A New Interactive Progressive Transmission of Medical Images

Abstract

Medical images are of high volume and contain valuable diagnostic information, which have to be preserved against any archival or transmission error. Progressive transmission of data is favourable due to the fact that the region of interest (RoI) within the image can be coded without any visible error and that it speeds up the transmission of desired information due to the hierarchical region relation & transmission. In addition, this modality of communication has been modified to be interactive so the physicians can select the RoI to prioritize transmission of various regions. Wireless transmission of medical images involves construction of an effective source-channel coding to not only preserve the diagnostic information but also to enable progressively streaming the data from host to receiver [1]. A number of large medical images have been compressed and progressively transmitted with low bitrate. The blocking effect, as can be seen in JPEG coded images with the same compression ratio, has been highly reduced and the quality of the decoded images enhanced. A MATLAB-based TCP/IP connection has been established to demonstrate the proposed interactive progressive transmission system.