The size of medical data has increased significantly over the last few years. This poses severe problems for the rapid transmission of medical data across the hospital network resulting into longer access times of the images. Also longterm storage of data becomes more and more a problem. In an attempt to overcome the increasing data size often lossless or lossy compression algorithms are being used. This paper compares the existing JPEG2000 compression algorithm and the new emerging JP3D standard for compression of volumetric datasets. The main benefit of JP3D is that this algorithm truly is a 3D compression algorithm that exploits correlation not only within but also in between slices of a dataset. We evaluate both lossless and lossy modes of these algorithms. As a first step we perform an objective evaluation. Using RMSE and PSNR metrics we determine which compression algorithm performs best and this for multiple compression ratios and for several clinically relevant medical datasets. It is well known that RMSE and PSNR often do not correlate well with subjectively perceived image quality. Therefore we also perform a psycho visual analysis by means of a numerical observer. With this observer model we analyze how compression artifacts actually are perceived by a human observer. Results show superior performance of the new JP3D algorithm compared to the existing JPEG2000 algorithm.

Date Published: 3 March 2007
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 6512, Medical Imaging 2007: Image Processing, 65124L (3 March 2007); doi: 10.1117/12.707629

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6512:
Medical Imaging 2007: Image Processing
Josien P. W. Pluim; Joseph M. Reinhardt, Editor(s)