2009 International Conference on Signal Processing Systems

Performance Analysis of Medical Image Compression

K.Vidhya
Research Scholar Electronics & Communication Engineering College of Engineering, Anna University Guindy, Chennai, Tamilnadu e-mail: kvidhyasri@gmail.com Abstract The paper deals with evaluation of medical images
by objective quality measures. Two main approaches to assess image quality are objective testing and subjective testing. Objective measures correlate well with the perceived image quality for the proposed compression algorithm. This paper presents an effective algorithm to compress and to reconstruct DICOM (Digital Imaging and COmmunications in Medicine) images. DICOM is a standard for handling, storing, printing and transmitting information in medical imaging. These medical images are volumetric consisting of a series of sequences of slices through a given part of the body. DICOM series of images are decomposed using Cohen-DaubechiesFeauveau (CDF) biorthoganal wavelet. The wavelet coefficients are encoded using Set Partitioning In Hierarchical Trees (SPIHT). Consistent quality images are generated by this method at a lower bit rate compared to JPEG and Fractal compression algorithms. The image quality is evaluated by various objective quality measures. Keywords- Medical imaging, Set Partitioning In Hierarchical Trees (SPIHT), Cohen-Daubechies-Feauveau biorthoganal wavelet (CDF), Digital Imaging and COmmunications in Medicine (DICOM), DICOM previewer, Objective Quality Measures.

Dr.S.Shenbagadevi
Assistant Professor Electronics & Communication Engineering College of Engineering, Anna University Guindy, Chennai, Tamilnadu e-mail: s_s_devi@annauniv.edu Images can be compressed using lossy or lossless compression techniques. Lossless compression involves with compressing data which, when decompressed, will be an exact replica of the original data without any loss. Typical compression rates for lossless techniques are around 2:1 to 4:1. Lossy techniques do not allow for exact recovery of the original image once it has been compressed. But these techniques allow for compression rates that can exceed 100:1 depending on the compress quality level and the image content, sacrificing some of the finer details in the image for the sake of saving a little more bandwidth and storage space. Current DICOM standard is based on JPEG image compression. In this paper wavelet coding has been proved to be a very effective technique for DICOM images giving significantly better results than the JPEG algorithm. A set of DICOM files containing full series of transverse MR images are used for experiments. The Discrete Wavelet Transform of the image is calculated with CDF biorthoganal filter. The wavelet coefficients are encoded using SPIHT. This method yields better compression than other standard methods. The experimental results are compared with standard JPEG algorithm and fractal compression. A major design goal of any compression method is to obtain the visual quality with lowest bit rate. However, the quality and the bit rate are the trade-offs that must be considered simultaneously. Some of the objective picture quality measures [9] apart from the common measures Mean Squared Error (MSE) and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) are Normalized CrossCorrelation (NK), Average Difference (AD) and Structural Content (SC). The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II presents an overview of medical image compression. Section III discusses the DICOM images used for compression. Section IV gives an overview of wavelets. Section V explains the SPIHT coder. Section VI presents the proposed coding method for a set of DICOM files containing full series transverse MR images. Section VI shows experimental results of the proposed work compared with JPEG algorithm and fractal compression algorithm. Section VIII gives some concluding remarks.
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I.

INTRODUCTION

This paper will propose an approach to improve the performance of medical image compression. JPEG and Wavelet compression methods are most popular methods preferred by the medical community.The well-known JPEG compression standard described in [1].In this lossy method, the image is divided into sub-images. Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) is performed on the sub-images, and the resulting coefficients are quantized and coded. Wavelet compression has been developed by many authors [2, 3]. In [4] a network algorithm to compress and to reconstruct DICOM images is presented. Said and A. Pearlman developed a SPIHT coding algorithm [5], a refined version of embedded zero tree wavelet coder (EZW) coder [6]. In Fractal Image Compression technique [7, 8] possible self-similarity within the image is identified and used to reduce the amount of data required to reproduce the image. But these methods have been time consuming.
978-0-7695-3654-5/09 $25.00 2009 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ICSPS.2009.183

II.

MEDICAL IMAGE COMPRESSION

The compression of medical images has a great demand. The image for compression can be a single image or sequence of images. The medical community has been very reluctant to adopt lossy algorithms in clinical practice. However, the diagnostic data produced by hospitals has geometrically increased and a compression technique is needed that results with greater data reductions and hence transmission speed. In these cases, a lossy compression method that preserves the diagnostic information is needed. In medical image sequences called Volumetric Medical Image (VMI) or 3-D medical data needs efficient image compression solving storage and transmission problems and also preserving diagnostic information. Visually indistinguishable resultant images at high quality can be obtained using lossy compression techniques, for compression rates much greater than those obtained by lossless compression techniques. That is, the human eye cannot detect a difference between the original image and the compressed then decompressed image with the lossy compression method. III. DICOM IMAGES DICOM differs from other data formats in that it groups information together into a data set. A DICOM data object consists of a number of attributes, containing such items as name, ID, etc, and also one special attribute containing the image pixel data. The previewer gives a list of files from a selected directory. Header and image data of the selected file are displayed immediately. IV. WAVELETS

it encodes the wavelet coefficients. SPIHT is based on three concepts (1) exploitation of the hierarchical structure of the wavelet transform by using tree-based organization of the coefficients, (2) partial ordering of the transformed coefficients by magnitude, (3) ordered bit plane transmission of refinement bits for the coefficient values. This leads to a compressed bit stream in which the most important coefficients are transmitted first. The values of all coefficients are progressive refined and the relationship between coefficients representing the same location at different scales is fully exploited for compression efficiency. The SPIHT algorithm appears to give extremely good performance in DICOM image compression. The fully embedded nature of the output bit stream also makes an excellent choice for progressive transmission. The interband spatial dependencies are captured in the form of parent-child relationships. The arrows in Fig.1 point from the parent node to its four children. With the exception of the coarsest subband and the finest subbands each wavelet coefficient at the i-th level of composition is spatially correlated to 4 child coefficients at level i-1 in the form of 2x2 blocks of adjacent pixels. These 4 child coefficients are at the same relative location in the subband decomposition structure. This relationship is utilized during SPIHT quantization. If a parent coefficient is insignificant with respect to a particular threshold then all of its children would most likely be insignificant and similarly significant coefficients in the finer subband most likely correspond to a significant parent in the coarser subband. This results in the significant savings: only the parents position information needs to be coded since the childrens coordinate scan be inferred from the parents position information. VI. CODING OF DICOM IMAGES The previewer gives a list of files from a selected directory. Header and image data of the selected file are displayed immediately. These medical images are volumetric consisting of a series of sequences of slices through a given part of the body. To maintain uniform quality for all sequences of slices a single slice is encoded and compressed bitstream is sent to the decoder. After the encoder and decoder finish all the slices in a sequence, it shifts to process the next sequence of slices. The block diagram of proposed method is shown in Fig. 1. DICOM images are first decomposed using generalized CDF wavelet filter and the wavelet coefficients are encoded using SPIHT. The algorithm starts at the coarsest sub band in the sub band pyramid. SPIHT captures the current bitplane information of all the DWT coefficients and organizes them into three subsets: (1) List of Significant Pixels (LSP), (2) List of Insignificant Pixels (LIP) and (3) List of Insignificant Sets of Pixels (LIS)). LSP constitutes the coordinates of all coefficients that are significant. LIS contains the roots of insignificant sets of coefficient. Finally, LIP contains a list of all coefficients that do not

Algorithms based on wavelets have been shown to work well in image compression. Separating the smooth variations and details of the image can be done by decomposition of the image using a Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). The symmetric extension details were being perfected for biorthoganal wavelets especially for low frequency images. Extensive research has shown that the images obtained with wavelet-based methods yield good visual quality. At first it was shown that even simple coding methods produced good results when combined with wavelets. SPIHT employs more sophisticated coding. In fact, SPIHT exploits the properties of the wavelettransformed images to increase its efficiency. CDF biorthoganal wavelet preferred to perform better compared to other wavelets for the compression of DICOM images. This wavelet, which is used in JPEG 2000 compression, is used along with SPIHT to provide high compression ratio and also good resolution. The perceived image quality is significantly improved using CDF wavelet. V. SPIHT CODER SPIHT technique is based on a wavelet transform and differs from conventional wavelet compression only in how

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belong to either LIS or LSP and are insignificant. During the encoding process these subsets are examined and labeled significant if any of its coefficients has a magnitude larger than a given threshold. The significance map encoding (set partitioning and ordering pass) is followed by a refinement pass, in which the representation of significant coefficients is refined. These thresholds used to test significance are powers of two, so in its essence, the SPIHT algorithm sends the binary representation of the integer value of wavelet coefficients.

hospitals is used as material for this statistical survey. The aim of this survey is to compare the objective quality measures of the proposed method with standard JPEG compression and Fractal image compression algorithms. The performance of the proposed method for DICOM images is much better than JPEG and Fractal techniques. This algorithm shows good performance as good as other algorithms at a lower bit rate. The peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) is defined by PSNR = 10 log 10 (255 2 / MSE) dB The rate vs. PSNR results is excellent. At a bit rate of 0.5 bpp the compressed images exhibit better subjective quality with PSNR exceeding 35 dB. The Normalized Cross-Correlation is defined by NK = x (i, j) x (i, j) / x (i, j) 2 i j i j The Average difference is defined as

DICOM previewer

DWT

SPIHT coder

Compressed image
IDWT SPIHT decoder

AD = (x (i, j) - x (i, j)) / MN i j The Structural Content is evaluated by SC = x (i, j) 2 / x (i, j) 2 i j i j The objective quality measures correlate with the perceived image quality and compared across different compression algorithms. The numerical results are shown in Table I.
TABLE I.
Compression Results PSNR (dB) CR
Encoding time (sec) Decoding time (sec) NK
AD
SC

Reconstructed Image

Compressed image

Figure 1. Block diagram of Coding method.

NUMERICAL RESULTS OF SLICE 1

Proposed
38.71
45.7295
2.64
0.94
73.2983
-0.6114
1.0001

JPEG
24.45
47.65
2.5982
5.83
47.65
5.93
2.2495

Fractal
28.32
162
112.93
0.44
145
-0.0343
1.0075

VII. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS DICOM series of images of resolution 256 pixels by 256 pixels and 512 pixels by 512 pixels are used for experiments. SPIHT have better visual quality than JPEG compression and Fractal image compression. From the selected directory the files will be listed by the previewer. From sequences of slices a single slice is first decomposed using generalized CDF wavelet filter and the wavelet coefficients are encoded using SPIHT coder and compressed bitstream is sent to the decoder. After the encoder and decoder finish all the slices in a sequence, it shifts to process the next sequence of slices. The original and reconstructed images with bit rate of 0.7 bpp and decomposition level of 4, processed by this algorithm is shown in Fig. 2. The reconstructed images at a low bit rate show good quality without distortion. The encoding and decoding time increases as bit rate increases. The effectiveness of the algorithm described above can be statistically modeled and evaluated. Many number of DICOM images collected from

VIII. CONCLUSION A wavelet based compression with set partitioning in hierarchical trees appears to give extremely good performance in DICOM series of images for medical image compression. The proposed algorithm outperforms the standard JPEG compression and fractal compression

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algorithms in terms of both objective and subjective measure. The subjective measure is based on the visual inspection of the compressed images and the evaluations are carried out among different images at various bit rates and decomposition levels. Future work will include using the
ORIGINAL IMAGE RECONSTRUCTED IMAGE

methodology to preprocess the image for producing significant improvement in compression efficiency at lower bit rates and also quality evaluation of various medical volumetric datasets.

ORIGINAL IMAGE

RECONSTRUCTED IMAGE

Figure 2. Visual performance of the slices taken from MRI data set at 0.7 bpp.

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REFERENCES
[1] Wallace GK.The JPEG still picture compression standard, Comm of the ACM3 34:30-44, 1991. [2] P.Schelkens, A.Munteanu, J.Barbarien, M.Galca, X.Giro-Nieto and J.Cornelis, Wavelet coding of volumetric medical datasets, IEEE Trans. Med. Imag.vol 22, pp.441-458, Mar.2003. [3] A.R.Golderbank, Ingrid Daubechies, Wim Sweldens and Boon-Lock Yeo, Lossless image compression using integer to integer wavelet transforms, IEEE Trans, 1997. [4] S.Hludov, Chr.Meinel, DICOM - image compression, IEEE, 1999. [5] Said A.Pearlman WA,A new fast and efficient image codec based on set partitioning in hierarchical trees, IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. Video Technology, vol.6, pp. 243-250, June 1996. [6] Shapiro JM,Embedded image coding using zero trees of wavelet coefficients, IEEE Trans Signal Processing. 41:3445-3462, 1993. [7] Y.Fisher, Fractal Image compression: Theory and Application, Springer Verlag, N.Y., 1995. [8]Barnsley.M. Fractals Everywhere, Academic press. San Diego, 1989. [9] Marta Mrak, Sonja Grgic and Mislav Grgic, Picture Quality Measures in Image Compression Systems, EUROCON 2003, Slovenia.

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