Stripe-based SPHIT lossy compression of volumetric medical images for low memory usage and uniform reconstruction quality

Abstract

This paper presents a low memory implementation of efficient lossy volumetric medical image compression using the set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) algorithm. The coding units in this three-dimensional wavelet transform and compression method are short sequences of horizontal stripes cut from the sequence of slices in the volumetric image. As the compression degree increases, the boundaries between adjacent coding units became increasingly visible. Unlike video, where image frames are viewed under dynamic conditions, the volume image is examined under static conditions and must not exhibit such boundary artifacts. In order to eliminate them, we utilize overlapping and averaging both at the intra-slice and inter-slice boundaries between adjacent and successive stripe sequences. Our low memory implementation smooths out considerably the variation in mean squared error among different slices and suffers only an insignificant loss in performance from that of a full memory implementation.