MEDICAL IMAGE COMPRESSION USING JPEG-2000 AND JPEG: A COMPARISON STUDY

Due to the constrained bandwidth and storage capacity, medical images must be compressed before transmission and storage. However, compression will reduce image fidelity, especially when the image is compressed of lower bit rate, which cannot be tolerated in medical field. In this paper, the compression performance of the new JPEG-2000 and the more conventional JPEG is studied. The parameters used for comparison include the compression efficiency, peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), picture quality scale (PQS), and mean opinion score (MOS). Three types of medical images are used — X-ray, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and ultrasound. Overall, the study shows that JPEG-2000 compression is more acceptable and superior compare to JPEG for lossy compression.