Large-scale implementation of optimal image compression algorithms

Despite over a decade of research and development, medical image compression has not yet been widely implemented on clinical picture archiving and communication systems (PACS). We have developed a prototype interface which incorporates both lossless and lossy compression into a browsing system that enables the efficient use of network and storage resources. Such a system allows a user to quickly browse through a large set of image icons created from lossy compression and selectively retrieve the original images for diagnosis from the optical disk that contains losslessly compressed image data. For lossless compression, we implemented modality specific techniques which combines preprocessing, adaptive prediction and entropy coding, giving a compression improvement of 20% over JPEG predictors. The lossy compression algorithm consists of subsampling followed by wavelet transform coding and achieves compressed CR images of sufficient quality for browsing at a compression ratio of about 2000:1.© (1995) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.