Published Paper Details:

In the present scenario the amount of medical image data being generated is enormous. Statistics say that the storage needs have increased by 25% accounting to petabytes of image data [1]. The major reasons for this increase in the imaging data is the growth in the aged population, awareness among people, increase in the size and resolution of the images and also due to retention policies and backup images [2]. Also the cost involved in per gigabytes data storage is very high. This has caused serious challenge in the storage and transmission of medical images. Though doctors are reluctant to use lossy compression, it is predominantly the solution that decreases the amount of storage. JPEG compression are widely used because of their advantage. In this research an effort has been made to investigate, evaluate and analyse the effects of compression on the size and quality of the image using popular JPEG compression algorithms. Hundreds of images from radiological modalities (CT, MRI and Digital X-Ray) were subjected to JPEG compression at varying qualities [100% to 5%]. Subjective validation was carried out with the help of Physicians by using side-by-side (or "flicker") comparison of original image and compressed image using 5 Point scoring scale. Quantitative assessment was accomplished by comparing MSE, PSNR, CR and BPP