Sparse Mixture-of-Experts for Non-Uniform Noise Reduction in MRI Images

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is an essential diagnostic tool in clinical settings, but its utility is often hin-dered by noise artifacts introduced during the imaging process. Effective denoising is critical for enhancing image quality while preserving anatomical structures. However, traditional denoising methods, which often assume uni-form noise distributions, struggle to handle the non-uniform noise commonly present in MRI images. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach leveraging a sparse mixture-of-experts framework for MRI image denoising. Each expert is a specialized denoising convolutional neural network fine-tuned to target specific noise characteristics associated with different image regions. Our method demonstrates superior performance over state-of-the-art denoising techniques on both synthetic and real-world brain MRI datasets. Fur-thermore, we show that it generalizes effectively to unseen datasets, highlighting its robustness and adaptability.