46 - Fundamentals and Standards of Compression and Communication

Abstract

Telemedicine is the use of electronic information and communications technology to provide and support health care when distance separates the participants. Telemedicine applications involve mainly image transmission within and among health care organizations. The principal objectives of this chapter are to introduce basic concepts and standards for data compression and communications in telemedicine systems, and to lay a foundation for further study in this field. The focus is on image processing and telecommunications features. Compression techniques generally attempt to achieve a compromise between two undesirable outcomes: potentially deleting critical information and insufficient reduction of the image file size. The common lossy compression techniques are: JPEG, MPEG, wavelets, and fractals. The representative lossless compression techniques are: CCITT Group 3 ID, CCITT Group 3 2D, CCITT Group 4, and Lempel-Ziv and Welch (LZW) algorithm. Telecommunications involve the use of wire, radio, optical, or other electromagnetic channels to transmit or receive signals for voice, data, and video communications. This chapter also describes features of technologies, standards, and procedures or protocols that contribute to the speed and reliability of modern telecommunications systems.