
  • Neural Networks, Computer*