Processing of medical images in compressed format

Hundreds of thousands of medical images are produced daily in the United States and must be stored. In addition, many of these images must be processed. Due to the large volume, such processing can strain even current computer capabilities. However, these images will be stored in compressed format to conserve memory storage space in the near future. Compression ratios of 50 to 100 to 1 are not uncommon. Because medical images will be available in compressed format and to help accelerate the processing of medical images, we are proposing that the image processing be carried out on the greatly restricted number of compressed parameters rather than on the pixels themselves as is usual. The processing of the substantially smaller number of compressed parameters for an image should be faster in many cases than the processing of images in a pixel by pixel mode. The feasibility of this approach is discussed based upon components of the JPEG image compression standard.