Lossless Compression of 4D Medical Images using H.264/AVC

Four dimensional (4D) medical data are sequences of volumetric images captured in time. These data sets are typically very large in size and demand a great amount of resources for storage and transmission. In this paper, we present a lossless compression technique for 4D medical images which is based on the H.264/AVC video coding standard. Our lossless compression technique efficiently exploits spatial and temporal redundancies between 2D image slices and 3D images in 4D medical images and eliminates any concerns regarding the effects of compression on image quality for diagnostic purposes. Performance evaluations have shown that the proposed compression technique outperforms current 4D compression methods by 70%