Adaptive compression algorithm from projections: application on medical greyscale images

A Block Adaptive Near-Lossless Compression Algorithm for Medical Image Sequences and Diagnostic Quality Assessment

The near-lossless compression technique has better compression ratio than lossless compression technique while maintaining a maximum error limit for each pixel. It takes the advantage of both the lossy and lossless compression methods providing high compression ratio, which can be used for medical images while preserving diagnostic information. The proposed algorithm uses a resolution and modality independent threshold-based predictor, optimal quantization (q) level, and adaptive block size encoding. The proposed method employs resolution independent gradient edge detector (RIGED) for removing inter-pixel redundancy and block adaptive arithmetic encoding (BAAE) is used after quantization to remove coding redundancy. Quantizer with an optimum q level is used to implement the proposed method for high compression efficiency and for the better quality of the recovered images. The proposed method is implemented on volumetric 8-bit and 16-bit standard medical images and also validated on real time 16-bit-depth images collected from government hospitals. The results show the proposed algorithm yields a high coding performance with BPP of 1.37 and produces high peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of 51.35 dB for 8-bit-depth image dataset as compared with other near-lossless compression. The average BPP values of 3.411 and 2.609 are obtained by the proposed technique for 16-bit standard medical image dataset and real-time medical dataset respectively with maintained image quality. The improved near-lossless predictive coding technique achieves high compression ratio without losing diagnostic information from the image.

Novel Near-Lossless Compression Algorithm for Medical Sequence Images with Adaptive Block-Based Spatial Prediction

To address the low compression efficiency of lossless compression and the low image quality of general near-lossless compression, a novel near-lossless compression algorithm based on adaptive spatial prediction is proposed for medical sequence images for possible diagnostic use in this paper. The proposed method employs adaptive block size-based spatial prediction to predict blocks directly in the spatial domain and Lossless Hadamard Transform before quantization to improve the quality of reconstructed images. The block-based prediction breaks the pixel neighborhood constraint and takes full advantage of the local spatial correlations found in medical images. The adaptive block size guarantees a more rational division of images and the improved use of the local structure. The results indicate that the proposed algorithm can efficiently compress medical images and produces a better peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) under the same pre-defined distortion than other near-lossless methods.

Symmetry-Based Biomedical Image Compression

Image compression techniques aim at reducing the amount of data needed to accurately represent an image, such that the image can be economically transmitted or archived. This paper deals with employing symmetry as a parameter for compression of biomedical images. The approach presented in this paper offers great potential in complete lossless compression of the biomedical image under consideration, with the reconstructed image being mathematically identical to the original image. The method comprises getting rid of the redundant data and encoding the non-redundant data for the purpose of regenerating the image at the receiver section without any observable change in the image data.

Projection-based medical image compression for telemedicine applications

Recent years have seen great development in the field of medical imaging and telemedicine. Despite the developments in storage and communication technologies, compression of medical data remains challenging. This paper proposes an efficient medical image compression method for telemedicine. The proposed method takes advantage of Radon transform whose basis functions are effective in representing the directional information. The periodic re-ordering of the elements of Radon projections requires minimal interpolation and preserves all of the original image pixel intensities. The dimension-reducing property allows the conversion of 2D processing task to a set of simple 1D task independently on each of the projections. The resultant Radon coefficients are then encoded using set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) encoder. Experimental results obtained on a set of medical images demonstrate that the proposed method provides competing performance compared with conventional and state-of-the art compression methods in terms of compression ratio, peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), and computational time.

Segmentation of colon tissue sample images using multiple graphics accelerators

Nowadays, processing medical images is increasingly done through using digital imagery and custom software solutions. The distributed algorithm presented in this paper is used to detect special tissue parts, the nuclei on haematoxylin and eosin stained colon tissue sample images. The main aim of this work is the development of a new data-parallel region growing algorithm that can be implemented even in an environment using multiple video accelerators. This new method has three levels of parallelism: (a) the parallel region growing itself, (b) starting more region growing in the device, and (c) using more than one accelerator. We use the split-and-merge technique based on our already existing data-parallel cell nuclei segmentation algorithm extended with a fast, backtracking-based, non-overlapping cell filter method. This extension does not cause significant degradation of the accuracy; the results are practically the same as those of the original sequential region growing method. However, as expected, using more devices usually means that less time is needed to process the tissue image; in the case of the configuration of one central processing unit and two graphics cards, the average speed-up is about 4-6×. The implemented algorithm has the additional advantage of efficiently processing very large images with high memory requirements.