We study efficient implicit methods to denoise low-field MR images using a nonlinear diffusion operator as a regularizer. This problem can be formulated as solving a nonlinear reaction–diffusion equation. After discretization, a lagged-diffusion approach is used which requires a linear system solve in every nonlinear iteration. The choice of diffusion model determines the denoising properties, but it also influences the conditioning of the linear systems. As a solution method, we use Conjugate Gradient (CG) in combination with a suitable preconditioner and deflation technique. We consider four different preconditioners in combination with subdomain deflation. We evaluate the methods for four commonly used denoising operators: standard Laplace operator, two Perona–Malik type operators, and the Total Variation (TV) operator. We show that a Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) preconditioner works best for problems with a slowly varying diffusion coefficient, while Jacobi preconditioning with subdomain deflation works best for a strongly varying diffusion, as happens for the TV operator. This research is part of a larger effort that aims to provide low-cost MR imaging capabilities for low-resource settings. We have evaluated the algorithms on low-field MRI images using inexpensive commodity hardware. With a suitable preconditioner for the chosen diffusion model, we are able to limit the time to denoise three-dimensional images of more than 2 million pixels to less than 15 s, which is fast enough to be used in practice.@en

This paper studies time-domain parallelisation using Parareal to speed up the computations of anisotropic diffusion filtering. We consider both explicit and implicit Euler based method for the propagation in time for Parareal. The Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient (PCG) method is used to solve the systems that arise in the implicit based method. The estimation of the iteration numbers of PCG allows us to predict the running time of Parareal calculation, which further guides us in the experimental stage. Parallelisation of the method is implemented using Coarray Fortran. We illustrate the experimental results on 3D low-field MRI images using up to 960 cores. The computational improvement in time is achieved.@en

Currently, many children with hydrocephalus in East Africa and other resource-constrained countries do not have access to Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanners, the preferred imaging tool during the disease administration and treatment. Conventional MRI scanners are costly to buy and manage, which limits their utilization in low-income countries. Low-field MRI scanners can offer an affordable, sustainable, and safe imaging alternative to high-field MRI. However, they are associated with a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and therefore the images obtained are noisy. In this study, we propose an algorithm that may help to alleviate the drawbacks of low-field MRI by improving the quality of images obtained. The proposed algorithm combines our previous proposed algorithm known as AS-DLMRI for image reconstruction and a nonlinear diffusion filter for image denoising. The formulation is capable of removing additive zero-mean white and homogeneous Gaussian noise, as well as other noise types that could be present in the original signal. Experiments on visual quality revealed that the proposed algorithm is effective in denoising images during reconstruction. The proposed algorithm effectively denoised a noisy phantom, and a noisy MRI image, and had better performance when compared to DLMRI and AS-DLMRI in terms of Peak Signal to Noise ratio (PSNR) and High-Frequency Error Norm (HFEN). Integrating AS-DLMRI and the nonlinear diffusion filter proved to be effective in improving the quality of the images during the experiments performed. The hybrid algorithm may be of great use in imaging modalities like low-field MRI that are associated with low SNR.@en

Nonlinear diffusion equations have been successfully used for image enhancement by reducing the noise in the image while protecting the edges. In discretized form, the denoising requires the solution of a sequence of linear systems. The underlying system matrices stem from a discrete diffusion operator with large jumps in the diffusion coefficients. As a result these matrices can be very ill-conditioned, which leads to slow convergence for iterative methods such as the Conjugate Gradient method. To speed-up the convergence we use deflation and preconditioning. The deflation vectors are defined by a decomposition of the image. The resulting numerical method is easy to implement and matrix-free. We evaluate the performance of the method on a simulated image and on a measured low-field MR image for various types of deflation vectors.@en