DIFFERENTIATION APPLIED TO LOSSLESS COMPRESSION OF MEDICAL IMAGES

Lossless compression of medical images using a proposed differentiatio n technique is explored, This scheme is based on computing weighted di fferences between neighboring pixel values, The performance of the pro posed approach, for the lossless compression of magnetic resonance (MR ) images and ultrasonic images, is evaluated and compared with the los sless linear predictor and the lossless Joint Photographic Experts Gro up (JPEG) standard, The residue sequence of these techniques is coded using arithmetic: coding, The proposed scheme yields compression measu res, in terms of bits per pixel, that are comparable with or lower tha n those obtained using the linear predictor and the lossless JPEG stan dard, respectively, with 8-b medical images, The advantages of the dif ferentiation technique presented here over the linear predictor are: 1 ) the coefficients of the differentiator are known by the encoder and the decoder, which eliminates the need to compute or encode these coef ficients, and 2) the computational complexity is greatly reduced, Thes e advantages are particularly attractive in real time processing for c ompressing and decompressing medical images.