A Parallel Fuzzy Algorithm for Real-Time Medical Image Enhancement

Medical images may be corrupted by noise. This noise affects the image quality and can obscure important information required for accurate diagnosis. Effectively apply filtering techniques can facilitate diagnosis or reduce radiation exposure. In this paper, we introduce a parallel method designed to reduce mixed Gaussian-impulse noise from digital images. The method uses fuzzy logic and the fuzzy peer group concept. Implementations of the method on multi-core interface using the open multi-processing (OpenMP) and on graphics processing units (GPUs) using CUDA are presented. Efficiency is measured in terms of execution time and in terms of MAE, PSNR and SSIM over medical images from the mini-MIAS database and over computed radiography (CR) images generated at different exposure levels. These images have been contaminated with impulsive and/or Gaussian noise. Experiments show that the proposed method obtains good performance in terms of the above mentioned objective quality measures. After applying multi-core and GPUs optimization strategies, the observed time shows that the new filter allows to remove mixed Gaussian-impulse noise in real-time.