Automatic Determination of the Optimal Number of Iterations of the Anisotropic Diffusion Filter for Noise Reduction in 3D Brain MRI Images

• Yuri Saito USP
• Jefferson Teixeira USP
• Andre P. L. F. de Carvalho USP
• Antonio C. dos Santos FMRP
• Paulo M. de Azevedo Marques FMRP
• Ricardo J. Ferrari UFU

Abstract

This work presents a mathematical model to automatically determine the optimum number of iterations of the anisotropic diffusion filter applied to medical image denoising. The model is determined by means of the maximization of the structural similarity index, which is used in this work for quantitative quality assessment of the resulting images after each filter iteration. After determining the model parameters, the optimum number of algorithm iterations required to remove the image noise, while preserving all important edges between the anatomical structures, is easily obtained. Results of the proposed method applied to (real and simulated) 3D magnetic resonance images of the human brain are presented to illustrate the efficiency of the method.

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