Lossless Medical Image Compression in a Block-Based Storage System

Medical images are captured in a 16-bit high-resolution grayscale format and are large, frequently reaching MBs per image and PBs for the archive. Regulatory compliance requirements make de-ploying new full image compression techniques difficult. Instead of forcing applications and end users to deal with the deployment complexity, we show that image data can be effectively and transparently compressed by the storage infrastructure. We analyzed our MICA compressor performance using five million publicly available medical images (> 2.2 TB) in three different image formats from eight sources. With 8KB blocks, we achieved 13% better compression, 10% better compression throughput and 782% better uncompression throughput than JPEG-LS. MICA also offered some compression for non-medical data that was incidentally stored in the same storage system.