Analysis of controversies in the formulation and evaluation of restoration algorithms for MR Images

Abstract

There is no reliable guidance available in literature so far for the selection of a suitable technique for denoising Magnetic Resonance (MR) images. The performance of edge-preserving denoising schemes like Nonlocal Means, Bilateral, Total Variation, Anisotropic Diffusion, Kuwahara, wavelet denoising, Linear Minimum Mean Square Error, Smallest Univalue Segment Assimilating Nucleus and Beltrami filters on MR images are evaluated and compared in this paper. Performance evaluation is done on real-time MR Images, Shepp–Logan Phantom images and simulated MR images. Image Quality Analysis indices used for the evaluation are Structural Similarity Index Metric, Noise Quality Measure, Peak Signal to Noise Ratio, Edge Preservation Index, MetricQ, Anisotropic Quality Index, Blind Reference Image Quality Evaluator and computational time. It has been observed that the performance of each filter is completely different on Shepp–Logan, simulated MR and real-time MR images. It is critically sensitive to the strength of noise also. No filter which can offer good performance equally on Phantom, simulated MR image and real-time MR images, is available in the literature. Values of the objective indices are not in concordance with subjective quality ratings. Filter designs optimized on Phantom or simulated MR using maximum PSNR between denoised and ground-truth images as an objective function (minimum error sense in general) do not perform well on real-time MRI.