Possibilities of New Image Storage Modalities

Information storage is, alongside transmission and processing, one of the basic functions of systems assisting medical diagnostics. State-of-the-art distributed computer systems are now supplying these functions, but only in the domain of alphanumeric information. Complementary to alphanumeric information, pictorial information is the basis for several medical disciplines. Unfortunately, the digital representation of a picture requires several orders of magnitude more basic units of information (bits) than an alphanumeric document. This is due to the fact that a picture has to be resolved into a matrix of picture elements (pixels), each of which described by the binary representation of its grayness or color shade. The matrix has to be large enough to allow the reconstruction of the finest picture details, and thus depends on the ‘MTF’ of the imaging process [5]. Table 1 gives some examples.