A Simple and Novel Algorithm for Medical Image Compression

The use of digital medical images is increasing very fast. Medical images, like CT scan, Ultrasound, Dental X-ray etc, require large amounts of memory storage. Even to transmit an image over a wireless or LAN network could take more time. Due to this reason medical image compression is important. Related to medical images many compression methods are available. However, the lossless (for diagnostic and legal reasons) techniques, which allow for perfect reconstruction of the original images, yield compression rates of at most 2 only, while the techniques that yield higher compression rates are lossy. To meet this challenge, we have developed a hybrid compression schemes which is diagnostically lossless with good compression ratio. Due to its simplicity the hardware realisation is also easy and cost effective compare to JPEG method.