Medical image compression using cubic spline interpolation for low bit-rate telemedicine applications

In this paper, a new medical image compression algorithm using cubic spline interpolation (CSI) is presented for telemedicine applications. The CSI is developed in order to subsample image data with minimal distortion and to achieve image compression. It has been shown in literatures that the CSI can be combined with the JPEG or JPEG2000 algorithm to develop a modified JPEG or JPEG2000 codec, which obtains a higher compression ratio and a better quality of reconstructed image than the standard JPEG and JPEG2000 codecs. This paper further makes use of the modified JPEG codec to medical image compression. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can increase 25 similar to 30% compression ratio of original JPEG medical data compression system with similar visual quality. This system can reduce the loading of telecommunication networks and is quite suitable for low bit-rate telemedicine applications.