Lossless medical image compression algorithm exploring three dimensional space

There has been a lot of research on lossless medical image compression in the 2D domain. As for volumetric data, a 3D image is firstly cut into slices and then compressed losslessly in 2D space. However, in this way, the information redundancy between neighboring slices is not exploited. This paper extends the segmentation-based lossless image coding (SLIC) algorithm to deal with image data from 2D to 3D. The results show that the new method not only encompasses all the SLIC functions, but also produces same results on 2D images and performs better on image volume data which has inherent 3D characteristics.