Compression of Cardiac X-Ray Images Based on Acquisition Noise

The goal of this work is to illustrate the feasibility to use noise as a measure for data loss in compression of cardiac X-ray images. In lossy medical image compression, the requirements for the preservation of diagnostic integrity cannot be easily formulated in terms of a perceptual model. Especially since, in reality, human visual perception is dependent on numerous factors such as the viewing conditions and psycho-visual factors. In general, due to the low exposure, cardiac X-ray images tend to be relatively noisy. In the assumption that noise, in case it is not correlated with the signal, contains no diagnostic information, we propose a compression scheme, based on (overlapping) block transforms, exploiting the different spectral distributions of signal and noise.