Denoising of magnetic resonance images using discriminative learning-based deep convolutional neural network

Abstract

BACKGROUND: The noise in magnetic resonance (MR) images causes severe issues for medical diagnosis purposes. OBJECTIVE: In this paper, we propose a discriminative learning based convolutional neural network denoiser to denoise the MR image data contaminated with noise. METHODS: The proposed method incorporates the use of depthwise separable convolution along with local response normalization with modified hyperparameters and internal skip connections to denoise the contaminated MR images. Moreover, the addition of parametric RELU instead of normal conventional RELU in our proposed architecture gives more stable and fine results. The denoised images were further segmented to test the appropriateness of the results. The network is trained on one dataset and tested on other dataset produces remarkably good results. RESULTS: Our proposed network was used to denoise the images of different noise levels, and it yields better performance as compared with various networks. The SSIM and PSNR showed an average improvement of (7.2 ± 0.002) % and (8.5 ± 0.25) % respectively when tested on different datasets without retaining the network. An improvement of 5% and 6% was achieved in the values of mean intersection over union (mIoU) and BF score when the denoised images were segmented for testing the relevancy in biomedical imaging applications. The statistical test suggests that the obtained results are statistically significant as p< 0.05. CONCLUSION: The denoised images obtained are more clinically suitable for medical image diagnosis purposes, as depicted by the evaluation parameters. Further, external clinical validation was performed by an experienced radiologist for testing the validation of the resulting images.