Unsupervised MRI Images Denoising via Decoupled Expression

Abstract

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is widely adopted in medical diagnosis. Due to the spatial coding scheme, MRI image is degraded by various noise. Recently, massive methods have been applied to the MRI image denoising. However, they lack the consideration of artifacts in MRI images. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised MRI image denoising method called UEGAN based on decoupled expression. We decouple the content and noise in a noisy image using content encoders and noise encoders. We employ a noising branch to push the noise decoder only extract the noise. The cycle-consistency loss ensures that the content of the denoised results match the original images. To acquire visually realistic generations, we add an adversarial loss on denoised results. Image quality penalty helps to retain rich image details. We perform experiments on unpaired MRI images from Brainweb datesets, and achieve superior performances compared to several popular denoising approaches.