Burrows-Wheeler Transformation for Medical Image Compression

Abstract

Medical imaging is a very useful component in diagnosing diseases. For future use, and further study and analysis, hospitals must keep all patients' medical images in databases. In this work, a new lossless image compression technique is proposed for efficient storage and transmission of medical images. The newly proposed technique is based on encoding prediction errors with a suitable entropy coder upon transforming them with the Burrows-Wheeler Transformation (BWT). We show that the newly proposed technique yields better compression than the mainstream lossless compression algorithms JPEG-2000 and JPEG-LS.