3D Medical Image Compression: A Review

In this paper a comprehensive survey of the state of the art lossy and lossless techniques available in the literature has been presented and the merits and pitfalls of each technique are analyzed. This study congregates the pioneer works in two dimensional (2D) compression techniques, both in pixel domain and transform domain. The evolution of compression of three dimensional (3D) medical images from 2D compression has also been discussed. Compressed medical image has to be both diagnostically lossless and less bandwidth in addition to visual quality. Region of Interest coding (ROI) which achieves diagnostic quality image with less bandwidth has been explored. In spite of proven compression technologies, only the lossless compression has been used widely around the world and the reason for the same has been investigated. In addition it also investigates several factors; why one needs to go for lossy compression.