Embedded coding of medical images with regions of interest based on 3-D zerotree

Abstract

In order to satisfy the need of diagnoses, based on the characteristic of medical images that a sequence of frames are formed in one body inspection, a new strategy for medical images compression is proposed. The 3-D wavelet is adopted and the planar zerotree is extended to the 3-D zerotree. By making use of the 3-D zerotree structure, a simple method for region of interest (ROI) mask generation is put forward. Medical images are compressed by three-dimensional embedded coding with the compression of regions of interest. Simulation results have shown that it can efficiently improve the compression ratio without affecting the diagnoses.

Keywords

3-D wavelet transform (3DWT), ROI, 3-D zerotree, ROI, embedded zerotree wavelet (EZW), medical image compression