NASA 1996 SBIR Phase I

PROJECT TITLE : A Compression System for Telemedicine and Medical Image Archiving Applications

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT (LIMIT 200 WORDS)

The growth in telemedicine and volume of archived medical image data has necessitated the use of image compression in the medical community. The need for high-quality low bitrate compression cannot be met with the current technological standard, JPEG. New technologies have been developed which significantly outperform JPEG. One such technology is adaptive wavelet/UTCQ. Wavelet/UTCQ is among the best compression algorithms in the scientific literature and was judged by imagery analysts to provide better lossy compression than any other algorithm submitted in the NITFS low bitrate competition.

We propose to add lossless/near lossless capabilities, including region of interest (ROI) support, to adaptive wavelet/UTCQ. These capabilities are necessary for medical applications and will allow for initial dissemination at low bitrate/bandwidth followed by ROI updating to lossless or near lossless quality. Techniques that will be investigated to provide this functionality include diagonal coding, other entropy coding methods, and predictive/entropy coding techniques. Extension of wavelet/UTCQ to include the compression of multicomponent medical imagery shall be explored. The preliminary design and specification of a hardware accelerator will be carried out in Phase I. Phase II will involve the creation of a hardware/software system for the fast and efficient compression and transmission of this imagery.

Numerous commercial applications utilize image digitization and compression for telecommunications, broadcast, and storage of imagery, video, multimedia, and interactive television. Applications include image quality for video databases, numerous military applications, mapping, medical imaging, telemedicine, and medical databases.

Dr. James S. Kasner
Member of Technical Staff
1480 Drew Ave.
Davis, CA 95616

Optivision, Inc.
3450 Hillview Ave.
Palo Alto, CA 94304