Visually Lossless Threshold: JPEG 2000 compression of Digital Chest Radiographs

radiologic examination and they account for a large portion of medical image data. For example, 16,110 chest radiographs were performed, resulting in a data volume of 229.9 gigabytes accumulated at the Seoul National University Bundang Hospital in September 2009. Irreversible (“lossy”) image compression appears to be an immediate and effective means to reduce operational costs on transmission and storage of medical image data (1-4). However, such compression techniques are not always accepted by radiologists due to concerns of artifacts that potentially hinder diagnosis. There have largely been two approaches in determining optimal compression thresholds: the diagnostically lossless approach (5-11) and visually lossless approach J Korean Soc Radiol 2010;63:371-378