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.