Abstract
Recently nonlocal means (NLM) and its variants have been applied in the various scientific fields extensively due to its simplicity and desirable property to conserve the neighborhood information. The two-stage MRI denoising algorithm proposed in this paper is based on 3D optimized blockwise version of NLM and multidimensional PCA (MPCA). The proposed algorithm takes full use of the block representation advantageous of NLM3D to restore the noisy slice from different neighboring slices and employs MPCA as a postprocessing step to remove noise further while preserving the structural information of 3D MRI. The experiments have demonstrated that the proposed method has achieved better visual results and evaluation criteria than 3D-ADF, NLM3D, and OMNLM_LAPCA.