An Approach for Diagnostically Lossless Coding of Volumetric Medical Data Based on Wavelet and Just-Noticeable-Distortion Model

Abstract

This paper explores a technique for visually/diagnostically lossless coding in the wavelet domain to effectively compress the three-dimensional medical image data. The quantisation module based on Just Noticeable Distortion (JND) for wavelets guarantees the visual quality in the reconstructed data. This method has been further extended to present the Volume of Interest (VOI) based technique that enables to preserve the quality of the diagnostically significant VOI region. The proposed method tested on several datasets outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Apart from the conventional quality metric, Human Visual System (HVS) based quality metrics are also used to evaluate the visual quality of the reconstructed image. A subjective and objective evaluation carried out for VOI based coder shows that the quality-compression needs of the medical community are well addressed.

Keywords:

• Discrete wavelet transform
• Just noticeable distortion
• Medical image coding
• MRI and CT images
• Visually lossless compression
• Volume of interest

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The authors would like to thank Prof Bilgin A., University of Arizona, USA, Dr. Victor Sanchez, University of Warwick, UK, Dr. Tim Bruylants, Vrije University Brussel, Dr Vijay Ballal, Ampalpady Scan Centre, Udupi and Dr. Mohandas S Bhavikatti, Hubli Scan Centre, Hubli for providing the medical image data sets.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

B. K. Chandrika

B K Chandrika is associate professor at Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Manipal Institute of Technology, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal, India. She obtained her BTech degree in electrical and electronics engineering, MTech in industrial electronics and PhD from NITK, Surathkal. Her areas of interest are signal processing, signal compression, and FPGA based system design.

P. Aparna

P Aparna obtained her BTech degree in electronics & communication engineering from NMAMIT. Nitte (Mangalore University) in 1999 and her MTech degree in digital electronics & advanced communication from NITK, Surathkal in 2004 and her PhD from NITK Surathkal in multimedia signal processing in 2012. She has joined Electronics & Communication Dept, NITK, Surathkal as assistant professor in 2008. Her areas of interest are biomedical signal processing, signal compression, computer architecture and embedded systems. She has published 20 research papers in various journals and conference proceedings. Email: [email protected]

S. Sumam David

S Sumam David is a professor at Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal, Mangalore, India. She obtained her BTech degree from University of Kerala, India in 1985, MTech and PhD degrees from Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India in 1986 and 1992, respectively. She joined NITK Surathkal as faculty in August 1991. She has served as head of the Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering and dean (Academic) of the Institute. Her research interests are in the areas of signal processing, VLSI architectures for signal processing and engineering education. She is a Fellow of IETE, Fellow of IE, and Senior Member of IEEE Signal Processing Society. Email: [email protected]