Multiresolution Lossy-to-Lossless Coding of MRI Objects

This paper proposes an object-based, highly scalable, lossy-to-lossless coding approach for magnetic resonance (MR) images. The proposed approach, called OBHS-SPIHT, is based on the well known set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) algorithm and supports both quality and resolution scalability. It progressively encodes each slice of the MR data set separately in a multiresolution fashion from low resolution to full resolution and in each resolution from low quality to lossless quality. To achieve more compression efficiency, the algorithm only encodes the main object of interest in the input data set, and ignores the unnecessary background. The experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed algorithm for multiresolution lossy-to-lossless MRI data coding. OBHS-SPIHT, is a very attractive coding approach for medical image information archiving and transmission applications especially over heterogeneous networks.