What filter is optimal for noise cancellation when working with very low sample count
filtfilt filters backwards in time, so the latency can be very large (infinite in theory), depending on the length of the filter's impulse response above your desired noise floor (or quantization floor).  Thus filtfilt is best used only for offline filtering.

If you use an ordinary forward-in-time IIR filter, you need to save the internal state variables of your IIR filter(s) between each short frame.

An alternative, for a FIR filter (or if an IIR impulse response tapers below some noise floor in a short enough number of samples), is to use some form of zero-padding plus overlap add/save to carry the impulse response forward.