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The statistical properties of background noise such as its standard deviation and mean value are frequently used to estimate the original noise level of the acquired data. This requires the knowledge of the statistical intensity distribution of the background signal, that is, the probability density of the occurrence of a certain signal intensity. The influence of many new MRI techniques and, in particular, of various parallel-imaging methods on the noise statistics has neither been rigorously investigated nor experimentally demonstrated yet. In this study, the statistical distribution of background noise was analyzed for MR acquisitions with a single-channel and a 32-channel coil, with sum-of-squares (SoS) and spatial-matched-filter (SMF) data combination, with and without parallel imaging using k-space and image-domain algorithms, with real-part and conventional magnitude reconstruction and with several reconstruction …