Structure-Aware Adaptive Kernel MPPCA Denoising for Diffusion MRI

Abstract

Diffusion-weighted MRI (DWI) at high b-values often suffers from low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), making image quality poor. Marchenko-Pastur PCA (MPPCA) is a popular method to reduce noise, but it uses a fixed patch size across the whole image, which doesn't work well in regions with different structures. To address this, we propose an adaptive kernel MPPCA (ak-MPPCA) that selects the best patch size for each voxel based on its local neighborhood. This improves denoising performance by better handling structural variations.