Lossless Compression of X-ray Cardiac Images

Digital medical imaging systems like Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) has become a crucial tool supporting both decision making and treatment procedures in medical environments. Advantages come from reduced storage and management costs associated with image data and increased intra and interinstitutional portability of data in communication networks. One of the most important benefits of the digital medical image is that it allows the widespread sharing and remote access to medical data by outside institutions. Mass storage and digital communication systems costs are continuously decreasing, but, as individual digital medical studies become significantly larger, requirements for transmission bandwidth and data storage capacity still exceed available technologies. Image compression algorithms offer the means to minimize storage cost and to increase transmission speed. This paper provides a comparison about the application of Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM) lossless compression standards on Angiography cine acquisition images. Moreover, some other state-of-the-art compression schemes are evaluated when applied on angiographic images. We also propose new directions for the lossless compression of this type of images, based on exploring a third dimension of the data. Preliminary results are presented using some lossless video compression methods.