Abstract : MRI denoising is a classical preprocessing step which aims at reducing the noise naturally present in MR images. In this paper, we present a new method for MRI denoising that combines recent advances in deep learning with classical approaches for noise reduction. Specifically, the proposed method follows a two-stage strategy. The first stage is based on an overcomplete patch-based convolutional neural network that blindly removes the noise without estimation of local noise level present in the images. The second stage uses this filtered image as a guide image within a rotationally invariant non-local means filter. The proposed approach has been compared with related state-of-the-art methods and showed competitive results in all the studied cases.
