Enhanced ROI (Region of Interest Algorithms) for Medical Image Compression

Abstract

Medical image compression applications are quality-driven applications which demand high quality for certain regions that have diagnostic importance in an image, where even small quality reduction introduced by lossy coding might alter subsequent diagnosis, which might cause severe legal consequences. Due to this, lossless techniques have been extensively used. As an alternative, owing to the observation that only some part of the image actually is of interest to the practitioners, ROI-based techniques are becoming popular. This paper proposes four techniques for this purpose. The four techniques are based on Mixed Raster Content layering, block-based thresholding, region growing and active contour algorithms. All the four techniques are enhanced and have the common objective of determining a ROI that can improve the compression process. Experiments results prove that all the four algorithms are efficient in determining the ROI and are efficient in terms of segmentation, compression and speed.