Lossless Compression of Medical Images based on the Differential Probability of Images

Abstract

Lossless compression is crucial in the remote transmission of large-scale medical image and the retainment of complete medical diagnostic information. The lossless compression method of medical image based on differential probability of image is proposed in this study. The medical image with DICOM format was decorrelated by the differential method, and the difference matrix was optimally coded by the Huffman coding method to obtain the optimal compression effect. Experimental results obtained using the new method were compared with those using Lempel–Ziv–Welch, modified run–length encoding, and block–bit allocation methods to verify its effectiveness. For 2-D medical images, the lossless compression effect of the proposed method is the best when the object region is more than 20% of the image. For 3-D medical images, the proposed method has the highest compression ratio among the control methods. The proposed method can be directly used for lossless compression of DICOM images.