Noise-residue learning convolutional network model for magnetic resonance image enhancement

Abstract

Magnetic Resonance Image (MRI) is an important medical image acquisition technique used to acquire high contrast images of human body anatomical structures and soft tissue organs. MRI system does not use any harmful radioactive ionized material like x-rays and computerized tomography (CT) imaging techniques. High-resolution MRI is desirable in many clinical applications such as tumor segmentation, image registration, edges & boundary detection, and image classification. During MRI acquisition, many practical constraints limit the MRI quality by introducing random Gaussian noise and some other artifacts by the thermal energy of the patient body, random scanner voltage fluctuations, body motion artifacts, electronics circuits impulse noise, etc. High-resolution MRI can be acquired by increasing scan time, but considering patient comfort, it is not preferred in practice. Hence, postacquisition image processing techniques are used to filter noise contents and enhance the MRI quality to make it fit for further image analysis tasks. The main motive of MRI enhancement is to reconstruct a high-quality MRI while improving and retaining its important features. The new deep learning image denoising and artifacts removal methods have shown tremendous potential for high-quality image reconstruction from noise degraded MRI while preserving useful image information. This paper presents a noise-residue learning convolution neural network (CNN) model to denoise and enhance the quality of noise-corrupted low-resolution MR images. The proposed technique shows better performance in comparison with other conventional MRI enhancement methods. The reconstructed image quality is evaluated by the peak-signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index (SSIM) metrics by optimizing information loss in reconstructed MRI measured in mean squared error (MSE) metric.