Application of JPEG 2000 compression in medical database image data

A medical database has been developed in the pediatric clinic of the University Hospital of Alexandroupolis in order to organize and manipulate all clinical information in digital form. A compression technique that trades between the amount of data stored/transmitted and the quality of the image may be used in order to reduce the amount of stored/transmitted image data. A comparative evaluation of JPEG and JPEG2000 compression standards by means of both subjective and objective criteria was performed in order to select the appropriate compression technique for the database medical images. JPEG 2000 proves to be an ideal file format for the pediatric DB application, since it compresses the image data up to 98.4% without any loss in the diagnostic information of the image.