A compression and transmission scheme of computer tomography images for telemedicine based on JPEG2000.

A newly developed lossy compression and transmission scheme valid for telemedicine is described. The system uses computed tomography (CT) images and is based on JPEG2000. Different compression rates were applied to different regions within the image. JPEG2000 with the Maxshift algorithm to encode a region of interest (ROI) was used. The ROI is an area in the image that is expected to exhibit a better quality than the rest of it at any decoding bit rate. ROIs were delimited by using several processes of thresholding and growing regions. Compressed images were encapsulated using the DICOM format with JPEG2000 Transfer Syntax before transmission. DICOM Storage Service Class was then used to transmit those images. The system was evaluated by transmitting several series of CT images via integrated services digital network (128 kbps). Results obtained after decompression with and without the Maxshift algorithm were compared.