Lossless color medical image compression using adaptive block‐based encoding for human computed tomographic images

The advancement in medical imaging systems such as computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), positron emitted tomography (PET), and computed radiography (CR) produces huge amount of volumetric images about various anatomical structure of human body. There exists a need for lossless compression of these images for storage and communication purposes. The major issue in medical image is the sequence of operations to be performed for compression and decompression should not degrade the original quality of the image, it should be compressed loss lessly. In this article, we proposed a lossless method of volumetric medical image compression and decompression using adaptive block‐based encoding technique. The algorithm is tested for different sets of CT color images using Matlab. The Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) images are compressed using the proposed algorithm and stored as DICOM formatted images. The inverse process of adaptive block‐based algorithm is used to reconstruct the original image information loss lessly from the compressed DICOM files. We present the simulation results for large set of human color CT images to produce a comparative analysis of the proposed methodology with block‐based compression, and JPEG2000 lossless image compression technique. This article finally proves the proposed methodology gives better compression ratio than block‐based coding and computationally better than JPEG 2000 coding. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol, 23, 227–234, 2013