3D medical image coding method using a separable 3D wavelet transform

An original 3D subband coding scheme based on a separable 3D wavelet transform is proposed. The 3D images (volumes) are produced with a new true 3D x ray scanner called `Morphometer.' The Morphometer can generate 2563 discrete volumes with isotropic voxels of 356 microns. A separable 3D wavelet decomposes the original volume. A distortion minimization algorithm selects the best number of decompositions and chooses for each subvolume the most appropriate quantization approach.