Certain algorithms for compression of volumetric medical images

Abstract

Medical imaging modalities have become an integral part in the field of medicine aiding diagnosis and treating ailments Popular imaging modalities like Computed Tomography CT Magnetic Resonance Imaging MRI Positron Emission Tomography PET Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography SPECT X rays Ultrasound scans generate huge amount of medical data in hospitals These data are of high resolution and voluminous which need to be stored for future archival and or transmitted for implementation of e health teleradiology tele consultation telemedicine and telematics Storage and transmission of these data in raw state incurs high storage capacity large transmission bandwidth and long transmission time Though increasing the storage capability and bandwidth is a possible solution the associated high cost makes this solution less attractive So to mitigate these problems compression algorithms adapted to these applications are required for creating data files with reduced memory size In the past many compression algorithms were proposed for medical images Two dimensional medical image compression algorithms can be extended to three dimensional medical image stacks by applying it to individual slices but doing so will not exploit the three dimensional nature of the stacks in order to improve compression performance newline