Visually lossless compression of breast biopsy virtual slides for telepathology

A major issue in telepathology is the extreme size of digitized slides, which require several gigabytes of storage and cause significant delays in image delivery to pathologists. We investigated the utility of a visual discrimination model (VDM) to predict bit rates for visually lossless JPEG2000 compression of breast biopsy virtual slides. Visually lossless bit rates were determined experimentally with human observers. VDM metrics computed for those bit rates were nearly constant, suggesting that VDMs could be used to achieve visually lossless image quality while providing about four times the data reduction of reversible compression.