Advanced Approaches for Medical Image Compression

Medical diagnostic data produced by hospitals has increased exponentially. With the coming era of digitized medical information and film-less imaging, it has been a challenge to deal with the storage and transmission requirement of enormous data. Compression is one of the indispensable techniques to solve this problem; with this the wavelet-based approaches have been the mainstream in the signal compression community. Wavelets are especially suitable for applications where scalability and tolerable degradation are important. Thus, many waveletbased image compression algorithms have been developed, resulting in practical advances such as: continuous-tone and bit-level compression, lossless and lossy compression, progressive transmission by pixel, accuracy and resolution, region of interest coding and others. This paper aims to discuss some of the latest and efficient, wavelet based compression techniques followed by comparison in order to do justice to the three, namely: memory requirement, bandwidth constraint, and battery resource constraint.