Analysis of JPEG Compression on Communications in a Telepathology System

ABSTRACT This paper presents a performance evaluation of a digital telepathology system. In telepathology, 5ev- eral operations are involved in displaying source images from a remote microscope on the screen of alocal workstation. At the remote site, images from a microscope are acquired by a camera and framegrabber, compressed, stored, and transferred to the local site. At the local site they are stored, decom- pressed, displayed, and diagnosed by collaborating pathologists. In this paper, we present the evaluationof a Roche Imaging Systems telepathology workstation. During tests, microscope magnification, cameraresolution, color quality, quantization factors of JPEG (Joint Photographic Expert Group) compression, and transmission speed of the communication network were changed. The time of each operation and the size of compressed images were recorded. Analysis of the operation time and image size delineated the characteristics and bottlenecks of operating a digital telepathology system. The results show that