Abstract #0346

Nezamzadeh M, Cameron I

It is well known that pixel intensities of magnitude MR images are biased by Rician noise. This is particularly noticeable for SNR < 2. Rician noise bias corrections from the literature work well for SNR > 2 but not for SNR < 2. Furthermore, the distribution of these corrected data points is far from Gaussian. This can have significant implications if the data is further processed using least squares procedures, which assume a Gaussian distribution of data points. In this work a new and improved procedure for Rician noise bias correction for small SNR is presented which gives a better estimate of the true signal value and produces a Gaussian-like distribution function for the corrected data.