Perceptually lossless medical image coding.

A novel perceptually lossless coder is presented for the compression of medical images. Built on the JPEG 2000 coding framework, the heart of the proposed coder is a visual pruning function, embedded with an advanced human vision model to identify and to remove visually insignificant/irrelevant information. The proposed coder offers the advantages of simplicity and modularity with bit-stream compliance. Current results have shown superior compression ratio gains over that of its information lossless counterparts without any visible distortion. In addition, a case study consisting of 31 medical experts has shown that no perceivable difference of statistical significance exists between the original images and the images compressed by the proposed coder.