Health information integrating and size reducing. 2003 IEEE nuclear science symposium, 'medical imaging conference, and workshop of room-temperature semiconductor detectors'

With the development of digital technique, more and more digital medical images are used by physicians in their clinical diagnosis. Existing Healthcare Management Systems take the images and corresponding patient medical record separately. Two subsystems, one for images and one for patient records, have to be used to handle the separate units. The system routine load, maintenance and cost could increase. Further it breaks the patient data integrity and incurs unavoidable mistake in medical practice. DICOM format images are being widely used in hospitals. However, the header file to DICOM image adds additional size to the image. We use a lossless data embedding scheme to integrate the separate units. It can effectively reduce the total information size. The scheme is distortion-tolerant in application. The distortion from data embedding can be removed completely. The original image can be recovered losslessly. Existing applications with lossless compressing schemes emphasize on data hiding. We aim to reduce information size.