High frame rate medical quality video compression for tele-EEG

More and more, exams require medical images as a tool to diagnose pathologies. Thus, the transfer and storage of the exam data becomes a critical issue. To address this issue, an image compression algorithm called Waaves has been developed and certified for medical imaging. Our work in this paper deals with a scenario of EEG exams where video of the patient is also recorded in order to correctly diagnose myoclonus pathologies. To achieve this goal, the video needs to be of high quality and at frame rate of at least 100 frames per second. This high data rate cannot be compressed on the fly by Waaves codec. In this paper, we present a novel codec based on the Waaves compression algorithm that fits the requirements of tele-video-EEG. We have used the characteristics of the input sequence and the analysis of the original codec, to improve the compression speed. The proposed video codec has shown a speed-up of around 3.4 times compared to the original algorithm. In addition, we have been able to improve the compression ratio while retaining necessary quality to identify myoclonus.