A review on noise reduction methods for brain MRI images

Abstract

Segmentation plays a vital role in extracting information from medical images. Segmentation is the process of partitioning the image into distinct regions. Magnetic resonance imaging is used to extract images of soft tissues of human body. It is used to analyze the human organs without the need for surgery. Generally MRI images contain a significant amount of noise caused by operator performance, equipment and the environment, which leads to serious inaccuracies MRI seems to be efficient in providing information regarding the location of tumors and even the volume. The noise present in the MRI image can be removed by using various de-noising techniques whichever is best suited depending upon the image acquired and then can be processed by any of the segmentation methods. The noise in MRI images may be due to field strength, RF pulses, RF coil, voxel volume, or receiver bandwidth. A review of various de-noising methods are presented.