# An Attention-Based Denoising Model for Diffusion Weighted Imaging

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03903 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03903/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [Beyond a Gaussian Denoiser: Residual Learning of Deep CNN for Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03981/) (2016)
- [Noise2Noise: Learning Image Restoration without Clean Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04189/) (2018)
- [FFDNet: Toward a Fast and Flexible Solution for CNN based Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04026/) (2017)
- [Self-Supervised Diffusion MRI Denoising via Iterative and Stable Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13514/) (2025)
- [MRI denoising using Deep Learning and Non-local averaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04798/) (2019)
- [Advancing low-field MRI with a universal denoising imaging transformer: Towards fast and high-quality imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19167/) (2024)
- [Generative AI for Rapid Diffusion MRI with Improved Image Quality, Reliability and Generalizability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05686/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) is used for whole-body cancer screening, but it typically requires a long acquisition time. When the scan time is reduced, the image quality often suffers, leading to increased noise in the scans. Magnitude reconstruction in DWI introduces signal-dependent Rician noise, which makes denoising more challenging for conventional convolution-based methods. To address this limitation, we propose a noise-aware attention-driven denoising framework that integrates hierarchical Swin Transformer window attention with transformer-based multi-dimensional gated refinement for DWI restoration. The model incorporates explicit noise-level conditioning and residual reconstruction to enable adaptive suppression of heteroscedastic noise across a wide range of corruption levels. Experimental evaluation on corrupted DWI scans demonstrates strong restoration performance. Our model achieves a mean PSNR of 33.69~dB and SSIM of 0.8539 across noise levels from 1% to 15%, while maintaining stable behavior under severe noise conditions. These results indicate that attention-guided contextual modeling combined with channel-adaptive refinement provides a robust and generalizable solution for DWI denoising.