The Rician Distribution of Noisy MRI Data英文文献.pdfVIP

NIH Public Access Author Manuscript Magn Reson Med . Author manuscript; available in PMC 2008 February 25. N Published in final edited form as: I H Magn Reson Med . 1995 December ; 34(6): 910–914. - P A A The Rician Distribution of Noisy MRI Data u t h o Hákon Gudbjartsson and Samuel Patz r M From the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of EECS (H.G.), and Harvard Medical a School, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital (S.P.), Department of Radiology, Boston, n u Massachusetts s c r i p Abstract t The image intensity in magnetic resonance magnitude images in the presence of noise is shown to be governed by a Rician distribution. Low signal intensities (SNR 2) are therefore biased due to the noise. It is shown how the underlying noise can be estimated from the images and a simple correction scheme is provided to reduce the bias. The noise characteristics in phase images are also studied and shown to be very different from those of the magnitude images. Common to both, however, is that the noise distributions are nearly Gaussian for SNR larger than two. N I H - P A Keywords A Rician; Rayleigh; Gaussian; noise u t h o r M INTRODUCTION a n It is common practice to assume the noise in magnitude MRI images is described by a Gaussian u s distribution. The power of the noise is then often estimated from the standard deviation of the c r i pixel signal intensity in an image region with no NMR signal. This can, however, lead to