Lossless Compression Techniques for Medical Images In Telemedicine

Telemedicine is telecommunication technology integrated with the advancements in information technology. The main purpose is to enhance health care delivery to a wider population. This telemedicine technology supports the transfer of pathological and imaging reports of patients across the telemedicine networks, so as to provide consultation by specialists located in geographically different locations. The integration of mobile communication and biomedical instrumentation technology plays an important role in Telemedicine as doctors away from the system can also get the health status of their critical patients (AlfredoI.Hernandez et al., 2001). Advances made in the field of biomedical engineering, has lead to the development of more accurate biomedical instrumentation to measure vital physiological parameters and the development of interdisciplinary areas to fight the effects of body malfunctions and disease. The chapter is organised as follows. Subsections under 1 describe the application of telecommunication technology to health care and the necessity of telemedicine in India. The challenges pertaining to telemedicine have also been identified and addressed accordingly. Section 2 briefs on the concepts of effective medical image compression. The effectiveness of Huffman Compression in telemedicine and related work is presented in Section 3. Section 4 describes transform based image compression. The basics of contourlet coding and global thresholding based on Otsu’s method is described in Sections 4.2 and 4.3 respectively. The algorithm steps of Contourlet based Joint Medical image compression is presented in 4.5.Section 5 gives the results obtained on applying the algorithm. The conclusion is presented in Section 6.