Optimal compression of medical images

Abstract

In today's healthcare system, medical images are playing a vital role in the diagnosis. The challenges arise to the hospital management systems (HMS) are to store and communicate the large volume of medical images generated by various imaging modalities. Efficient compression of medical images is required to reduce the bit rate to increase the storage capacity and speed-up the transmission without affecting its quality. Over the past few decades, several compression standards have been proposed. In this paper, an intelligent JPEG2000 compression scheme is presented to compress the medical images efficiently. Unlike the traditional compression techniques, genetic programming (GP)-based quantization matrices are used to quantize the wavelet coefficients of the input image. Experimental results validate the usefulness of the proposed intelligent compression scheme.