Wavelet-based compression with ROI coding support for mobile access to DICOM images over heterogeneous radio networks.

Most of the commercial medical image viewers do not provide scalability in image compression and/or region of interest (ROI) encoding/decoding. Furthermore, these viewers do not take into consideration the special requirements and needs of a heterogeneous radio setting that is constituted by different access technologies [e.g., general packet radio services (GPRS)/ universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS), wireless local area network (WLAN), and digital video broadcasting (DVB-H)]. This paper discusses a medical application that contains a viewer for digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) images as a core module. The proposed application enables scalable wavelet-based compression, retrieval, and decompression of DICOM medical images and also supports ROI coding/decoding. Furthermore, the presented application is appropriate for use by mobile devices activating in heterogeneous radio settings. In this context, performance issues regarding the usage of the proposed application in the case of a prototype heterogeneous system setup are also discussed.