Efficient lossy compression of ultrasound data

Large-scale numerical simulations of high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU), important for model-based treatment planning, generate large amounts of data. Typically, it is necessary to save hundreds of gigabytes during simulation. We propose a novel algorithm for time varying simulation data compression specialized for HIFU. Our approach is especially focused on the on-the-fly parallel data compression during simulations. Now, we are able to compress 3D pressure time series of linear and nonlinear simulations with very acceptable compression ratios and errors (over 80 % of the space can be saved with an acceptable error). The proposed compression will be helpful for significant reduction of resources, such as storage space, network bandwidth, CPU time, etc., enabling better treatment planning using fast volume data visualizations. The paper describes the proposed method, its experimental evaluation, and comparison to the state of the art.