USING JPEG IMAGE COMPRESSION TO FACILITATE TELEMEDICINE

Economical applications of teleradiology and telemedicine are limited to the existing telephone network infrastructure, which greatly limits the speed of digital information transfer. Telephone lines are inhere ntly slow, requiring image transmission times to be unacceptably long for large, complex, or numerous images. JPEG (Joint Photographic Exper ts Group) image transmission has been shown to compress images to 10% of the original file size without a noticeable change in the quality o f the image. This study was carried out to assess the quality of medic al diagnostic images after JPEG compression and decompression. X-rays, computed tomography scans, and ultrasound samples were compressed and decompressed using JPEG. The compressed JPEG images were indistinguis hable from the original images. The JPEG images were approximately 10% of the original file size. This would reduce image transmission times by 90% (eg, an unacceptable time of 50 minutes would be reduced to an acceptable time of 5 minutes). JPEG can be used to optimize teleradio logy and telemedicine.