Development and performance evaluation of medical image compression techniques

Abstract

Medical imaging techniques such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging Computed Tomography X ray and Ultrasound produce a large amount of digital medical images These medical images require ample storage space Hence compression of digital images becomes essential and is very much desired in medical applications to solve both storage and transmission problems But at the same time an efficient image compression scheme that reduces the size of medical images without sacrificing diagnostic information is required The underlying basis in the compression process is the removal of redundant information contained within data A large number of image compression algorithms have been developed But still there is a need for efficient compression algorithms to manage the increasing demands for image storage and transmission time This research work proposes three new image compression algorithms to reduce the size of the medical image without degradation in the diagnostic information In the first part of the work a novel threshold based medical image compression technique is proposed This algorithm proposes a new type of thresholding to maximize Compression Ratio without sacrificing diagnostic information