Comparative Analysis of Various Standards for Medical Image Compression

For efficient storage and transmitting of medical images over the internet, an adequate compression method is necessary. Modern healthcare services that rely on cloud computing use such compression methods, as often we are limited by internet bandwidth and memory to store these medical images on cloud servers. The Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM), which is the standard currently used for transmission and handling communication of medical data uses the JPEG-2000 standard for compression. Recent impressive advancement in computer hardware and software leads to new compression methods to be developed and used widely for many applications. High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC/H.265/x265) is a video coding standard that has intra-frame coding for still medical images such as X-rays, MRIs, CT Scans, etc and as an advanced video coding standard, it supports compression of medical videos such as ultrasound and sonography. HEVC can be a single format that can support the compression of still Medical images, images series, and videos as well as modern medical imaging such as 3-D X-rays and 3-D Ultrasound. This study illustrates the utilization of HEVC for the compression of Medical images and a comparison of various compression techniques that have been used here for medical image compression. The Lossless compression performance of HEVC is compared to JPEG -2000 for grayscale and RGB images. Experimental results show, that in lossless mode, HEVC performs up to \({\sim }15\%\) better for grayscale and \({\sim }17\%\) better for RGB images. For lossy mode, HEVC accomplishes better results than JPEG, JPEG-2000 and AVC.