  Background: Prostate cancer is one of the most common forms of cancer found
in males making early diagnosis important. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has
been useful in visualizing and localizing tumor candidates and with the use of
endorectal coils (ERC), the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) can be improved. The
coils introduce intensity inhomogeneities and the surface coil intensity
correction built into MRI scanners is used to reduce these inhomogeneities.
However, the correction typically performed at the MRI scanner level leads to
noise amplification and noise level variations. Methods: In this study, we
introduce a new Monte Carlo-based noise compensation approach for coil
intensity corrected endorectal MRI which allows for effective noise
compensation and preservation of details within the prostate. The approach
accounts for the ERC SNR profile via a spatially-adaptive noise model for
correcting non-stationary noise variations. Such a method is useful
particularly for improving the image quality of coil intensity corrected
endorectal MRI data performed at the MRI scanner level and when the original
raw data is not available. Results: SNR and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR)
analysis in patient experiments demonstrate an average improvement of 11.7 dB
and 11.2 dB respectively over uncorrected endorectal MRI, and provides strong
performance when compared to existing approaches. Conclusions: A new noise
compensation method was developed for the purpose of improving the quality of
coil intensity corrected endorectal MRI data performed at the MRI scanner
level. We illustrate that promising noise compensation performance can be
achieved for the proposed approach, which is particularly important for
processing coil intensity corrected endorectal MRI data performed at the MRI
scanner level and when the original raw data is not available.
