Rician Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models For Sodium Breast MRI Enhancement
This work addresses the challenge of enhancing sodium MRI for breast cancer characterization, representing an incremental improvement by adapting an existing method to a specific noise profile.
The paper tackled the problem of denoising sodium breast MRI, which suffers from low signal-to-noise ratios and unique Rician noise, by introducing Rician Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (RDDPM) that convert Rician noise to Gaussian noise during denoising, resulting in consistent outperformance over DDPM and CNN-based methods on non-reference image quality metrics.
Sodium MRI is an imaging technique used to visualize and quantify sodium concentrations in vivo, playing a role in many biological processes and potentially aiding in breast cancer characterization. Sodium MRI, however, suffers from inherently low signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) and spatial resolution, compared with conventional proton MRI. A deep-learning method, the Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPM), has demonstrated success across a wide range of denoising tasks, yet struggles with sodium MRI's unique noise profile, as DDPM primarily targets Gaussian noise. DDPM can distort features when applied to sodium MRI. This paper advances the DDPM by introducing the Rician Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (RDDPM) for sodium MRI denoising. RDDPM converts Rician noise to Gaussian noise at each timestep during the denoising process. The model's performance is evaluated using three non-reference image quality assessment metrics, where RDDPM consistently outperforms DDPM and other CNN-based denoising methods.