Medical image denoising by parallel non-local means

The generation process of medical image will inevitably introduce certain noises. These noises will degrade the image quality and affect the final clinical diagnosis. Therefore, denoising plays an important role in the pre-processing of medical image before the formal diagnosis and treatment. In this paper, the classical NLM algorithm is improved to denoise medical images by involving a novel noise weighting function and parallelizing. In our experiment, plenty of medical images have been tested and experiment results show that our algorithm can achieve better results and higher efficiency compared with the original NLM method.