Compression of Dicom Images Based on Wavelets and Spiht for Telemedicine Applications

Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) is a standard used for distribution and viewing of medical images from different modalities. In this paper, we propose a method for compressing DICOM images based on the well-known Set Partitioning in Hierarchical Trees (SPIHT) which possess the progressive transmission capabilities useful for telemedicine applications. This is in sharp contrast to Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) where the images have to be first compressed to the required level and only then can be transmitted. In our method, the header and image data is separated from the DICOM image where the header is transmitted first with necessary modifications. The image data is then compressed using SPIHT and transmitted. It is found from the experiment that our method gives better results in terms of compression and time.