DICOM Image Compression and Decompression Techniques

Abstract: The increasing volume of medical data generated by new imaging modalities is causing many issues in the medical field. All these modalities related to patient(s) are saved in a standard format called DICOM. Uploading and retrieving such large volume of medical data to and from the cloud or other databases is becoming very challenging with this digitization. Hence, we propose to develop a DICOM compression and decompression tool that helps in compressing the medical data and hence reduces time in accessing from central databases or cloud. Here, compression includes both reversible and irreversible (lossless and lossy) techniques depending on users Region of Interest. With reversible compression (Lossless), upon decompression, the image is perfectly reconstructed and numerically identical to the original (i.e. the original and decompressed are perfectly correlated). With irreversible compression, data are discarded during compression and cannot be recovered. Upon compression frequency content to which the human eye is insensitive is removed. Upon decompression, the discarded information cannot be recovered, resulting in some reconstruction interpretation.

Keywords: DICOM, compression.