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To improve signal‐to‐noise ratio for diffusion‐weighted magnetic resonance images.

A new method is proposed for denoising diffusion‐weighted magnitude images. The proposed method formulates the denoising problem as an maximum a posteriori} estimation problem based on Rician/noncentral χ likelihood models, incorporating an edge prior and a low‐rank model. The resulting optimization problem is solved efficiently using a half‐quadratic method with an alternating minimization scheme.

The performance of the proposed method has been validated using simulated and experimental data. Diffusion‐weighted images and noisy data were simulated based on the diffusion tensor imaging model and Rician/noncentral χ distributions. The simulation study (with known gold standard) shows substantial improvements in single‐to‐noise ratio and diffusion tensor estimation after …