Medical image transcoder for telemedicine based on wireless communication devices

Abstract

Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) is a standard for handling, storing, printing, and transmitting information in medical imaging. DICOM viewer tool is required to view and analyze these DICOM images. There are many commercially available algorithms which process Dicom images; however these algorithms are typically tuned for particular image types. This paper describes a universal transcoder for reading Dicom images and compressing these using lossy as well as lossless schemes such as Dicom rle, jpeg, and jpeg 2000. The compression technique to be used is either automatically selected based on image parameters, or as specified by the user. This paper also describes results from research conducted in the conversion of images from DICOM format into any other image format, reducing the dependence of specialized DICOM viewer tools for viewing medical images. The idea is to convert DICOM formatted files into bitmap format first, and then convert these bitmaps into other common image files. Our transcoder outputs an image that is best suited for viewing on wireless handhelds (mobile phones) as well as built-in viewers on computers, which facilitates further analysis and research to be conducted on these images.