Medical Image Compression Based on Variational Autoencoder

Abstract

With the rapid growth of medical image data, it has become a current research hotspot that how to realize the large amounts of the real-time upload and storage of medical images with limited network bandwidth and storage space. However, currently, medical image compression technology cannot perform joint optimization of rate (the degree of compression) and distortion (reconstruction effect). Therefore, this study proposed a medical image compression algorithm based on a variational autoencoder. This algorithm takes rate and distortion as the common optimization goal and uses the residual network module to directly transmit information, which alleviates the contradiction between improving the degree of compression and optimizing the reconstruction effect. At the same time, the algorithm also reduces image loss in the medical image compression process by adding the residual network. The experimental results show that, compared with the traditional medical image compression algorithm and the deep learning compression algorithm, the algorithm in this study has smaller distortion, better reconstruction effect, and can obtain higher quality medical images at the same compression rate.