A GPU parallel optimised blockwise NLM algorithm in a distributed computing system

Recently, advanced computing systems are widely adopted in order to intensively elaborate a huge amount of biomedical data in the e-health field. An interesting challenge is to perform real-time diagnosis by means of complex computational environments. In this paper, we suggest to deal the most computationally expensive processing steps of a distributed cloud e-health system by the use of graphics processing units (GPUs). In the case study of the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), for improving the quality of denoising and helping the real-time diagnosis, we have implemented a GPU parallel algorithm based on the optimised blockwise non-local means (OB-NLM) method. Experimental results have shown a significant improvement of healthcare processing practice in terms of execution time.