International conference on Communication and Signal Processing, April 3-5, 2013, India

Region Based Lossless Compression for Digital Images in Telemedicine Application

B. Brindha, G. Raghuraman

AbstractRegion Based Coding Technique is significant for

medical image compression and transmission. In medical images, only a small portion of the image might be diagnostically useful. In these regions, lossless compression can helps to achieve high efficiency performance in telemedicine applications. This paper proposes a very efficient and low complexity compression method for Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) images. Main advantages of Region based coding technique is exploited in this paper. Segmentation of these regions leads to optimal performance. Here the ROI part of the image is identified by manually and combined with effect of Integer Wavelet Transform (IWT). IWT compression technique is useful to reconstruct the original image, reversibly with desired quality. The overall compression process helps to reach a satisfactory level for image transmission in limited bandwidth over a telemedicine application. Index TermsCompression, Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), Integer Wavelet, Region of Interest (ROI).

I. INTRODUCTION Medical imaging has a great impact on the diagnosis of diseases and surgical planning. However, imaging devices continue to generate more data per patient, often 1000 images or ~500 MB. These data need long-term storage and efficient transmission . Many compression algorithms produce high compression rates in medical images. But the quality of loss is affordable. In telemedicine application field medicine cannot afford any deficiency in diagnostically important regions (Region of Interest, ROI). An approach that brings a high compression rate with good quality in the ROI is necessary. The general theme is to preserve quality in diagnostically critical regions, while allowing lossily encoding the other regions. The main reason for preserving regions other than ROI is make user as more easily to locate the position of critical regions in the original image and also used to evaluate the interactions if possible with other organs. The evaluation of digital images in the field of telemedicine application leads to apply compression algorithm to medical images. The initial emphasis was on information preserving methods. In means
B.Brindha is pursuing post graduate with the Computer Science and Engineering Department, SSN College of Engineering, Chennai. (e-mail: brindhabalan16@gmail.com). G.Raghuraman is with the Computer Science and Engineering Department, SSN College of Engineering, Chennai. (e-mail: raghu.grr@gmail.com).

of scan pixel difference was researched by Takaya et al in [1]. Assche et al exploit the inter-frame redundancy in [2]. Linear predictive coding schemes were investigated in [3]. The lossless compression algorithms are resulted in low compression ratios. For better result transform coding schemes such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) are used. To achieve high compression ratio without degrading of quality, ROI method were introduced. Data set is a collection of 2D images, henceforth called slices. The most important drawback of 3D based approaches in ROI based compression is twofold. First, the image quality along the three principal 3D axes is not uniform, i.e. the resolution between the slices is much less than the resolution within each slice. Second, the ROI does not necessarily lie in a 3D primitive shape such as a cube. As a consequence, a primitive 3D ROI would occupy a big portion of the data, thereby deviating from our initial objective of high compression rate. To address these problems, a 2D based ROI scheme is explored in this paper. In this paper we propose a new lossless compression method in the image with embedded encoding. The Wavelet Transform (WT), in general, produces floating point coefficients. These coefficients are used to reconstruct an original image perfectly in theory, the use of finite precision arithmetic and quantization results in a lossy scheme. Recently, Integer WT has been introduced to overcome this disadvantage. In this paper we have proposed a method for lossless compression in medical images. The proposed algorithm is denoted as Integer Wavelet Transform (IWT). The paper is organized as follows. Section II gives a detailed description of our proposed method. Section III provides experimental results and section IV gives our conclusion and discussion of summary. II. REGION OF INTEREST ROI concept is introduced owing to limitations of lossless and lossy compression techniques. Most of the lossless compression techniques, the compression ratio are near to 80% of original size, whereas for lossy encoders the compression ratio is much higher (up to 5-30 %) [1][3] but there may be significant loss in data. This loss may hamper effective treatment, losing diagnostically important parts of the medical image. Hence, there is a need for lossless compression technique which will preserve diagnostically

978-1-4673-4866-9/13/$31.00 2013 IEEE

537