A survey of denoising techniques for multi-parametric prostate MRI

Denoising is one of active area of research in the image-processing domain since last decade. Internal and external conditions of acquisition device are the main source of noise in an image during the procurement process, which is often impossible to avoid in practical situations. Since many different image denoising algorithms have been recommended till date, but the issue of noise elimination remains an undefended challenge. The main objective of this paper is to study and analyze the behavior of different denoising filters for multi-parametric (mp) prostate MRI so that the appropriate filter can be selected unanimously. This study evaluates the performance of fifteen denoising filters (Anisotropic, Median, Wiener, Gaussian, Mean, Wavelet, Contourlet, Bilateral, Curvelet, WHMT, NLM, GFOE, LMMSE, CURE-LET and ARF) w.r.t mp-prostate MRI i.e. T2w, DCE and DWI images in the presence of Gaussian and Rician noise. Evaluation is done in both variable and fixed level of noise. Both subjective and objective quality assessment parameters are considered for determining the final rating of filters executed over 300 mp-MRI images. This study concludes that anisotropic and NLM filter should be opted for denoising task because of their structural and other crucial details preserving capability.