Adaptive anisotropic noise filtering for magnitude MR data

Conventional noise filtering schemes applied to magnitude magnetic resonanc e (MR) images tacitly assume Gauss distributed noise. Magnitude MR data, ho wever, are Rice distributed. Not incorporating this knowledge leads inevita bly to biased results, in particular when applying such filters in regions with low signal-to-noise ratio, In this work, we show how the Rice data pro bability distribution can be incorporated so as to construct a noise filter that is far less biased. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Inc.