Automatic noise removal and effect of NEX setting on magnetic resonance images

In magnetic resonance imaging(MRI), there has been a tradeoff between the scan time and NEX in order to produce high quality images. Clinically, small NEX values corresponding to reduce scan times are usually used that increases inevitable noise, which obeys a Rician distribution. We propose on automatic filtering method based on noise estimation and bilateral filtering to facilitate the denoising procedure in an attempt to shorten scan time while maintain high imaging quality in MRI. A variety of MR images have been used to evaluate the proposed method including phantoms and clinical data. The experimental results indicate that our method outperformed several existing methods and is of potential in many MR image denoising application.