Performance Evaluation of Lossless Compression Algorithms for Medical Images

With the spread of telemedicine networks, the demand for compression algorithms that provide the efficient transmission of medical data has increased. Although lossy algorithms provide significantly higher compression ratios than lossless methods, lossless techniques are more preferred in the medical field because any loss of information may result in irretrievable results. In recent years, a significant performance improvement as well has been observed in the lossless techniques specialized for medical data. In this study, the performance of lossless compression algorithms with 16-bit support which can be used in telemedicine networks are examined. Various algorithms have been implemented on a wide range of medical data and performance evaluation are presented in quantitative criteria such as processing time and compression ratio.