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A Parallel Fuzzy Algorithm for Real-Time Medical Image Enhancement

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Abstract

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.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the editor and reviewers for their comments and suggestions which helped to improve the quality of the paper significantly.

Funding

This research was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (Grant RTI2018-098156-B-C54) co-financed by FEDER funds.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Ciencia de la Computación e Inteligencia Artificial, Universidad de Alicante, San Vicente del Raspeig, 03690, Spain

    Josep Arnal & Luis B. Súcar

  2. Departamento de Sistemas Informáticos y Computación, Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, 46022, Spain

    Mónica Chillarón & Vicente Vidal

  3. Instituto de Tecnologías de la Información y Comunicaciones, Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, 46022, Spain

    Estíbaliz Parcero

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  1. Josep Arnal
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  2. Mónica Chillarón
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Correspondence to Josep Arnal.

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Arnal, J., Chillarón, M., Parcero, E. et al. A Parallel Fuzzy Algorithm for Real-Time Medical Image Enhancement. Int. J. Fuzzy Syst. 22, 2599–2612 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40815-020-00953-3

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