A GPU-accelerated fuzzy method for real-time CT volume filtering

During acquisition and reconstruction, medical images may become noisy and lose diagnostic quality. In the case of CT scans, obtaining less noisy images results in a higher radiation dose being administered to the patient. Filtering techniques can be utilized to reduce radiation without losing diagnosis capabilities. The objective in this work is to obtain an implementation of a filter capable of processing medical images in real-time. To achieve this we have developed several filter methods based on fuzzy logic, and their GPU implementations, to reduce mixed Gaussian-impulsive noise. These filters have been developed to work in attenuation coefficients so as to not lose any information from the CT scans. The testing volumes come from the Mayo clinic database and consist of CT volumes at full and at simulated low dose. The GPU parallelizations reach speedups of over 2700 and take less than 0.1 seconds to filter more than 300 slices. In terms of quality the filter is competitive with other state of the art algorithmic and AI filters. The proposed method obtains good performance in terms of quality and the parallelization results in real-time filtering.