IMPLEMENTATION OF BANDWIDTH EFFICIENT PICTURE ARCHIVING AND COMMUNICATION SYSTEM FOR MEDICAL iMAGES

Abstract

As medical/biological imaging facilities move towards complete film-less imaging, compression plays a key role. Although lossy compression techniques yield high compression rates, the medical community has been reluctant to adopt these methods, largely for legal reasons, and has instead relied on lossless compression techniques that yield low compression rates. But with increasing database of medical images, the problem of storage and transmission become magnified for large size images. Hence there is a need to increase storage efficiency by maximizing compression while maintaining perceptual quality of the image for clinical relevance and balancing legal risk. In this dissertation we propose a Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS), in which the transmission time and storage space is reduced by the use of priority based hybrid compression technique. In this approach, the image is divided into regions based on priority of importance defined by radiologist. Here we divide the image into three regions — primary, secondary and tertiary. Lossless compression is used in all the primary regions, and lossy compression is used in all secondary and tertiary regions with different compression levels. The implementation was done using dcm4che package to implement PACS functionality, MS SQL Server for database, Java for GUI and Matlab for image compression. The experimental results show that the proposed method is a good solution for the above problem due to increased storage efficiency by reducing the image size while maintaining the perceptual quality of the image in the relevant areas