A novel approach to medical image compression

Abstract: As medical/biological imaging facilities move towards complete film-less imaging, compression plays a key role. Although lossy compression techniques yield high compression rates, the medical community has been reluctant to adopt these methods, largely for legal reasons, and has instead relied on lossless compression techniques that yield low compression rates. The true goal is to maximise compression while maintaining clinical relevance and balancing legal risk. This paper proposes a novel model-based compression technique that makes use of clinically relevant regions as defined by radiologists. Lossless compression is used in these clinically relevant regions, and lossy compression is used everywhere else. Keywords: clinically relevant; compression; lossy; lossless; JPEG; mammogram; medical imaging; mutual information maximisation; region of interest (ROI); snakes; wavelet; X-ray. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Zukoski, M.J., Boult, T. and Iyriboz, T. (2006) ‘A novel approach to medical image compression’, Int. J. Bioinformatics Research and Applications, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp.89–103