Compression of Biomedical Images and Signals

Conclusion

This book, dedicated to the compression of medical images and signals, is the result of the collective work of a number of physicians and scientific researchers from a dozen different French research teams. Working on the project has provided the stimulus for cross-laboratory exchanges and collaboration between researchers and various scientific communities. Indeed, a number of chapters have been cowritten by researchers from different teams. In addition, this work goes hand in hand with the new policy implemented over the years in most scholarly societies on promoting medical and biological engineering and specifically the processing of medical signals and images.

Most specialists agree on the fact that it is essential and inevitable to proceed with the compression of medical data in order to guarantee a good Quality of Service in any PACS, wireless transmissions or even storage systems. We have understood in the course of our work that most compression techniques used on medical data today are of a rather “general application” in the sense that they can apply to medical images from a variety of sources. We thus believe that there is still room for improvement in this particular field before reaching an optimal performance for all encoders applied to medical images. Why not have specific encoders for ultrasound images or videos? Or a specific encoder for MRI images? Ideas are already bustling within the community, and many attempts at improvements have been undertaken. ...