Medical Image Compression based on ROI using Integer Wavelet Transform

Abstract

Medical imaging refers to techniques and processes used to create images of various parts of the human body for diagnostic and treatment purposes within digital health. With the increased use of digital images in clinical settings, it has become necessary to use various compression methods, both lossless and lossy, in order to reduce their cost of storage or transmission. While lossy compression alternatives allow high compression rates, there are legal limitations that such images including MRI, ultrasound, X-Ray and CT-Scan should be stored in a format without loss of information. This work proposes a digital image compression mechanism compatible with the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) standard that takes advantage of the IDWT capabilities to preserve the diagnostic quality of the regions of interest, through lossless encoding, while the rest of the image, composed of zones less relevant, is compressed with for JPEG compression. The results, in terms of Compression Ratio, MSE and PSNR are found to be quite satisfactory both quantitatively and qualitatively.