Irreversible Compression of Medical Images with a Rigorous Error Bound

For the archiving of mammograms, the FDA requires lossless image compression. Using near-lossless compressors for temporary examination of medical images could be advantageous “if the interpreting physician deems that acceptable”. However, the FDA [1] states, “we do not believe there is consensus on what loss of information is acceptable”. To address this concern, we present a new near-lossless compression algorithm for grayscale medical images that guarantees a minimum PSNR value.