Denoising very low-field magnetic resonance images using native noise modeling

Low-field MRI is gaining interest, especially in low-resource settings, due to its low cost, portability, small footprint, and low power consumption. However, it suffers from significant noise, limiting its clinical utility. This study introduces native noise denoising (NND), which leverages the inherent noise characteristics of the acquired low-field data. By obtaining the noise characteristics from corner patches of low-field images, we iteratively added similar noise to high-field images to create a paired noisy-clean dataset. A U-Net based denoising autoencoder was trained on this dataset and evaluated on three low-field datasets: the M4Raw dataset (0.3T), <i>in vivo</i> brain MRI (0.05T), and phantom images (0.05T). The NND approach demonstrated improvements in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 32.76%, 19.02%, and 8.16% across the M4Raw, <i>in vivo</i> and phantom datasets, respectively. Qualitative assessments, including difference maps, line intensity plots, and effective receptive fields, suggested that NND preserves structural details and edges compared to random noise denoising (RND), indicating potential enhancements in visual quality. This substantial improvement in low-field imaging quality addresses the fundamental challenge of diagnostic confidence in resource-constrained settings. By mitigating the primary technical limitation of these systems, our approach expands the clinical utility of low-field MRI scanners, potentially facilitating broader access to diagnostic imaging across resource-limited healthcare environments globally.