Denoising Diffusion MRI via Graph Total Variance in Spatioangular Domain

Diffusion MRI (DMRI) plays an essential role in diagnosing brain disorders related to white matter abnormalities. However, it suffers from heavy noise, which restricts its quantitative analysis. The total variance (TV) regularization is an effective noise reduction technique that penalizes noise-induced variances. However, existing TV-based denoising methods only focus on the spatial domain, overlooking that DMRI data lives in a combined spatioangular domain. It eventually results in an unsatisfactory noise reduction effect. To resolve this issue, we propose to remove the noise in DMRI using graph total variance (GTV) in the spatioangular domain. Expressly, we first represent the DMRI data using a graph, which encodes the geometric information of sampling points in the spatioangular domain. We then perform effective noise reduction using the powerful GTV regularization, which penalizes the noise-induced variances on the graph. GTV effectively resolves the limitation in existing methods, which only rely on spatial information for removing the noise. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real DMRI data demonstrate that GTV can remove the noise effectively and outperforms state-of-the-art methods.