An Improved Medical Image Compression Method Based on Wavelet Difference Reduction

Advanced microscopic techniques such as high-throughput, high-content, multispectral, and 3D imaging could include many images per experiment requiring hundreds of gigabytes (GBs) of memory. Efficient lossy image-compression methods such as joint photographic experts group (JPEG) and JPEG 2000 are crucial to managing these large amounts of data. However, these methods can get visual quality with high compression ratios but do not necessarily maintain the medical data and information integrity. This paper proposes a novel and improved medical image compression method based on color wavelet difference reduction. Specifically, the proposed method is an extension of the standard wavelet difference reduction (WDR) method using mean co-located pixel difference to select the optimum quantity of color images that present the highest similarity in the spatial and temporal domain. The images with large spatiotemporal coherence are encoded as one volume and evaluated regarding the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index (SSIM). The proposed method is evaluated in the challenging histopathological microscopy image analysis field using 31 slides of colorectal cancer. It is found that the perceptual quality of the medical image is remarkably high. The results indicate that the PSNR improvement over existing schemes may reach up to 22.65 dB compared to JPEG 2000. Also, it can reach up to 10.33dB compared to a method utilizing discrete wavelet transform (DWT), leading us to implement a mobile and web platform that can be used for compressing and transmitting microscopic medical images in real time.