Simple lossless and near-lossless medical image compression based on enhanced DPCM transformation

Medical images include information about human body which are used for different purposes such as surgical and diagnostic plans. Compression of medical images is used in some applications such as profiling patient's data and transmission systems. Regard to importance of medical images information, lossless or near-lossless compression is preferred. Lossless JPEG, JPEG-LS and lossless version of JPEG2000 are few well-known methods for lossless compression. JPEG2000 is one of the latest and provides good compression ratio, however, it is complex [1]. In real time application which needs hardware implementation, low complex algorithm accelerates compression process. In this paper, a lossless and near-lossless compression method is introduced which is efficient due to its high compression ratio and simplicity. The method is consists of a new transformation method called Enhanced DPCM Transformation (EDT) which has a good energy compaction and a suitable Huffman encoding. After introducing the compression method, it is applied on different test cases and the results are evaluated.