MEDICAL IMAGE PROCESSING APPARATUS AND MEDICAL IMAGE PROCESSING METHOD

A medical image processing apparatus reducing noise of a medical image acquired includes a smoothing unit forming a smoothed image of the medical image, a route forming unit forming a route that is a pixel group positioned continuously in the smoothed image and fulfills a route condition, and a noise reducing unit extracting a pixel group corresponding to the route in the medical image and reducing noise of the medical image based on the extracted pixel group.