IJ Radiology
To investigate the effect of noise and denoising on the measurement of magnetic resonance (MR) imaging T2* values at interventricular septum of the heart in thalassemia major patients. A second objective is to estimate the T2* value based on the improvement of signal to noise ratio (SNR).
Different levels of Rician and Gaussian noises were added to the cardiac T2* MR images of 20 thalassemia major patients. The state-of-art denoising methods were applied to the obtained noisy images. T2* values of the interventricular septum and SNR were measured in both series of images by Segment and Matlab software, respectively.
With respect to the Gaussian noisy and denoised images in different noise levels, although SNR improved, there were no significant differences between T2* values in original, noisy and denoised images. On the other hand, after denoising images with Rician noise a relation between improvement of SNR and T2* value is noticed. A predictor model is constructed based on the level of Rician noise for each method.
In the case of existence Gaussian noise, the results confirm that denoising is not effective on the measurement of T2* value. In the case of image distortion by Rician noise, a predictor model is proposed to estimate the original T2* value. The predictor model is used to estimate the T2* value of new patients. The predicted T2* values were in good agreement with the corresponding original T2* values.
© 2017, Author(s). This open-access article is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which allows for unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original work is properly cited.
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