Analysis and comparison of symmetry based lossless and perceptually lossless algorithms for volumetric compression of medical images

Modern medical imaging techniques produce huge volume of data from stack of images generated in a single examination. To compress them several volumetric compression techniques have been proposed. Performance of these compression schemes can be improved further by considering the anatomical symmetry present in medical images and incorporating the characteristics of human visual system. In this paper a volumetric medical image compression algorithm is presented in which perceptual model is integrated with a symmetry based lossless scheme. Symmetry based lossless and perceptually lossless algorithms were evaluated on a set of three dimensional medical images. Experimental results show that symmetry based perceptually lossless coder gives an average of 8.47% improvement in bit per pixel without any perceivable degradation in visual quality against the lossless scheme.